Water frontage and direct access to the sea can add as much as 100 per cent to the value of a home, according to this article in the FT. “Houses with stunning water views offer the trophy view above all others, and can add as much as 25 to 50 per cent to a property’s value – even though sometimes the best views are from houses set back from the ‘frontline’,”...

In the present financial uncertainty, people are fleeing to gold for safety. Such is the demand, with soaring gold prices, that banks are charging more to store it, following the surge in demand for precious metals, which has left London, the centre of the global bullion market, short of vault space. Almost all of the major bullion-dealing banks have raised fees since March this year, in some cases...

Britain’s biggest estates are falling into the hands of Russian oligarchs hankering after their own slice of Brideshead Revisited. As another £100m home is put on the market, Observer journalist Tim Adams wonders if the rest of us will ever see over the castle walls.   Article continues here

Who owns the right to catch fish was the title of a Guardian article today. Having caught a few perch from the (very well managed) lake yesterday, each one a decent meal, I thought it was about hobby fishing but the article concerned commercial fishing quotas, which it seems were quietly disposed of by the Labour government in the 1990s and are now being traded.   It is strange how the government...

It is an unfortunate fact that until now, air has been freely available to everyone, and stands almost entirely outside the market system. A promising new technology is being developed which should finally put a stop to this unsatisfactory state of affairs, putting the planet’s atmosphere on the same economic footing as the planet’s surface. This development is long overdue, but has...

“Researchers have discovered that large groups of chimpanzees seem to send out patrols to kill members of rival groups before moving into their terrain. It is the first definitive proof of this kind of land grabs and could provide a evolutionary reason for mankind’s historical empire building. “During a decade of study, the researchers led by John Mitani at the University of Michigan,...

“Rent of Talent”, a notion that grew up some time around the 1900s, has cast a fog of confusion over the term “Rent”. The talents in question were those of opera singers, sportsmen, and the like. The argument went that if land rent should be taxed, so should natural talent, thereby opening up the case for progressive income taxes. This helped the landowning interest, as it...

In a recent exchange of correspondence, the question of the definition of “Wealth” came up. We have always worked to the definition given by Henry George, that Wealth consists of “natural products that have been secured, moved, combined, separated, or in other ways modified by human exertion to fit them for the gratification of human desires.” In short, Wealth is man made....

One of our members sent this gem from last week’s Sunday Times, in case you missed it. The former Nissan UK director who spent 4 years in jail after being found guilty of one of Britain’s biggest tax frauds is blocking a £700m skyscraper development at Canary Wharf. Michael Hunt and fellow property investor, Michael Gross, own a ‘ransom strip’ – a piece of land vital...

A while ago we posted Sounds from the Deep, an article about busking on the London Underground as an illustration of Ricardo’s Law of Rent and the effects of taxation. A Financial Times journalist actually tried it recently and earned just £15.26 for two hours’ busking at the foot of the escalators at Leicester Square According to the article, musicians can busk free of charge once they...