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Meet the economic architects behind the world's most exciting political movement, and gain insight into their platform.

The New Physiocrats are a political-economic framework and certification body. They are a movement established on a new way of economic thinking, what they refer to as the “New School of Economics.” The New Physiocrats have finally managed to reconcile the concerns of the left and right, through a new way of political-economic thinking, rooted in the original Physiocracy and Georgism.

The New School of Economics opens our eyes to these policy solutions, and after almost a half-century hiatus, it finally introduces the next generation of Physiocratic and Georgist thought - intending to carry on the legacy of Henry George.

amazon.com/New-School-Economics-Platfor ... 07B6329KQ/

Paging Professor Marks. What is this about?

I'll provide some background on Henry George's ideas, which he wrote about in the late 1870s.

He noticed several unique characteristics of land as a factor of production (compared to labour and capital):

- Land is fixed in supply. If you tax it, it can't shrink or disappear.
- Land is created by nature, not human labour
- Land is a monopoly; if you own a location, you prevent someone else from having it.
- When infrastructure is built, the value of land tends to rise more than the cost of the infrastructure
- Land cannot be hidden out of sight

These characteristics make land much more practical, economically beneficial, transparent, and fair to tax versus labour and capital. Henry George was not the first to notice this, but he did popularize the idea, and his book, Progress and Poverty, was the best selling book of his day. An important thing to note is that George's land value tax solution is not the same as a property tax (taxing only the underlying land, instead of the structure built on top of it).

While these ideas eventually lost momentum at the start of the cold war, when other economic philosophies took precedent, they emerged again after the last housing bubble, and have come back in full force again today. It is especially relevant now as a lot of financial gains are made with property speculation, while fewer gains are made through labour (salaries).

The new Georgist movement tries to apply the original idea to see how it would apply to a modern governing platform.

Henry George tends to have advocates from left, right and center. Taxing the "unearned increment" on land has a lot of appeal, though no one ever seems to propose tax rebates on those whose land ownership in, say, Davenport, Iowa loses value.

Two current themes and an older one seem to pick up on this. One is Liz Warren's wealth tax proposal. The one with three cents of each dollar over, what was it, 20 million? The only argument I know of against a wealth tax is a supposed disincentive to invest and innovate, unless you count rich people disliking it as an argument. I tend to think that those who consider vast wealth to be the result of their terrific genius and tremendous hard work are not entirely mistaken, but are leaving out the contribution made by a stable and just society, which is worth more the more you earn.

The second is Thomas Piketty's finding that rising housing costs in the metropolitan centers favored by innovative, tech oriented companies are responsible for much of the rise in inequality in Europe and the U.S. It might be better to say the money has gone there. As usual in economics there are winners and losers from the trend: renters in Oakland, CA suffer and owners in the Boston area benefit. Piketty argues for a tax on wealth, in part as simple redistribution. With income inequality getting more and more extreme and wealth inequality even worse, there is a lot to be said for it.

My favorite is an old theme from James Michener's "Hawaii" in which he argued for a tax on wealth to liberate it from those not making good use of it. The idea was that if average return on capital is 3 percent per year, which is still about right, those not earning enough from it to be able to pay a tax of, say, 1 percent per year, ought to sell their assets and put their financial capital in the hands of those who can earn a better return with it.

I don't have time right now to read this particular book, or to learn more about a "New School" of economics. However, it sounds much more sane than most popular economic "solutions". Georgists tend to be a bit eccentric but often insightful, and are rarely disguised versions of something else. One more remark: it is easy to demonstrate that the big network advantages of leading tech firms, including Google, Facebook, and to some extent Microsoft and Amazon, create "rents" (aka "unearned increment") that are prime targets for such taxes.