George Osborne is being urged by leading Tory MPs to raise council tax on mansions and expensive homes as part of a deal with the Liberal Democrats that would see the chancellor cut welfare benefits in real terms next year.
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When at the Scottish Lib Dem conference in Dunfermline, we used the Monopoly board game as a prop on the stand, to explain how land monopoly creates inequalities. On seeing this our speaker, Andy Wightman the leading campaigner for Land Tax in Scotland, told me about this article in Harpers Magazine. I had been told by ALTER members that the origins of Monopoly board game were from Landlords game, but this article by Christopher Ketcham tells the full forgotten history of the board game that Henry George's ideas inspired. Its a fascinating, if rather a sad tale of how an American ideal of creating a game to teach the evils of monopoly became a victim of monopoly itself.
138 years of economic history show that Keen and Minsky are right and the mainstream economists are wrong. "The National Bureau of Economic Research has published a new paper analyzing 138 years of economic history in 14 advanced economies, which proves that high levels of private debt cause severe recessions."
Henry George is the most famous American popular economist you've never heard of, a 19th century cross between Michael Lewis, Howard Dean and Ron Paul. Progress and Poverty, George's most important book, sold three million copies and was translated into German, French, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Hebrew and Mandarin. During his lifetime, George was probably the third best-known American, eclipsed only by Thomas Edison and Mark Twain. He was admired by the foreign luminaries of the age, too -- Leo Tolstoy, Sun-Yat Sen and Albert Einstein, who wrote that "men like Henry George are unfortunately rare. One cannot image a more beautiful combination of intellectual keenness, artistic form and fervent love of justice." George Bernard Shaw described his own thinking about the political economy as a continuation of the ideas of George, whom he had once heard deliver a speech.
I missed the media coverage at its publication a year ago but having now read this report by the intergenerational foundation, I felt I must share the headline facts with ALTER website visitors. I hope our Housing Policy Working Group read it when they were preparing the motion we passed last month in Brighton.