View source for Seven Nobel Prize Winners Endorse Land Value Taxation

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{{DES | des = Starting with [[Milton Friedman]], who also planned the US income tax withholding system. | show=}}
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{{List|title=Seven Nobel Prize Winners Endorse Land Value Taxation|links=true}}
{{Quotations|title=Seven Nobel Prize Winners Endorse Land Value Taxation|quotes=true}}

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The headline is correct. If we had eight, would you be more impressed, and even more important, moved to action (written in 1991; since we now have eight...)?
 

Milton Friedman: “I share your view that taxes would be best placed on the land, and not on improvements.”
Herbert Simon: “Assuming that a tax increase is necessary, it is clearly preferable to impose the additional cost on land by increasing the land tax, rather than to increase the wage tax - the two alternatives open to the City (of Pittsburgh). It is the use and occupancy of property that creates the need for the municipal services that appear as the largest item in the budget - fire and police protection, waste removal, and public works. The average increase in tax bills of city residents will be about twice as great with wage tax increase than with a land tax increase.”
Paul Samuelson: “Pure land rent is in the nature of a ‘surplus’ which can be taxed heavily without distorting production incentives or efficiency.” A land value tax can be called “the useful tax on measured land surplus.”
James Tobin: “I think in principle it’s a good idea to tax unimproved land, and particularly capital gains (windfalls) on it. Theory says we should try to tax items with zero or low elasticity, and those include sites.”
James Buchanan:’ “The landowner who withdraws land from productive use to a purely private use should be required to pay higher, not lower, taxes.”
Franco Modigilani: It is important that the rent of land be retained as a source of government revenue. Some persons who could make excellent use of land would be unable to raise money for the purchase price. Collecting rent annually provides access to land for persons with limited access to credit.”
Robert Solow: “Users of land should not be allowed to acquire rights of indefinite duration for single payments. For efficiency, for adequate revenue and for justice, every user of land should be required to make an annual payment to the local government equal to the current rental value of the land that he or she prevents others from using.”
The President of the American Economics Association(1991), later the 1996 Nobel Prize Winner, William Vickrey, also endorses land value taxation: “It guarantees that no one dispossesses fellow citizens by obtaining a disproportionate share of what nature provides for humanity.”

The endorsements from the last three economists named above were taken from a letter dated November 7, 1990 to Mikhail Gorbachev signed by 30 prominent U.S. economists.

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