8 Nobel Laureates in Economics have Endorsed a Tax on Land rather than on Production

Milton Friedman: “I share your view that taxes would be best placed on the land, 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]….The average increase in tax bills of city residents will be about twice as great with a 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.”

James Tobin: “I think in principle it’s a good idea to tax unimproved land…. 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 Modigliani: “It is important that the rent of land be retained as a source of government revenue.  [Without land value taxation] 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.”

William Vickrey (when president-elect of the American Economics Association): “It guarantees that no one dispossesses fellow citizens by obtaining a disproportionate share of what nature provides for humanity.”

The endorsements of the last three Nobel Prize winners are taken from a letter dated November 7, 1990 to Mikhail Gorbachev and signed by 30 prominent U.S. economists.