Review Rent Unmasked: How to Save the Global Economy and Build a Sustainable Future (Essays in Honor of Mason Gaffney) Fred Harrison, Editor

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12170
• Date: 01 November 2016
• Author: Brian Hodgkinson
• Published date: 01 November 2016

Review

Rent Unmasked: How to Save the Global

Economy and Build a Sustainable Future

(Essays in Honor of Mason Gaffney)

Fred Harrison, Editor

Reviewed by BRIAN HODGKINSON

Rent Unmasked is a remarkable collection of essays in honor of Mason

Gaffney, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Califor-

nia, Riverside. Gaffney spent his whole career analyzing and supporting

Henry George’s principle of land value taxation in the face of an academ-

ic establishment that turned a blind eye to it. The contributors come from

a wide variety of backgrounds—academic, public service, and environ-

mental reform. They are united in their firm belief in Joseph Stiglitz’s aph-

orism, in The Price of Inequality, that “a tax on land doesn’t go away.”

The implication that a tax on everything else—notably labor, capital, and

final goods and services—deters their use and production is an idea

shared by all contributors. Yet the essays show a surprising range of

application of these principles to the working of modern economies.

In an opening tribute, Fred Harrison recalls how Gaffney refused

to compromise. An example of Gaffney’s spirit can be seen in the

articles he published about rent-seekers in California, who “purloined

public value through their legal rights to water, timber, oil or fisheries.”

By the age of 89, when heretired from teaching, Gaffney wasaccompa-

nied in his lifelong campaign for economic justice by an impressive

group that included Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and the English

Financial Times journalist Martin Wolf. Together, these defenders of

Henry George’s ideals have begun to change opinion around the world

about the just and fair ways to raise public revenue. As editor, Harrison

entitles the opening part of the collection “The Last Man Standing,”

with reference to Henry George as the last of the classical economists,

who, since Adam Smith, have extolled the merits of land as the natural

source of public revenue.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 75, No. 5 (November, 2016).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12170

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C2016 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.