My Nonprofit Reviews

I regret that I cannot give this nonprofit a higher rating, but using local property tax laws to collect ground rents was only reluctantly chosen by Henry George and his lawyer Thomas Shearman after their preferred income-tax-based LVT was ruled unconstitutional in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan (1895).

The local property-tax-based LVT was actually George and Shearman's third choice, and they only considered it to be better than nothing. There's also a danger that a property-tax-based LVT will lead to land nationalization, which of course is not Georgist at all.

To my knowledge, New Hampshire is the only state that now levies income taxes exclusively on unearned income, while exempting wages from the tax base. This is more like what George and Shearman had in mind when they pitched their preferred method, the 1893 "Just and Practicable Income Tax," argued before the Subcommittee on Internal Revenue in Washington, D.C.

However, George died in 1897 and Shearman in 1900, long before the 16th Amendment (1913) would make their preferred 1893 method possible.

If the CSE is considering shifting away from the property-tax-based LVT to the income-tax-based one, and using assessors for that purpose (instead of infringing on property rights), please let me know so I can give a 5-star rating.