Commissioner Dorgan is quite right that North Dakota, like other states, possesses a sovereign right to levy taxes in the manner of its choosing provided only that it does not discriminate against interstate commerce in a gross and overt way. I am only surprised that he feels a need to defend North Dakota’s use . . . → Read More: Intergovernmental Competition for Energy Resources
 Comments are closed  Address, Publication  Energy, Leasing policy, Minerals policy, Politics, Property taxation, Public finance, Tax policy What is the “message” of Proposition 1 3? Everyone was invoking it this past summer to fill his sails, but what was really blowing in the wind? Howard Jarvis had been fighting property taxation for a score of years with minimal success. Philip Watson, until recently more prominent, led two property tax limitation initiatives . . . → Read More: Proposition 13: An Alternative Reform Comments are closed Policy Paper, Publication Incidence, Inequality, Land Rent, land value tax, Proposition 13, Public finance, Tax policy, Tax Shift We can multiply the value of output from limited natural water supplies by allocating them to higher uses. To this end we need a market in raw water, but existing markets work badly, for several reasons. Sellers are undermotivated, absent taxes or debt. Free groundwater subverts the pricing of surface water. Loss of elevation, . . . → Read More: What Price Water Marketing? California’s New Frontier Economists are not doing their job if they merely act like auditors and snoops. We are actually more dangerous than that. We become aware that there are gross perceptual biases in popular awareness of different kinds of waste. A poor congressman can get ruined for hiring a steno with a fast track record, but . . . → Read More: Greater Social Benefits From our National Forests Technical Appendices A-L for Oil and Gas Leasing Policy: Alternatives for Alaska in 1977, 8 of them by Mason Gaffney. Others by Michael Crommelin, Richard Norgaard, and Robert Rooney. . . . → Read More: Appendices for Oil and Gas Leasing Policy: Alternatives for Alaska in 1977 The purpose of this report is to be of service to the Alaska State Legislature and the Department of Natural Resources in their review of oil and gas leasing policy. It is written from the State’s viewpoint. It treats the State’s interests as being frequently adverse to those of the State’s lessees, without being hostile . . . → Read More: Oil and Gas Leasing Policy: Alternatives for Alaska in 1977 To serve his citizens best, the statesman should act much like a private landowner maximizing his net income from lands. He should resist the temptation to use his power to manipulate and control, foster and suppress, divert and channel, reward and punish on the too easy presumption that the market has no rationale or normative value of its own. . . . → Read More: Objectives of Government Policy in Leasing Mineral Lands In the classical synthesis, human welfare and land rent were two parts of an integrated philosophy. As Smith, Mill, Marshall, and especially Ricardo scan us from their present eyries they must note with shock two virtually separate disciplines tagged “land economics” and “welfare economics.” The first has come to connote Wisconsin Institutionalism with its skepticism . . . → Read More: Land and Rent in Welfare Economics This paper purports to solve a particular kind of problem that characterizes urban expansion and evolution: when replace a collection of individual apparatuses (CIA) with a mass system. Examples include replacing individual septic tanks by sewers, well to public water supply, private cars by mass transit, trash burners by public pickup, coal or fuel . . . → Read More: When to Build What Comments are closed Publication Land economics -- urban, Property taxation, urban development, urban infrastructure This will not be a perfect market. There will be only one seller, and the buyers will surely form a user’s association. But this should not deter us. No human institution is perfect, except some that are perfectly awful. The present water market is one of these, and the point is to make it . . . → Read More: How a Water Market Might Work Comments are closed Address, Policy Paper, Publication Land Economics - Water, Land economics -- Environment, Law, Natural Resources, Water |