This is Seeing the Cat — sixteen years of writing (and counting) on one idea: that the value of land belongs to the community that creates it, and that collecting it for public purposes — land value taxation — would do more than any other single reform to end poverty, tame speculation, and make our cities and our economy work for everyone. The idea reaches back to Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879), and it has never been more relevant than now.
Why “Seeing the Cat”?
Georgists of the 1880s passed around a puzzle picture — a tangle of branches that, looked at long enough, suddenly resolved into a cat. Once you saw it, you could never unsee it, and you couldn’t understand how anyone else could miss it. That is what grasping the land question feels like. The story is told in full here:
Seeing the Cat — Have You Seen the Cat? — the parable itself, from Judge Maguire’s 1890 telling to Henry George’s own reaction. Begin with this one.
Then keep pulling the thread
- The Land Questions: #8 — Natural Resource Royalties — one entry in a series working through the land question piece by piece.
- The archive — all the posts, by year and month, 2008 to the present.
- The tags — 300-odd threads through the archive; Henry George, Privilege, Earth for All, and Cui Bono? are rich places to dig.
- Search — full-text, across everything.
Who writes this?
LVTFan — a fan of the land value tax, writing since 2008. The blog quotes generously from the reformers who saw the cat a century before us: Henry George, Louis F. Post, J. W. Bengough, and the writers of The Standard. Their words hold up.
Land Value Taxation will solve many of the 21st century’s most serious social, economic and environmental problems, and promote justice, fairness and sustainability. We can have a world in which all can prosper.