The following thinkers have defended a policy of returning ground rent to the surrounding community (or individuals therein) which creates it. Note that some of them would not call such a policy a "tax", in order to avoid any possibility of legitimizing various illegitimate policies that are called "taxes".

Classical Liberals

• John Locke
  • "Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others."
  • "Whenever, in any country, the proprietor ceases to be the improver, political economy has nothing to say in defence of landed property. When the “sacredness” of property is talked of, it should be remembered that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property."
  • "When land is not intended to be cultivated, no good reason can in general be given for its private property at all."
  • "The earth belongs in usufruct to the living and is given as a common stock for men to live and labor on."
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • "The fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to no one."
• Adam Smith
  • "Both ground-rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. Though a part of this revenue should be taken from him in order to defray the expences of the state, no discouragement will thereby be given to any sort of industry. The annual produce of the land and labour of the society, the real wealth and revenue of the great body of the people, might be the same after such a tax as before. Ground-rents and the ordinary rent of land are, therefore, perhaps, the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them. Ground-rents seem, in this respect, a more proper subject of peculiar taxation than even the ordinary rent of land. The ordinary rent of land is, in many cases, owing partly at least to the attention and good management of the landlord. A very heavy tax might discourage too much this attention and good management. […] Nothing can be more reasonable than that a fund which owes its existence to the good government of the state should be taxed peculiarly, or should contribute something more than the greater part of other funds, towards the support of that government."
• Voltaire
  • "The fruits of the earth are a common heritage of all, to which each man has equal right."
• Thomas Jefferson
  • "A right of property in movable things is admitted before the establishment of government. A separate property in lands not till after that establishment…. He who plants a field keeps possession of it till he has gathered the produce, after which one has as good a right as another to occupy it."
  • "The earth belongs always to the living generation; they may manage it, then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct."
• Tom Paine
  • "Men did not make the earth…. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property…. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds."
  • "[I]t is the value of the improvement, only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes the community a ground-rent for the land which he holds."
  • "Men did not make the earth, and though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it."
• William Penn
  • "If all men were so far tenants to the public that the superfluities of grain and expense were applied to the exigencies thereof, it would put an end to taxes, leave not a beggar, and make the greatest bank for national trade in Europe."
• John Stuart Mill
  • "The essential principle of property being to assure to all persons what they have produced by their labor and accumulated by their abstinence, this principle cannot apply to what is not the product of labor, the raw material of the earth."
  • "The increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might hold title."
  • "When the sacredness of property is talked of, it should always be remembered that any such sacredness doe snot belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust. It is no hardship to anyone to be excluded from what others have produced: they were not bound to produce it for his use, and he loses nothing by not sharing in what otherwise would not have existed at all. But it is some hardship to be born into the world and to find all nature's gifts previously engrossed, and no place left for the new-comer."
• Henry George
  • "The right to exclusive ownership of anything of human production is clear. No matter how many the hands through which it has passed, there was, at the beginning of the line, human labor—some one who, having procured or produced it by his exertions, had to it a clear title as against all the rest of mankind, and which could justly pass from one to another by sale or gift. But at the end of what string of conveyances or grants can be shown or supposed a like title to any part of the material universe? To improvements, such an original title can be shown; but it is a title only to the improvements, and not to the land itself. If I clear a forest, drain a swamp, or fill a morass, all I can justly claim is the value given by these exertions. They give me no right to the land itself, no claim other than to my equal share with every other member of the community in the value which is added to it by the growth of the community."
  • "No matter what may be its intrinsic qualities land that is no better than other land which may be had for the using can have no value. And the value of land always measures the difference between it and the best land that may be had for the using. Thus, the value of land expresses in exact and tangible form the right of the community in land held by an individual; and rent expresses the exact amount which the individual should pay to the community to satisfy the equal rights of all other members of the community."
• John Dewey
  • "The socially produced annual value of land — not of improvements, but of ground-rent value — is about five billion dollars, and its appropriation by those who create it, the community, would at once relieve the tax burden and ultimately would solve the tax problem".
• Herbert Spencer
  • "The right of each man to use of the earth, limited only by the like rights of his fellow-men, is immediately deducible from the law of equal freedom. We see that the maintenance of this right necessarily forbids private property in land. On examination, all existing titles to such property turn out to be invalid."
  • "You have turned over the soil to a few inches in depth with a spade or a plough; you have scattered over this prepared surface a few seeds ; and you have gathered the fruits which the sun, rain, and air helped the soil to produce. Just tell me, if you please, by what magic have these acts made you sole owner of that vast mass of matter, having for its base the surface of your estate, and for its apex the centre of the globe? … You say truly, when you say that 'whilst they were unreclaimed these lands belonged to all men.' And it is my duty to tell you that they belong to all men still; and that your ' improvements' as you call them, cannot vitiate the claim of all men. You may plough and harrow, and sow and reap ; you may turn over the soil as often as you like; but all your manipulations will fail to make that soil yours, which was not yours to begin with. … This extra worth which your labour has imparted to it is fairly yours … but admitting this, is quite a different thing from recognising your right to the land itself."
• Frank Chodorov
  • "It is obvious that if rent were socialized - that is, publicly collected and used for social purposes - the power of the State would decline, and eventually disappear. The governing body could not hide its inefficiency or corruption behind tax levies. Rent would be the barometer of government's value to the citizenry, and the readings would be quite visible. The producers would be buying social services just as they buy private services or goods. The price would be rent. Government would come into the market. […] The socialization of rent would destroy taxes. The State (as we know it) would disappear; and such government as we would have would be always subject to the economic instrument of rent."
• Albert J. Nock
  • "[T]here is a natural difference between property in land, minerals, timber, water powers, etc., and property, say, in a house or a suit of clothes."
  • "Here is land with its potential wealth. What gives value to it is the number of persons who want it. Help yourself. All you make out of it is yours — no tax on property, industry, production or labor. Pay simply what the demand (the number of people who want it) determines the privilege is worth. If you can make ten million dollars we won't begrudge you a single dollar; and if you want to put up a house built of silver or gold, we won't tax it a cent. But whether you choose to work this privilege or leave it idle, you will pay in either case just what it is worth."
  • "Why tax industry and enterprise at all—why not just charge rent? There would be no need to interfere with the private ownership of natural resources. Let a man own all of them he can get his hands on, and make as much out of them as he may, untaxed; but let him pay the community their annual rental value, determined simply by what other people would be willing to pay for the use of the same holdings. George could see justification for wages and interest, on the ground of natural right; and for private ownership of natural resources, on the ground of public policy; but he could see none for the private appropriation of economic rent. In his view It was sheer theft."
• Friedrich Hayek
  • "The usefulness of almost any piece of property in a city will in fact depend in part on what one's immediate neighbors do and in part on the communal services without which effective use of the land by separate owners would be nearly impossible. … The general formulas of private property or freedom of contract do not therefore provide an immediate answer to the complex problems which city life raises. It is probable that, even if there had been no authority with coercive powers, the superior advantages of larger units would have led to the development of new legal institutions—some division of the right of control between the holders of a superior right to determine the character of a large district to be developed and the owners of inferior rights to the use of smaller units, who, within the framework determined by the former, would be free to decide on particular issues. In many respects the functions which the organized municipal corporations are learning to exercise correspond to those of such a superior owner."

Academic Economists

Nobel prizewinners are shown in bold. Italics indicates signatories to the 1990 Open Letter to Mikhail Gorbachev advocating LVT.

• Milton Friedman
  • "In my opinion, the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument of many, many years ago."
• James Buchanan
  • "The landowner who withdraws land from productive use to a purely private use should be required to pay higher, not lower, taxes."
• Robert Solow
  • "The user 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."
• Franco Modigliani
• Paul Samuelson
  • "Pure land rent is in the nature of a “surplus” which can be taxed heavily without distorting production incentives or efficiency. A land value tax can be called “the useful tax on measured land surplus”."
  • "The striking result is that a tax on rent will lead to no distortions or economic inefficiencies. Why not? Because a tax on pure economic rent does not change anyone's economic behavior. Demanders are unaffected because their price is unchanged. The behavior of suppliers is unaffected because the supply of land is fixed and cannot react. Hence, the economy operates after the tax exactly as it did before the tax—with no distortions or inefficiencies arising as a result of the land tax."
• 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 … It is the use and occupancy of property that creates the need for municipal services that appear as the largest item in the budget — fire and police protection, waste removal, and public works."
• James Tobin
  • "I think in principle it’s a good idea to tax unimproved land, and particularly capital gains (windfalls) on it. Theory says we should try to tax items with zero or low elasticity, and those include sites."
• William Vickrey
  • "Removing almost all business taxes, including property taxes on improvements, excepting only taxes reflecting the marginal social cost of public services rendered to specific activities, and replacing them with taxes on site values, would substantially improve the economic efficiency of the jurisdiction."
  • "Economists are almost unanimous in conceding that the land tax has no adverse side effects. … Landowners ought to look at both sides of the coin. Applying a tax to land values also means removing other taxes. This would so improve the efficiency of a city that land values would go up more than the increase in taxes on land. … There is also a strong equity argument in its favor. Consider the example of a tennis court. Even though people playing tennis have no use for electric, water and communication facilities, these services must be provided anyway. … In effect we have to pay for utilities twice: once to the provider and once to the landowners who benefit by them."
• Joseph Stiglitz
  • "The main, underlying idea of Henry George is the taxation of land and other natural resources. What was underlying his ideas is rent associated with things that are inelastically supplied, which are land and natural resources. And using natural resource extraction and using land rents as the basis of taxation is an argument that I think makes an awful lot of sense because it is a non-distortionary source of income and wealth."
  • "The question is: 'Would it be better if we had more taxation of land and natural resource, and more revenue from natural resource management, and I would include atmosphere and spectrum. And less tax on income and savings.' And I would say, 'Yeah.' And I think many economists would agree with that. So, if you want to sell it as a 'Single Tax,' then, no, you won't get anyone to agree that there's enough revenue there. If you look at is a more 'central' tax, then, yes, you will get most economists to agree with you."
  • "There is a wide view today that we should tax environmental 'bads' such as pollution and the like. And switch from taxing good things like labor. So, in a way, that's where it comes in: let's stop taxing good things like labor, and tax things that are resources. So the argument is, 'why tax things that are contributing to society?'"
• Colin Clark (Oxford)
  • "What gives urban land its value, apart form the few cents per square foot which the developer has to spend on roads, water and sewage connection, is its proximity to opportunities for employment, shopping, education, etc. In other words, the seller of urban land is mainly selling the fruits of other people's labour. The requirements of social justice would therefore indicate that heavy taxes should be imposed on land."
• Scott Sumner (George Mason)
  • "We need a mixture of the following, in this order: 1) Taxes on externalities (carbon, but not cigarettes.) 2) Taxes on land (by acreage, not value, with the tax rate varying by zip code.) 3) Progressive consumption taxes."
  • "I like a land tax because the supply of land is inelastic."
• Daniel Klein (George Mason)
  • "My attitude is that, in a hypothetical in which the government is going to coercively extract $X from the economy, the geo-rent tax is probably the best way to do it (provided that $X is not too large), and probably far better than the second-best approach. Adam Smith and Milton Friedman agreed."

Other Signatories to the 1990 Open Letter

In 1990 many economists signed an Open Letter to Mikhail Gorbachev advocating that Russia use Land Value Taxation as part of its free market reforms. It began:

The movement of the Soviet Union to a market economy will greatly enhance the prosperity of your citizens. Your economists have learned much from the experience of nations with economies based in varying degrees on free markets. Your plans for freely convertible currency, free trade, and enterprises undertaken and managed by individuals who receive the profit or bear the losses that result from their decisions are all highly commendable. But there is a danger that you will adopt features of our economies that keep us from being as prosperous as we might be. In particular, there is a danger that you may follow us in allowing most of the rent of land to be collected privately.

It is important that the rent of land be retained as a source of government revenue. While the governments of developed nations with market economies collect some of the rent of land in taxes, they do not collect nearly as much as they could, and they therefore make unnecessarily great use of taxes that impede their economies—taxes on such things as incomes, sales and the value of capital.

Social collection of the rent of land and natural resources serves three purposes. First, it guarantees that no one dispossesses fellow citizens by obtaining a disproportionate share of what nature provides for humanity. Second, it provides revenue with which governments can pay for socially valuable activities without discouraging capital formation or work effort, or interfering in other ways with the efficient allocation of resources. Third, the resulting revenue permits utility and other services that have marked economies of scale or density to be priced at levels conducive to their efficient use.

• William Baumol (Princeton)
• Robert Dorfman (Harvard)
• Daniel Fusfeld (Michigan)
• Mason Gaffney (UC Riverside)
• Zvi Griliches (Harvard)
• Lowell Harriss (Columbia)
• Alfred Kahn (Cornell)
  • "I have never seen a convincing refutation of the Henry George proposition that taxing the rental value of land would actually increase the supply offered in the market, whereas taxing capital must to some extent interfere with the growth of productivity."
• Carl Kaysen (MIT)
• Richard Musgrave (Harvard)
• Oliver Oldman (Harvard)
• Guy Orcutt (Yale)
• Giulio Pontecorvo (Columbia)
• Gustav Ranis (Yale)
• Susan Rose-Ackerman (Yale)
• Tibor Scitovsky (Stanford)
• Eugene Smolensky (Berkeley)
• Nicolaus Tideman (Virginia Polytechnic)

Libertarians

• David Nolan (AZ) - founder of the LP
  • "What kind of taxation is least harmful?….My own preference is for a single tax on land, with landholders doing their own valuation; you'd state the price at which you'd be willing to sell your land, and pay taxes on that amount. Anyone (including the tax collector) who wanted to buy it at that price could do so. This is simple, fair, and minimizes government snooping into our lives and business."
• John Hospers (CA) - first LP presidential nominee (1972)
• Karl Hess - LP News editor, 1986-1990
• Russell Means - runner-up for 1988 LP presidential nomination, losing by 3 votes to Ron Paul
• Steve Dasbach (VA) - former Chair, LPUS; member of multiple LPUS Platform Committees
• Less Antman (CA) - 1982 LPCA candidate for Treasurer; 1983 Karl Bray Award for Libertarian Activism; c.1980 publisher of LPCA's Caliber
  • "The geoist ethic is, in principle, a sound way for people in a community to address the problem of financing the successful governance of the commons. To the extent ground rent is the value created through the availability of goods and services by others in proximity, it can be enforced through mechanisms of reputation, ostracism, and boycott, without the need for violence (which I would consider unlibertarian in this context). I believe a libertarian society is more likely to operate in a manner that is most beneficial to the great majority if people add to their commitment to non-aggression a geoist ethic that expects people to contribute to common services based on their claims of ownership of land."
• Fred Foldvary (CA) - geolibertarian economist; 2000 LP candidate for Congress
• Carl Milsted (NC) - LNC member c. 2002; founder, Libertarian Reform Caucus; site: Holistic Politics
• Dan Sullivan (PA) - founder, Geolibertarian Society; past chair, LP of Allegheny County
• Harold Kyriazi (PA) - U. of Pittsburgh neurobiologist; author, Libertarian Party at Sea on Land (2000)
• Todd Altman (OH, was MS) - maintainer of A Geolibertarian FAQ
• Lorenzo Gaztanaga (MD) - LPMD Chair c. 1994; LNC member c. 2002
• Lois Kaneshiki (PA) - LPPA Chair and LNC member, c. 2002; wrote Is the LP Serious About Politics?
• Wayne Parker (MS) - LPLA Chair c. 1996; LPMS ex-Chair; 2002 LP candidate for Congress MS-4
• Paul Gagnon (VA) - founder, LP of Fairfax County; by 2005 on Democractic Freedom Caucus NatCom
• Mike O'Mara
• Henry Haller (PA) - multiple LPUS Platform Committees
• Mik Robertson (PA) - 2006 LPUS Platform Committee
• Guy McLendon (TX) - 2006,2008,2010 LPUS Platform Committee; Chair, LP of Harris County
• Jon Roland (TX) - 2006,2008,2010 LPUS Platform Committee; creator of constitution.org
• Brian Holtz (CA) - 2006,2008,2010,2012 LPUS Platform Committee; LPCA Executive Committee 2007-2009 ; Purissima Hills Water District Director 2009-
• Robert Capozzi (VA) - 2008 LPUS Platform Committee
• Starchild (CA) - former Chair, LP of San Francisco
  • "I don't consider [collection of] Georgist land rents to be taxes."
  • "A geo-libertarian approach should not require land rents to be collected by government. I would want government kept as far away from the money as possible. An alternate approach would be for people to be required to deposit land rent payments with private banks, from which those owning less than the determined per-person share of land value would be entitled to make withdrawals on a proportional basis. Any land not properly registered to a person and thereby counted in this system, could be deemed legally non-transferrable, and not entitled to any government protection against trespassers or squatters."
• Tom Knapp (MO) - LNC alternate c. 2001; founder of the Boston Tea Party; c. 2009 sought the LP POTUS nomination
  • "I’ve yet to see a successful attack on the basic Georgist/geoist position on property in land. On the details of what that implies, less so but still some."
• Debbie Clark (NE) - debated Georgism in 2001 with anarchist/voluntaryist George Smith
• Ron Rosenberger (PA) - 1998 LP candidate for PA Senate
• Chris Toto (NJ) - former chair, LP of Mercer County
• Brian Mulholland (CA)
• Jonathan Hall (CA) - Libertarian elected to Tehachapi Water District Board

Other Public Intellectuals

• Abraham Lincoln
  • "The land, the earth, God gave to man for his home, sustenance and support, should never be the possession of any man, corporation, society or unfriendly government, any more than the air or water — if as much. An individual or company, or enterprise, acquiring land should hold no more than is required for their home and sustenance, and never more than they have in actual use in the prudent management of their legitimate business, and this much should not be permitted when it creates an exclusive monopoly. All that is not so used should be held for the free use of every family to make homesteads and to hold them so long as they are so occupied."
• Leo Tolstoy
  • "Possession of land by people who do not use it is immoral — just like the possession of slaves."
  • "The injustice of the seizure of the land as property has long ago been recognised by thinking people, but only since the teaching of Henry George has it become clear by what means this injustice can be abolished."
  • "If the new Czar were to ask me what I should advise him to do, I would say to him: Use your autocratic power to abolish landed property in Russia, and to introduce the single-tax system, and then give up your power and give the people a liberal constitution."
  • "The land is common to all. All have the same right to it; but there is good land and bad land, and everyone would like to take the good land. How is one to get it justly divided? In this way: he who will use the good land must pay those who have got no land of the value of the land he uses."
• Theodore Roosevelt
  • "The burden of taxation should be so shifted as to put the weight upon the unearned rise in the value of land itself, rather than improvements, the effect being to prevent the undue rise of rents."
• Bertrand Russell
  • "The mere abolition of rent would not remove injustice, since it would confer a capricious advantage upon the occupiers of the best sites and the most fertile land. It is necessary that there should be rent, but it should be paid to the state or to some body which performs public services; or, if the total rental were more than is required for such purposes, it might be paid into a common fund and divided equally among the population."
• Winston Churchill
  • "Land, which is a necessity of human existence, which is the original source of all wealth, which is strictly limited in extent, which is fixed in geographical position — land, I say, differs from all other forms of property, and the immemorial customs of nearly every modern state have placed the tenure, transfer, and obligations of land in a wholly different category from other classes of property. […] Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains — and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived. […] I do not think that the man who makes money by unearned increment in land is morally worse than anyone else who gathers his profit where he finds it in this hard world under the law and according to common usage. It is not the individual I attack; it is the system. It is not the man who is bad; it is the law which is bad."
• Jack Kemp
  • "Property taxes could profitably be revised to fall more heavily on land rather than, as at present, penalizing property improvements."
• William Buckley
  • "Henry George said that the rent of all land ought to be public. … I am sympathetic with that particular analysis."
  • "I've run into tons of situations were I think the Single-Tax theory would be applicable. We should remember also this about Henry George, he was sort of co-opted by the socialists in the 20s and the 30s, but he was not one at all. Alfred J. Nock's book on him makes that plain. Plus, also, he believes in only that tax. He believes in zero income tax."
• Michael Kinsley
  • "Ideally, all taxes should be zero because all taxes discourage the activity being taxed. (The exception is the land tax, as Henry George famously noted, because land has nowhere to go.) Taxes on labor discourage work and encourage sloth. Taxes on capital discourage thrift and encourage consumption."
  • "Ownership of natural resources like land or oil does not 'create' or 'supply' anything. The profit from such ownership is a direct transfer from the rest of society."
  • Peter Thiel
    • "I always think the more concrete economic thing to try to focus on are things like housing, real estate… I’m always very partial to the theories of Henry George."