Academic & Popular Publications

New Life for the Octopus: How Voting Rules Sustain the Power of California’s Big Landowners

Abstract supplied by Wiley Publishing: The concentrated ownership of farmland has influenced rural life in the state of California for more than a century. Reformers have introduced measures to counteract that concentration, such as acreage limits on farms receiving water from federally funded projects. Large landowners have fought back with policies that have protected their ability to amass and maintain their empires. In the first part of this article, Mason Gaffney presents this historical background in broad outlines. In the second part, Merrill Goodall explains an important policy that preserves the power of entrenched interests: water districts that are governed by a board elected by a voting system that allots one vote to each dollar of land value. In these districts, a tiny handful of landowners is able to control a public agency without opposition and without the need to persuade other voters. Author of After the Crash: Designing a Depression-Free Economy (2009) and The Corruption of Economics (1999). Goodall: Deceased 2002. Goodall taught political science at Claremont Graduate University. Two of his areas of research interest were water policy in California and public administration in Nepal.

Non-Point Pollution: Tractable Solutions to Intractable Problems

Notes on Nouriel Roubini

Oil and Gas Leasing Policy: Alternatives for Alaska in 1977: a Report to the State of Alaska, Department of Natural Resources, and to the Alaska State Legislature, Interim Committee on Oil and Gas Taxation and Leasing Policy

Oil and Gas Leasing: A Study in Pseudo-Socialism

Panel on Property Tax Reform and the Environment Opens Annual CGO Conference in Ottawa

Policies and Practices Affecting Urban Land Costs as an Element of Housing Costs

Relationship Between Property Taxation and the Concentration of Farm Ownership

Rent-Seeking and Global Conflict

Replies by Mason Gaffney to Questions from Senator Len Jordan of Idaho Before Hearing of Joint Economic Committee of Congress

Repopulating New Orleans: How did San Francisco do what a top economist says New Orleans cannot?

Reverberations Between Immoderate Land-Price Cycles and Banking Cycles

Review of the Book: George Miller, 2000, On Fairness and Efficiency: The Privatisation of the Public Income Over the Past Millenium

Review of the Book: The Marginalists and the Special Status of Land as a Factor of Production by Fernando Scornik-Gerstein and Fred E. Foldvary

Seligman and His Critique from Social Utility

Sleeping with the Enemy: Economists Who Side with Polluters

Sounding the Revenue Potential of Land: Fifteen Submerged Elements

Stan Sapiro’s Court Appeal on California Assessments

Tax Reform to Release Land

Tax Reforms to ‘Promote’ Saving Would Backfire

Tax-Induced Slow Turnover of Capital, I

Tax-Induced Slow Turnover of Capital, IV

Tax-Induced Slow Turnover of Capital, V

Taxes, Capital and Jobs