Herman Daly, Professor of Ecological Economics at the School of Public Policy (University of Maryland) has written a thought-provoking blog post on the New Economics Foundation site.

Daly applies the ideas of Henry George to our time. George was a nineteenth-century American economist who, through his most famous work Progress and Poverty as well as his lecture tours around Britain, became an important influence on late nineteenth-century Christian Socialist thought - as well as on the Fabians and most of the British Left from 1880.

George's big idea was the 'Single Tax' - a tax on the unearned increment arising from land values. That the rental value of land was caused not by labour nor human skill meant it was morally justifiable to tax it in order to pay for public improvements and social welfare.

Daly argues that because 'the biosphere is now scarce, and becoming more so every day as a result of growth of its large and dependent subsystem, the macro-economy' - the ideas of Henry George are now more relevant than ever. Modern-day options for implementing the Single Tax include an 'ecological tax reform, or... quantitative cap-auction-trade systems'.

In the early twentieth century, most Christian Socialists (like most of their secular socialist counterparts) moved on from Henry George, because they felt the Single Tax alone could not solve the social problem. But their time was different; many of the measures that they advocated have since found their way into law (only for some of them to be reversed, but that's a different story).

A modern-day Single Tax may or may not be possible, but what is key is the point Daly makes here:

For resources the necessary supply price is the cost of extraction — so any payment above cost of extraction is rent. Since land has no cost of extraction all payment for land is rent. If no rent is paid, land does not cease to exist. Neoclassical economists accept this definition of rent but resist Henry George’s ethical emphasis on rent as unearned income.

and here:

Our present practice of taxing away a lot of the value added by individuals from applying their own labor and capital creates resentment, and discourages the supply of labor and capital. Taxing away value that no one added, scarcity rents on nature’s contribution, does not create as much resentment, and the resentment it does cause is less justified. In fact, failing to tax away the scarcity rents to nature and letting them accrue as unearned income to a landlord class has long been a primary source of resentment and social conflict.

The task as I see it is the extension of participation in the discourse of economics to everyone. Terms such as 'neoclassical', 'value added', 'scarcity rents' and, more generally, 'opportunity cost', 'marginal utility' or 'heterodox economics' mean nothing to the vast majority of people - yet the fundamental ideas above are widely understood and debated.

The more specialised and scientific the discipline of economics becomes, the more it is seen by most as something which it is not: the language of greed, the science of exploitation, the toolkit for banking and finance alone. Those who are immersed in the discipline can all too easily forget that this crude charicature is a passable representation of economics in the eyes of many people.