NOT MANY YEARS AGO, mention of taxing ground rent was likely to evoke at best pleadings of ignorance, usually well founded, and at worst scorn and rage, similarly founded. More recently, many economists have set out to dispel the ignorance. Netzer (1966)'t, Harriss (1968), Gaffney (1962, 1964), Schwartz and Wert (1958), Clawson (1962), Hulten (1966), and Alyea (1967) have written on urban taxation in the United States. Turvey (1957) has written in the English context; Holland (1965), Lindholm (1965), and Kaldor (1963) in the developmental. McDonald (1965) and Gaffney (1967, 1966, 1965) have written on taxing rent from exhaustible resources; Brewer (1961) and Henley (1968) on rural land taxation. Clark (1965), Rawson (1961), and Groves (1948) have written on experience in Canada and Australia. A complete modern bibliography would go on for pages. These modern restatements have a distinguished ancestry. Most economists are aware that the classical economists wrote seriously and favorably about taxing rent. Smith (1776) and Mill (1872) were advocatory, followed by Say (1830), Senior (1928), and Cairnes (1873). Ricardo (1911) stated the rationale curtly in his Chapter 10, "Taxes on Rent." It is less well known that many neo-classical and interwar period economists argued for taxing rent. These were the years when the topic was dominated by the protagonistic personality of Henry George, who attacked economists as Mandarins and won their enmity. Marshall (1967) and Walker (1888, 1891) (1) debated him bitterly-yet they wrote lucidly of the advantages of taxing land and rent. Harry Gunnison Brown (2) is known as the advocate in this period, and is often thought to have stood alone. Many economists will be surprised, therefore, at the favorable