Mason Gaffney, Who Argued for Taxing Only Land, Dies at 96

As Mason Gaffney bicycled to a Boy Scout meeting in 1940, a chauffeur-driven car clipped him, leaving him with injuries that kept him bedridden for months. During his convalescence his mother, appreciating his restless intellectual curiosity, gave him books to read, including complex tax policy textbooks in which he learned about Henry George, whose late-19th-century ideas helped sparked the Progressive movement.

The young Mr. Gaffney recovered; graduated from New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill., in 1941 as his class valedictorian (he was also an Eagle Scout); and went on to become an academic economist who for decades led the Georgist movement, which promotes taxing only land as the most effective, efficient and environmentally sound way to finance government.

Professor Gaffney died at 96 on July 16 at Loma Linda University Medical Center, not far from the University of California, Riverside, where he taught economics for 37 years. His son Stuart confirmed the death.

Taxing land is less intrusive than taxing income or estates, Professor Gaffney taught, drawing on Henry George’s influential 1879 book, “Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry Into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want With Increase of Wealth: The Remedy,” reportedly the best-selling popular book in America in the 1890s.