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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the accounts of self‐ and world‐ownership in the social philosophy of Henry George, and a Georgist social theorist Nicolaus Tideman.

The accounts of George and Tideman are evaluated using the tool of conceptual and logical analysis.

The paper argues that although the institutional proposals of Georgist are important and worth serious consideration, there are fundamental problems with the Georgist accounts of self‐ and world‐ownership.

The Georgist institutional recommendation of a land tax is not necessarily rejected by the criticism of the Georgist accounts of self‐ and world‐ownership.

The value of this paper derives from its careful analytic evaluation of the most basic concepts of the Georgist tradition. It serves, then, as a philosophical evaluation of that tradition and of those parts of the tradition that Georgism share with libertarianism generally. It also serves as a comparison of the basic commitments of Georgism and liberal egalitarianism.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the virtues (despite Moellendorf's criticisms) of the geoliberal framework of social justice, which assumes that people have rights to themselves and that all people have equal rights to natural opportunities.

After describing geoliberalism, the paper responds to Moellendorf's arguments, enlarging on the issues that arise.

Geoliberalism withstands Moellendorf's criticisms.

People can advocate geoliberal institutions in good conscience.

The paper provides principled, succinct responses to concerns people may have had about geoliberalism.

As Gonedes and Dopuch point out, there are many alternative approaches to the allocation of financial accounting information which might be viewed as competitors to ASC, FASB and other extant processes. Even if one begins with the ethical premise that “individual preferences are to count” and it is assumed that some sort of regulatory approach is needed, there are still at least three basic types of standards‐setting processes worthy of consideration: (1) “representative or expert body” processes; (2) “voting” processes; and (3) “demand‐based” (i.e. “willingness‐to‐pay”) processes. While the first type relies on the delegation of decision making authority to a body of “representative” or “expert” parties, the latter two types base their respective decisions on ordinal preference and demand information elicited directly from the affected parties themselves.

Two competing hypotheses have been developed in the public economics literature to explain the growth of government spending. The first, termed the fiscal illusion hypothesis, holds that governments have incentives to induce a misperception in the population about the cost of government. By constructing complex systems of taxation that obscure the true cost of government services, governments can lead the taxpayer to demand a larger quantity of services. The other hypothesis, the fiscal stress hypothesis, holds that tax complexity diversifies revenues, leading to less revenue variability and, hence, lower costs. Taxpayers, then, demand more government services. The two hypotheses make very different assumptions about the incentives of governments in regard to an informed electorate. The fiscal illusion hypothesis suggests incentives to obscure information, while the fiscal stress hypothesis suggests incentives to reveal true costs.

Accounting and financial reporting can play a role in revealing fiscal information to taxpayers, directly or indirectly, through information intermediaries. If the fiscal illusion hypothesis describes the behavior of governments, we would expect that such governments would attempt to protect the information advantage that is conveyed by a complex tax structure by minimizing accounting disclosures. On the other hand, the fiscal illusion hypothesis suggests that a government with a complex tax structure has no reason to minimize disclosure, and may have incentives publicize lower service costs.

This study examines the association of tax complexity and financial disclosure. We find that there is more disclosure in cities with more complex tax systems, a result that supports the fiscal stress hypothesis.