Saving Communities
bringing prosperity through freedom, equality, local autonomy and respect for the commons

Sample Epigraph

Single-Session Seminars

  • Property Tax
  • Corporate Inefficiency
  • Corporate Welfare
  • Gentrification & Displacement
  • Parking Lots
  • Transportation
  • Intentional Communities
  • Health Care
  • Land Tenure & Race
  • Social Security
  • Raising Wages
  • Food Production
  • Free Trade
  • Economics Euphemisms
  • Land & the American Legacy
  • American Indian Land Tenure
  • Land Tenure & Warfare
  • Irish Land Question
  • Birth of American Labor
  • Lost Science of Money
  • Beyond Right & Left
  • Multiple-Session Seminars

  • Economics for Small Governments
  • Economics for Large Landlords
  • Seminars and Speeches

    We lead seminars on request. Our single-session seminars usually run from one to two hours, depending on how thoroughly we are expected to present the information and how much discussion follows. Our public speakers can also make short overview presentations and can serve on panels. Our multiple-session seminars are about two hours per week for six weeks.

    Single-Session Seminars

    Property Tax Myths: Exposing the myths about property tax, and showing why it is the second-best tax option for local governments.

    The Myth of Corporate Efficiency: How preoccupation with labor-efficency has obscured the inefficient use land and resources, and why smaller independent proprietorships are often more efficient than larger corporations. See Outline

    Growth Without Corporate Welfare: How to revitalize a city without resorting to political favoritism.

    Gentrification and Displacement: Why neighborhoods go through boom-bust cycles, and how to minimize displacement of poor people when revitalizing a community. See Outline

    Why all the parking lots?: A look at parking lots as an interim land use, critiquing measures to discourage open parking lots.

    How to Fund Transportation Locally: Why current funding methods generate sprawl at the expense of urban and small-town citizens who walk and bicycle to work.

    Intentional Communities: Places designed to serve as models for local governments.

    Funding Health Care: Affordability, protection, and individual consumer control.

    Land Tenure and Race: How our systems of land tenure and taxation affect racial minorities.

    Supplementing Social Security Locally: How a measure to protect elderly taxpayers from property taxation can evolve into a superior Social Security system.

    Raising Wages: The insufficiency of minimum-wage laws, and addressing the root cause of sinking wages.

    Economics of Food Production: How tax policies favor corporate farming, animal factories, pesticides, chemicals and canneries over family farms, husbandry, organic farming, and fresh produce. See overview.

    The Free-Trade Fraud: Errors on both sides of the free-trade debate, and differences between true free trade, which benefits labor, and superficially free trade, which hurts labor.

    Land Tenure and the American Legacy: Views of Penn, Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, Lincoln and others on the limits of landed property.

    American Indian Land Tenure: Comparisons to Saxon common law and other early systems, and connections to the American Revolution and classical liberalism.

    Economics Euphemisms: How substituting euphemisms for precise scientific language has twisted economics rhetoric to into a kind of Orwellian Newspeak.

    Land Tenure and Warfare: How the lack of a principled mechanism for resolving land-tenure disputes creates strife and warfare.

    The Irish Land Question: How rack-renting starved the Irish, fueled immigration to America, launched the American labor movement, and continues to enrich English owners of American land.

    The Birth of American Labor: Henry George's pivitol role in forming a uniquely American labor movement based on principles "too radical for socialism," and how his political mistakes cost him his labor following.

    The Lost Science of Money: How treating money as wealth has made us dependent on banking cartels.

    Beyond Right and Left: Freedom and equality vs. bureaucrats and aristocrats.

    Multiple-Session Seminars

    Economics for Small Governments: The role of local government in making communities more desirable and giving residents the amenities they most value.

    Economics for Large Landlords: How large landlords can create community dynamics that will attract better tenants and increase long-term profitability.

    Using This Site

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    We Provide
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    How You Can Help
    Research
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    Training for responsibility

    Our Constituents
    Public Officials
    Small Businesses
    Family Farms
    Organic Farms
    Vegetarians
    Labor
    Real Estate Leaders
    Innovative Land Speculators
    Homeowners
    Tenants
    Ethnic minorities
    Ideological Groups

    Fundamental Principles Decentralism and Freedom
    Focusing on Local Reform
    Government as Referee
    Government as Public Servant
    Earth as a Commons
    Money as a Common Medium
    Property Derives from Labor

    Blinding Misconceptions

    Orwellian (Neoclassical) Economics
    Corporate Efficiency
    Democracy vs. Elections
    Big Government Solutions
    Founding Fathers
    Politics of Fear
    Politics of Least Resistance
    Radical vs. Militant
    Left vs. Right
    Common vs. Collective
    Analysis vs. Villification
    Influence vs. Power

    Core Issues Democratic Process
    Monopoly
    Debt-Money
    Taxation
    Privilege

    Derivative Issues Wealth Concentration
    Corruption
    Bureaucracy
    Authorities
    Privatization
    Centralization
    Globalization and Trade
    Economic Stagnation
    Boom-Bust Cycles
    Development Subsidies
    Sprawl
    Gentrification
    Pollution and Depletion
    Public Services
    Transportation
    Education
    Health Care
    Retirement
    Wages
    Zoning
    Parks
    Shared Services

    Saving Communities
    631 Melwood Avenue
    Pittsburgh, PA 15213
    United States