Vitalik Buterin: On Radical Markets
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin's influential endorsement of Harberger taxes and Georgist property reform, which carried the ideas into crypto and tech circles.
Summary
In this 2018 essay, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin reviewed Radical Markets by Posner and Weyl and enthusiastically endorsed its central proposal — the Harberger tax / COST — as an extension of Georgist principles to all property.
Why It Matters
Buterin's endorsement was pivotal in spreading land-value and self-assessment ideas through cryptocurrency and tech communities, where mechanism design and digital property rights are active concerns. He explored applying Harberger-style taxes to domain names, digital assets, and other scarce resources. The essay helped make Georgist-adjacent ideas a live topic among technologists and is part of why the modern revival has strong roots in that world.
See Also
- Radical Markets — the concept page for the Posner & Weyl program this essay reviews
- Harberger Tax (COST)
Sources
- Vitalik Buterin (2018), "On Radical Markets." vitalik.eth.limo — used for Buterin's endorsement of the Harberger tax/COST mechanism from Radical Markets.
- Eric Posner & Glen Weyl (2018), Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, Princeton University Press. Publisher — used for the book this essay reviews; see also wiki summary.