"Veblen and his fellow institutionalists understood that “the market” was distorted by special “free lunch” privileges to extract income without really contributing to production. Inherited privilege, monopoly power and land ownership rights were rewarded more than labor. While classical economics focused on labor time as forming the ultimate basis for cost-value, isolating land rent, natural resource rent, monopoly rent and financial privilege as prices without value – in order to minimize the gap. The largest asset in every economy was still real estate – mainly the raw land, as well as oil and gas, mines and forests and other resources supplied by nature, not human labor. [..] Henry George opposed the Marxian socialists and their advocacy of nationalizing land and other means of production. George explained that land could indeed be left in private hands if the government would simply collect the land rent"