This is a paper from some time ago, well prior to the advent of Occupy events. Henry George wrote from a sensibility one rarely finds expressed so explicitly today. The modern reader should note that Christian underpinnings in no way disrupt either the reasoned logic or the passionate humanity behind George's arguments. Follow the links! Many Occupiers have promoted education, the deeper aspects of which are rarely available in 3 page tracts....
For Eric Stephenson
16 February 2009
George Who?
It seems
peculiar that in 2009 no one has heard of Henry George, if only for the fact
that during his prime a hundred years past his was easily one of the most
recognizable names on Earth. Just a journalist really, George’s hardscrabble
upbringing, his early experience in the business world, and maybe just a little
OCD inspired him to craft an entirely new approach to economic theory. Its
publication very quickly garnered him international acclaim, respect, and
supportive friendship from many of the greatest figures of his day. Many,
encountering his work for the first time today, would no doubt label him a
Commie, particularly given that George’s work followed Marx and Engels’ by
three decades. This misinterprets
George. His thinking split the difference between Adam Smith and the Communist
theorists in many ways, sharing common ground with both camps but firmly
establishing his own territory. His work deserves a second reading.
George was
born in Philadelphia, September, 1839, to a family headed by a hardworking but
low-budget printer. By providing the Church cut-rate printing services,
George’s devout father enabled Henry to garner a relatively high-standard
primary education from the Episcopal Academy. He left home after high-school
seeking his own way, and after a brief period of adventuring, found himself in
San Francisco where he joined the Printer’s Union, following in his father’s
footsteps after all.
George lived
a poor man’s life--same as any tradesman at the height of the Robber Barons’
power--until an editor at the San Francisco Times came across a piece he
had written and left lying around. He accepted an offered staff writing
position at $50 a week, which seemed a princely amount compared with his
father’s $800 a year. He traveled quite a bit for the Times, and in 1868
on assignment in New York City first encountered the squalid conditions
surrounding and adjoining vaunted islands of luxury and power that would inform
and undergird his writing for the rest of his life.
Having
gained considerable respect as a newsman and a fair amount of seed-money,
George and a partner, William Hinton, established the San Francisco Evening
Post in 1871. George unabashedly used the paper as a human rights
platform until 1877, when, some say, powerful railroad interests against whom
he had written since his SF Times days shut the Evening Post down.
Quickly landing a government post through highly-placed friendships he had
developed, he used the leisure time it afforded to produce his magnum opus, Progress and Poverty, and
published it in 1879. George moved to New York in 1880 and promptly left for
England and Ireland, touring there to support Irish land support. By the time
he returned, his life had changed forever. Progress and Poverty had made
him a celebrity (de Mille 1-152).
George’s political economy laid out
in his roughly 600 page book begins with his assertion that Smith’s approach
established private land ownership as the foundation of economic and social
structure, referring often to “the sacred rights of private property” (Smith,
par. 1.11.79). So far few would argue, but George figured this skewed, and
brazenly wrote that, “[t]he great cause of inequality in the distribution of
wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of land is the
great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the intellectual and moral
condition of a people....[I]t necessarily follows that the only remedy for the
unjust distribution of wealth is in making land common property” (295, 391). He
argued that as a foundational natural resource there is no basis for
sequestering land in private hands. He proposed to hold land in common and
allot it to users for as long as they needed, for whatever production they
could derive from it, and the holder would pay tax, (rent), on its assessed
value until relinquished. The holder and any capital or labor involved would
keep whatever profit came from the working of the land, and the public would
base taxation only upon the land itself. Note that this negates both income and
capital gains taxes. (During George’s prominence, no federal income tax existed
in the United States). George insisted the extensive system described
philosophically in Progress and Poverty,
and rather more technically in The
Science of Political Economy, would adequately supply the government’s fiscal
needs without additional taxes while simultaneously encouraging
entrepreneurship and curtailing development of a landed class.
Marx, whose seminal works came before
George, but close enough that both wrote from the surrounding milieu of the
Industrial Revolution, addressed similar problems. He and those following took
the matter to a deeper extreme, however, allowing for no private ownership of
either property or capital. Marx expressed a well known hostility to capital.
The familiar Communist adage, “Property is Theft,” represents a drastic
condensation from Marx’s arguments that labor always seems to wind up on the
short end of dealings with those holding either land or capital (Marx, chap. 6,
par.2). Like George, Marx chafed at the inequities this arrangement produced,
especially with the exacerbations of capital lording over labor, which
industrial development had completely disassociated from the land producing the
wealth. “The means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the
bourgeoisie built itself up,” says Marx, “were generated in feudal society,” (Marx,
and Engels 1848, chap. 1, par. 21).The
Communists implemented a far more radical seizure of all private property,
including both land and capital, consolidating it under a central federal power
(chap. 2, par. 75). Contrarily, George felt that capital deserved its due, and
sought to rectify the problems he saw by implementation of a more enlightened “single
tax.”
A few germane observations present
themselves for discussion. Smith, George, and Marx all expressed notions we
might call idealist—Utopian even. Each sought to solve timeless conundrums with
an incredibly optimistic approach. Jaded 21st century readers might
consider any one of them painfully naive, in retrospect. None of them had the
advantage of the hindsight we enjoy, however, and fruitlessly denying the
problems each pointed out in his broader work does not help at all. Smith wrote
when, fresh from the collapse of European Feudalism, land served as the key to
wealth of any kind, and still viewed as an unlimited resource for the grabbing.
The vast inequities the Industrial Revolution had abruptly produced vexed George
and the Communists. None of these could have predicted today’s technological,
information-based economies, with the problems they addressed dispersed over
the entire planet. Today, the rate of separation between the “Haves” and the
“Have Nots” poises to exceed the conditions affecting either set of writers.
George did not design a perfect
system. Neither, as amply demonstrated by both history and current events, did
Smith or Marx. Henry George thoughtfully and humanely addressed a terribly
intractable matter in human affairs, however, and deliberately allowed for
future thinkers to expand his work. His work deserves contemplation as we forge
into a new century fraught with uncertainties. Our present crisis may help
encourage just that.
Works Cited
De
Mille, Anna George. Henry George: Citizen
of the World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950.
George, Henry. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the
Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy.
1898. New York, New York: The Robert Shalkenbach Foundation, 1979. 17 February
2009
Marx,
Karl. Wage-Labor Capital. 1849. 17
February 2009 <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/index.htm>
Marx, K. and
Engels, F. Manifesto of the Communist
Party. 1848. 17 February 2009 <http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html >
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations. 1776. Ed. Edwin
Cannan. 5th ed. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1904. 17 February
2009 < http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html >
United States Department of the
Treasury. Fact Sheets: Taxes. 17
February 2009
(This link is obsolete).
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