One afternoon, back in the days of the great bloom of New York City panhandling in the early 90s, I made the by-then reflexive plunge into my pocket, and found nothing but a twenty-dollar bill. I explained to the beggar that the twenty was all I had, and I couldn’t afford to give it to him. A conversation ensued, which turned out to mean a lot more to him than the money. “When so many people walk by and don’t seem to see me,” he said, “I start to wonder if I might really not be here.”
I often think of that moment as I ponder the plight of the Georgists. Responsible for letting the world in on a radically important insight, they go out and find that people simply seem unable to see them!
Nevertheless, despite our lack of honor in our own country, I’d suggest that we are not the most pathetic players in the field of political economy. Georgists can accomplish one thing that most of today’s credentialed economists have a great deal of trouble with: we can discern the obvious.
A highly-skilled stage magician can make something huge — the Statue of Liberty, say — seem to disappear. Yet if that magician were to actually start to believe in his smoke and mirrors, our feelings about his performance would shift from awe to pity. Modern economics has performed the astounding trick of making land — the natural materials and opportunities from which wealth comes — disappear from economic analysis. Yet, alas, many have come to believe in their own illusion.
If you had never thought about land as a separate factor, of course, then its absence from all manner of economic consideration wouldn’t ring any bells. People have been trained to ignore the meaning of land — and ignore it they do. From the op-ed pages to the college textbooks, the blanket assumption is that the private ownership of land — and its transformation into capital — is the Way Things Are. Without that, why, we’d be left with either a Traditional Economy, or with Socialism. Just really not thinkable.
This has profound consequences. Here are just a few examples — no doubt the reader can think of more. If fee-simple land ownership is sacrosanct, then:
Malthus was right
The poor will indeed be with us always — and they will always breed with unsustainable rapidity. Widespread improvements in living standards, which bring about a sensible drop in fertility, will not spread beyond their current enclaves. The urbanization of the poor south will continue, and misery will grow. Poor people keep being born, and there just isn’t enough land to go around. Transnational corporations have every right to retain their vast holdings, on which they pay local peasants starvation wages to grow crops for export.
Keynes was right
The boom/bust cycle is a permanent feature of the “modern” economy, which can only be managed by ever-increasing governmental management of fiscal and monetary policy, and the corruption that stems from that is just an unfortunate by-product. Inflation will always overheat before all the willing and able workers can find jobs; taxation will always place a dead weight on production. Real estate speculators have every right to enjoy the appreciation of their assets as GDP grows and workers become more productive; it’s their due, fair pay for entrepreneurial acumen.
Marx was right
There is an inherent structural tendency within the “capitalist” system for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer. Labor’s gains via legislation or collective bargaining will always tend to erode; real wages will inexorably drop. Those at the top will resort to ever-more-drastic repressive measures to keep disgruntled workers in line. As the inefficiencies and dead weights of the system grow, regimes will resort to imperialistic wars to secure markets, resources and profit margins.
There really is a global “race to the bottom”
Nothing can be done to provide better opportunities for poor workers in developing countries. They need the work — at whatever pay the multinationals are willing to give them. If nations want to develop at all, they have to play by the rules of the WTO and the IMF. Land barons in those nations have no incentive to let go of their holdings to give workers better options, and none has any right to make them do so.
George W. Bush was right
Terrorism will continue to increase. People who resent our advantages and hate what we stand for will become increasingly desperate and dangerous, and we must do what’s necessary to protect ourselves, even if it means sacrificing our Constitutional freedoms. Our very way of life depends on control over the last of oil, water and farmland.
Fortunately for us all, the fee-simple ownership of land need not be sacrosanct. The alternative is not just viable — it is infinitely preferable. The replacement of burdensome, invasive taxes with public collection of rent would confer a smorgasbord of benefits on society, within the overall structure of a free-market economy. Many things that seem inconceivable now would become not only possible but actually profitable!
At one time, slavery was deemed a sensible, sound practice; the Bible condones it. At one time, it was taken for granted that women had no rights beyond what their fathers and husbands whose property they were chose to grant them. Yet, through the long years when such backward practices held sway, there were always thoughtful individuals who saw the denial of basic human rights for what it was. The most basic right of all is that of life itself — yet, if fee-simple land ownership is sacrosanct, then we are obliged to pay a landowner for access to the natural resources that we must have in order to live. A hundred and twenty six years ago, Henry George thundered, “Private property in land is a bold, bare, enormous wrong, like to chattel slavery.” Most people still have not been inclined, or had the chance, to stop and think about the truth of those words — but they will.
