Why I Bother

The reader might wonder why there are several hundred posts on this blog, and rather few comments.  Why do I keep on writing?

This blog comes out of an experience which Georgists -- people who are persuaded that Henry George (b. 1839, Philadelphia; d. 1897, NYC) largely got it right -- call "seeing the cat."  The phrase refers to an AHA!!! moment once described as follows:

I was one day walking along Kearney Street in San Francisco when I noticed a crowd in front of the show window of a store. They were looking at something inside. I took a glance myself, but saw only a poor picture of an uninteresting landscape. As I was turning away my eye caught these words underneath the picture: "Do you see the cat?" I looked again and more closely, but I saw no cat. Then I spoke to the crowd. "Gentlemen," I said, "I do not see a cat in that picture; is there a cat there?" Some one in the crowd replied: "Naw, there ain't no cat there. Here's a crank who says he sees a cat in it, but none of the rest of us can." Then the crank spoke up. "I tell you," he said, "there is a cat there. The picture is all cat. What you fellows take for a landscape is nothing more than a cat's outlines. And you needn't call a man a crank either because he can see more with his eyes than you can with yours."

Well, I looked again very closely at the picture, and then I said to the man they were calling a crank, "Really, sir, I cannot make out a cat in that picture. I can see nothing but a poor drawing of a commonplace landscape." "Why, Judge," the crank exclaimed, "just you look at that bird in the air. That's the cat's ear." I looked but was obliged to say: "I am sorry to be so stupid but I really cannot make a cat's ear of that bird. It's a poor bird, but not a cat's ear." "Well, then," the crank persisted, "look at that twig twirled around in a circle; that's the cat's eye." But I couldn't make out an eye. "Oh, well," returned the crank a bit impatiently, "look at those sprouts at the foot of the tree, and the grass; they make the cat's claws." After a rather deliberate examination, I reported that they did look a little like claws, but I couldn't connect them with a cat. Once more the crank came back at me as cranks will. "Don't you see that limb off there? and that other limb just under it? and that white space between?" he asked. "Well, that white space is the cat's tail." I looked again and was just on the point of replying that there was no cat's tail there that I could see, when suddenly the whole cat stood out before me.

There it was, sure enough, just as the crank had said; and the only reason the rest of us couldn't see it was that we hadn't got the right angle of view. but now that I saw the cat, I could see nothing else in the picture. The poor landscape had disappeared and a fine looking cat had taken its place. And do you know, I was never afterwards able, upon looking at that picture, to see anything in it *but* the cat.

To which Nic Tideman added, "In my view, 'the cat' is the possibility of a world without privilege."

The goal of this website is to help others see what Georgists see.  We look around and see dozens -- hundreds -- thousands -- of social problems which ultimately, if you go to the root, are offshoots of our -- America's, the world's -- failure to recognize that the value of land, non-renewable natural resources and other like things (that which the classical economists would recognize as "land" even if they never saw an airplane [prime landing rights at LaGuardia] or heard a radio or TV [electromagnetic spectrum] or imagined a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, or lived in a place where water wasn't in seemingly infinite supply, or a time when clean air wasn't a given) ought to be socialized -- treated as our common treasure through taxation -- while things which individuals and corporations create ought to be privatized (not taxed).

There!  I've written a sentence of a length that only a few can parse.  But perhaps it will give you a sense of the Georgist vision and reform.

I write this blog in the hope that a curious journalist, or legislative aide, or reformer, or foundation board member, or simply another person who thinks that there has to be another, better way than what we are currently doing, will find this body of posts, and explore it long enough to start to see the cat, too, and then share it with others who are willing to work for a better country and better world. 

I'll close with a quote from Henry George's book, Social Problems, in an essay called "What We Must Do."

"I do not say that in the recognition of the equal and unalienable right of each human being to the natural elements from which life must be supported and wants satisfied, lies the solution of all social problems. I fully recognize that even after we do this, much will remain to do. We might recognize the equal right to land, and yet tyranny and spoilation be continued.

But whatever else we do, as along as we fail to recognize the equal right to the elements of nature, nothing will avail to remedy that unnatural inequality in the distribution of wealth which is fraught with so much evil and danger. Reform as we may, until we make this fundamental reform, our material progress can but tend to differentiate our people into the monstrously rich and frightfully poor. Whatever be the increase of wealth, the masses will still be ground toward the point of bare subsistence — we must still have our great criminal classes, our paupers and our tramps, men and women driven to degradation and desperation from inability to make an honest living."

Comments

[Troy]

"Whatever be the increase of wealth, the masses will still be ground toward the point of bare subsistence"

Indeed. This is the core of "seeing the cat" -- the more productive we become, the more this wealth is plowed into real estate valuation. And not the fixed capital "housing", but the exact opposite, the intangible land usage rights.

The more "affordable" we try to make housing, via tax breaks, low interest rates, or more lenient lending standards, the more unaffordable housing becomes!

I first saw the problem living in the dotcom era in the Bay Area. I saw old, crappy apartments that had been around since before I had been born quickly skyrocket in value simply due to the influx of highly-paid dotcommers.

This struck me as unusual, the landlords were getting something for nothing, but this was prior to finding the Georgist argument, so I could not conceptualize anything other than private profit from public value, and that was perfectly normal and to be expected in anything under a socialist, central-planned economy.

Then, later, I found Dr Gaffney's "The Corruption of Economics" and everything became rather clear. Our system is horrifically compromised, and quite possibly intentionally so, by the conflation of land with capital.

It is quite frustrating seeing the problem, knowing the solution, yet unable to win converts. I try, but I have zero expectation that the split tax will gain any headway.

If anything, we are heading toward a worsening of the situation. The teabaggers think low taxes are the solution, but if my thinking is correct, low taxes will just result in higher land values and we will be back where we started but with less government services.

[alarob]

Keep bothering, please.

[Nicholas D. Rosen]

I don't often comment, but I do read your blog, and sometimes I've linked to it on mine.