"... it clothes the naked, it feeds the hungry; it buries its dead ..."
I stumbled across this snippet in a 1000-page book of testimony before a senate committee from 1883, and it triggered some thoughts. Some of my reaction was set off from learning last evening of the death of a Georgist friend, Dan Kryston, who was the president of the board of the Henry George School in Manhattan and who died last week, much too young.
A good society does more than clothing the naked and feeding the hungry: it figures out why people are naked and why people are hungry, and seeks to remedy the underlying problems, so that people aren't hungry, aren't naked.
Yes, a good society buries its dead, and remembers what they did to make life better for those around them -- those they knew personally, and those they never met, in their own generation and future generations.
From time to time, I check the statistics for a website I created a few years ago -- http://www.wealthandwant.com/ -- the URL comes from the subtitle to Henry George's book, "Progress and Poverty" -- and (somewhat to my disappointment!) one of the most popular items is a page based on a bit of poetry -- using the term loosely, perhaps -- entitled "The Ambulance Down in the Valley." The page includes several versions of the poem I collected online, and then the thought that there is a 3rd alternative -- the ambulance in the valley and a fence at the edge of the cliff -- that we ought to consider: examining the nature of the cliff itself, and determining who benefits from the continued existence of the cliff!
What do we owe each other? And what do we owe future generations?
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