LVTFan's Blog

Dr. McGlynn's Lesson from the 1886 New York City Election

What follows is one of three analyses of the 1886 Mayoral election in Manhattan, which appeared in the December, 1886, issue of North American Review (see https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25101145.pdf) under the title "Lessons of the New York City Election."  The authors are listed as "A Republican, Edward McGlynn and S. S. Cox."

One might consider this a supplement to Post & Leubuscher's December 1886 book, Henry George's 1886 Campaign, online at 

II.
THE LABOR PARTY VIEW.

The late contest for the chief municipal office of New York marks an historical epoch. The movement to elect Henry George to that office has been something exceptional, in fact, unique, in its inception, in its growth, and in its results, in the character of its originators, in the sympathies it won, and in the opposition it evoked. It has had an unprecedented effect in confusing and disabling political plans and factions; and it has rendered inevitable, has, in fact, already begun, the disintegration and reconstruction of political parties. It is the beginning of a pacific revolution which is destined to have upon the whole world a more beneficent effect than our first Revolution and the great Declaration which gave it its justification and battle-cry.

All this was substantially said by me at the meeting in Chickering Hall a month before the election, and was then no doubt regarded by not a few as but a campaign extravagance — a mere rhapsody inspired by foolish hopefulness of the perfectibility of human society, and by a simple but absurdly enthusiastic hero-worship. Events, however, have largely justified tho declaration made at that meeting.

After our mighty civil struggle had ended, with a Union restored and a race emancipated; after the question of reconstruction had been settled, and a large part of the burdens of the war discharged; after its deepest wounds had been healed, and even their scars obliterated, everything might have seemed to promise a long period of unexampled national prosperity and contentment. Instead of this, a new sense of disappointment and discontent began to steal over the workers of the country. With increasing wealth, they felt the pressure of increasing want. Labor in mill and mine, on railroad and farm, became more and more conscious of a wrong, in the want of opportunity to employ itself, and in the inadequate share of the product of his toil which came back to the toiler. Maddened and blinded, the giant Labor too often struck out wildly to his own hurt, and eagerly snatched at such panaceas as “protection,” urged on him by the quacks, who found profit in his ignorance. Strikes, wasteful and sometimes violent; lock-outs, long and heartless, increased and multiplied. Waves of industrial depression followed each other with a regular periodicity which suggested a law of nature. The cry was heard everywhere, “the rich were becoming richer and the poor poorer.” “Hail, Columbia, happy land!” was no longer sung with the same heartiness as in the childhood of the nation, and even the Fourth of July seemed to have lost the freshness of its charm. In the reading of the magnificent assertion of the natural equality of man, and his inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there seemed to many an undertone of mockery. But deeply as the growing wrong was felt, there was a failure to clearly see its cause. Voices many were raised in complaint, but they were now the roar of a strong lion helpless in the toils, and now the wail of a child crying in the night. There was lacking the clear articulate speech of a man who, seeing a great truth, sounds a trumpet-call to all who would taste the fierce delight of battle against wrong.

But the hour came at last, and with it the man. The Duke of Argyll spoke better than he knew, when he sneeringly called Henry George the “Prophet of San Francisco.” No heart has sympathized more keenly with the sufferings of the toiler, no other pen has defined the wrong so clearly, and portrayed with such force and pathos the poverty that haunts progress like a spectre. No other voice has rung so loud and clear in calling men to take up the cross of a new crusade for justice, to proclaim the glad tidings of a new evangel to the poor, that shall relieve them from the degradation of want, and the deeper degradation of the fear of want. His cry rang forth, calling on the conscience of men to restore to the disinherited their equal share in the bounties of nature, and thus to fit their hearts and minds the better to receive and act out the old evangel of Him, who taught the universal Fatherhood of God and the equal Brotherhood of men. The common people of old heard the Christ gladly as He preached to them the blessedness of those that hunger and thirst after justice; and in the common people of today the same sure instinct responds to the call for social right-doing.

What gives to the late election its deep importance is that it marks the coming of a great principle into our politics; that it is a flashing into action of sentiments that have spread and are yet spreading wide and deep throughout the land and over the world. Henry George’s nomination was no accident. The working-people of New York, like their fellows throughout the country, have been reading and talking over his books, and are better acquainted with them, and have a keener appreciation of them, than most men of leisure and culture. They have learned from Henry George’s teachings an effectual and peaceful method of righting their wrongs, by the reformation of law on the lines of justice. They have got from him a new hope and courage; they have learned that the remedy must be political, since the wrong is political, proceeding from enactments that give to a few that which belongs to all. Henry George has taught them that it is not desirable nor possible to divide land equally; that the right of the individual is not to an equal division, but to an equal benefit from a common ownership. Henry George has shown that the beautiful economic law of rent suggests a simple and peaceful means of giving to every human being just what belongs to him of the common estate. He shows that rent is a good, not a bad, thing; that it is a gauge of the degree of progress from semi-barbaric, nomadic conditions up to conditions of the highest civilization. He shows that economic rent — that “unearned increment” which attaches to land by reason of the growth of population and the progress of civilization — is a value produced by the social aggregate, as distinguished from the value produced by the individual, and that thus is provided, by natural law, a common fund which may be drawn on for common needs without hampering capital or oppressing labor by taxes which check production and raise prices. He shows that it is just that he who is permitted to enjoy the advantage or privilege of occupying a larger or choicer portion of the common estate than is open to another, should pay the highest market price for this advantage: that is rent. The wrong is not in the payment of rent, but in its diversion from a common treasury into private pockets, and in the locking up of natural opportunities by the speculation which the possibility of appropriating this public revenue provokes. Henry George has taught that in this appropriation of rent by private persons, and in the forestalling which it engenders, is to be found the cause of that increasing poverty which is the dark side of progressing civilization, the true cause of the industrial depressions in which productive power is so enormously wasted, and in which willing hands cannot clothe the naked back, or feed the hungry stomach, because labor is shut out from natural opportunies for its employment by the speculation that holds land idle until it can get a blackmail price.

How this speculation in land grinds down the wages of labor, cuts down the profits of capital, and brings about these periodical industrial depressions, “Progress and Poverty” and “Social Problems” have taught the thousands on thousands who have read them. They have shown how the simple remedy of the appropriation of economic rent to its proper purpose, the public use, would destroy speculation in the elements of nature, and thus open to labor the natural opportunities which are required for the production of wealth; how in reality there is no conflict between labor and capital, but that the real conflict is between labor and monopoly. Workingmen have learned from Henry George that the simple reform which would thus give them the highest possible wages would make the cost of living much lower, since the enormous taxes which now fall with oppressive weight on the poor, and are a fruitful source of political corruption, could be entirely remitted, as no longer necessary. All the public needs that are now supplied by taxation, and many public conveniences and advantages which we have not yet become civilized enough to supply at public cost, could be provided for out of the common fund — the rent which individuals would pay to a community that included themselves.
When, therefore, organized labor, as represented in the Central Labor Union of New York City, determined to take political action, it was necessary and fitting that the doctrine of “the land for the people” — the doctrine that all are entitled to share in the benefits provided by their Creator, and the advantages which come with social growth and improvement — should be made, as it was, the chief principle of their platform, — a platform which, in its bold simplicity, is in inspiriting contrast to the straddling duplicities of the old party declarations. And it was equally fitting that they should call on Henry George to become their spokesman and standard-bearer. No other man could so well fit the platform.

When, some three or four months ago, members of the Central Labor Union began to talk among themselves of the propriety of political action, the most sanguine among them had little hope of doing more than making a small beginning. Mr. George from the first was spoken of as the candidate who could command the strongest following; yet the best they hoped for was that an independent Labor candidate might get some 15,000 votes. For they sadly remember how, a few years ago, a Labor candidate for Mayor polled only 87 votes. They knew by experience how strong were the political organizations of New York, how potent the “influences” on which these relied, and how general was the indisposition of men to "throw their votes away” on a candidate who had not a “regular” nomination. Mr. George’s own friends felt that his world-wide reputation, and the cause with which he, more than any other man, is identified, should not be subjected to the risk of being made ridiculous by a hopeless canvass. But pressed to accept the nomination, and anxious to maintain the dignity of his cause, and to inspire those disposed to vote for him with confidence in themselves, Mr. George conditioned his acceptance on a pledge from 30,000 voters, explaining the significance of the movement and of his candidacy in his now famous letter to the Secretary of the Labor Union Conference. That letter began the campaign. It infused into the movement a peculiar dignity and enthusiasm. Clergymen, lawyers, teachers, authors, business men of all kinds, joined the Labor men in requesting Mr. George to be a candidate, and crowded the meetings held to ratify his nomination.

The campaign is so recent that it would be useless to recount it here. Great as must have been the growth in economic and political education, in self-respect and self-restraint, in the ranks of organized labor to produce the astonishing result, yet it must be conceded that no other platform and no other candidate could have secured such a tremendous moral victory. It is the reputation of the candidate, his high genius and exalted character, his practical wisdom and masterly leadership, his tireless energy, the strange fascination his personality exerts, and the almost religious enthusiasm which he has been able to inspire by his presentation of the cause, that have given to the 68,000 men, who, in spite of all difficulties, voted for him, and to the thousands more in New York who are now prepared to join them, the consciousness of power, the conviction of duty, and the confidence of ultimate success. Thus has come to the front a new Land and Labor party, from henceforth utterly distinct from all other parties, prepared to go forth conquering and to conquer; and on the same platform and under the same leader to repeat, at the earliest possible moment, in the State and in the nation, this magnificent canvass, and to more than repeat the moral victory of the late municipal election in New York.

Edward McGlynn.

Henry George's 1877 Oration, Fourth of July, San Francisco

The American Republic: Its Dangers and Possibilities.

[An oration delivered in the California Theatre, San Francisco,
on the celebration of the 4th of July, 1877, by Henry George.]

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is under circumstances that inspire gratitude and renew patriotism that we celebrate the completion by the American Republic of the first year of her second century. How much that year has held of the possibilities of dire calamity it may be too soon to speak.¹ But for the deliverance let us give thanks. Through the web woven by passion and prejudice has run the woof of a beneficent purpose. Through clash of plans and conflict of parties; through gateways hung with cloud and by paths we knew not of, have we come to this good estate!

The Question Before the People, Henry George's election-year speech, San Francisco, 1876-08-15

144 years, another presidential election year --- and weeks after the centennial.

 

THE QUESTION BEFORE THE PEOPLE.
What is the Real Issue in the Presidential Campaign?

A SPEECH BY HENRY GEORGE,

BEFORE THE TILDEN AND HENDRICKS CENTRAL CLUB,

AT DASHAWAY HALL, SAN FRANCISCO, ON THE EVENING OF AUGUST 15th, 1876.

• Parties and Party Principles.
• The Two Great Parties of every Country.
• The Two Permanent American Parties.
• The Two Great American Party Leaders
• The Genealogy of our Parties
• Corruption and its Causes
• How Centralization Fosters Corruption.
• How "Protective" Taxes Foster Corruption.
• How Favored Corporations Foster Corruption.
• The Causes of Business Stagnation and Industrial Depression
• How the Policy of our Government Shackles Labor
• The Fault One of Policy not of Men.
• The Appeal to Prejudice.
• A Question for Republicans.
• Men and Reform.
• What may be Hoped from a Democratic Success.
• The Premonitions of Decay.
• The Remedy yet in our Hands.
• A Recapitulation.

The Meeting being called to order, the Hon. THOMAS P. RYAN, President of the Club, came forward and introduced Mr. HENRY GEORGE, who spoke as follows:

FELLOW-CITIZENS: We are coming to another Presidential election under circumstances which ought to give a fresh impulse to patriotic feeling. We have just entered upon a new century of the Republic the Republic one and indivisible. Over the whole vast territory held by over forty-five millions of people the same flag has been given to the breeze, the same anniversaries kept, the same traditions recalled. The thrill of Lexington, the joy of Bunker Hill, the defiant thunder of Moultrie have again swept through the land, and out again with all the added meaning of a century has rung the announcement of our independence. With eyes so fixed on the old beacons; with faces so turned towards the august shapes that loom through the mists of a hundred years, cold must be the heart that has not felt the prejudices of section and the surviving animosities of civil strife melting in the glow of a patriotism that knows but one common country.

Can we not, should we not, put away from us in this Centennial year all the rancor of party feeling? Can we not, should we not, make this Presidential election in fact, what it is in theory, a great council of the nation, to which we come not as the adherents of rival factions, but in the temper of men with mutual bonds and common interests, counciling with each other as to what is best for all? For this election means much more than the choice of an Executive. We have not simply to say what man shall govern, but what ideas shall govern; not merely who shall take the helm, but in what direction the Ship of State shall be steered.

Remembering this, the political contest is lifted above the low plain of denunciation and demagoguism, and becomes not a contest for spoils in which the people are simply permitted to choose which gang shall plunder them; but a solemn momentous inquiry, demanding from each voter a conscientious judgment.

Now, however much we may differ on minor questions it seems to me that the great body of the American people must find common ground on one thing the desire to restrain political corruption and to reduce the public burdens. It is to this class that I wish to address myself.

If one party avowed itself in favor of reform and the other party avowedly opposed it, the citizen who conscientiously wished to cast his vote for reform would be in no perplexity. But as is always the case, both parties ask the suffrage of the voter with the name of reform upon their lips. Which shall we believe?

An American Trinity: Thomas Jefferson, Henry George, Abraham Lincoln

https://books.google.com/books?pg=PA26&id=5VKP3aty_U4C#v=onepage&q&f=false
From The Conservator, April, 1895

from the masthead: "The Conservator is an exponent of the world movement in Ethics.  It is not published in the interest of any sect or party, but of Ethical principle and practice as reflected in all societies and churches and outside of all."  Horace L. Traubel was the publisher, and its offices were with those of architect Will Price, who was a founder of Arden. 

For more about The Conservator, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Traubel

An American Trinity*

*From a speech delivered at the Single Tax banquet in Philadelphia, on Jefferson's birthday, April 2.

Within the century and a little more that we have passed as a nation there have been but two supremely eminent men who have risen to the highest altitude, as to whose exact stature it remains for future generations to decide.

Of these one was a man of aristocratic lineage, inheriting in his blood those traits of caste and class which for centuries underlaid the great distinctions among men, and gave to the recipient a recognition of superiority, with all its allied privileges, prerogatives and immunities; yet a man in whose constitution there glowed a fierce hatred of all shams and enforced supremacies; whose faith in the dignity and uprightness of the common people, and whose trust in their rugged honesty and capabilities, were so great that he brushed aside all the influences of tradition and custom and greeted all men upon a common level; a man who well has been called the high priest of freedom and who swore upon the altar of liberty eternal hostility to all forms of tyranny over the souls of men; philosopher, patriot and sage— Thomas Jefferson.

The other, a man of humble parentage, born of the common stock, bread-winner on land and sea, hater of wrong, lover of right, seeker for truth, defender of the oppressed, comrade of the common people, of whom he is not ashamed; also philosopher, patriot and Sage— Henry George.

These men achieved merited pre-eminence, not by reliance upon credulity and the baser passions, but purely by reason of intellectual force and the appeal to the rigid sense of justice and right; not amid the glamour of war and conquest, but in the peaceful arena of everyday life; not by the instrumentality of carnage, but by the happy and gladsome medium of the understanding.

Jefferson's conception or central thought was that no man had a right to rule over or control another. The domination or censorship of one man over another was abhorrent to his sense of justice, and his whole life's work was to instill into the minds of men the doctrine of equal rights.

George, starting from the same premises as Jefferson, has also given to the world a philosophy from which there is no appeal. But its domain is different. It not only recognizes the equality of men before the statute law, but carries and establishes the principle of equality within the domain of natural law, showing conclusively that what we call political freedom rests upon a greater natural freedom.

So, alongside of Jefferson's conception of equal rights among men in relation to the social state we place George's equal rights among men in relation to the natural media. 

But between the period of Jefferson and that of George there arose another who, because of the momentous and awful panorama in which he was unseekingly made the dominating and controlling factor, and not by reason of any especial distinguishing individuality, must be linked with them; a man also of the common people, whom he loved with all the intensity of his great warm heart— Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln gave the world no new philosophy. For decades the enunciation of Jefferson that “all men are born free and equal” had been silently eating its way into the hearts and minds of men. In Lincoln and his compatriots it reached its culmination, as freedom and equality were then conceived. None of them saw the inner meaning of that great truth as it is seen today.

They accepted Jefferson's dictum of “equal rights.” The ownership of one man by another became so abhorrent that they could not rest until such ownership was overthrown and abolished, at no matter what cost. They did not see, as George saw and as we see, that the real ownership of men rests upon the ownership of the earth, and that to abolish one and not the other is merely to change the form of ownership.

It has been contended, and it may be essentially true, that to others, like Garrison, Phillips and Curtis, belongs greater honor for the overthrow of negro slavery than to Lincoln. Undoubtedly the labors of these men were great and sacred to the memory of man. Their enthusiasm and sacrifices were great. But, like those who, preceding Jefferson, preached the doctrine of political rights, these men were simply forerunners in the wilderness.

In Lincoln all the forces for freedom became focused. He became the great vehicle or instrumentality through which their labors should find expression. He became the crucible in which their identities were merged and lost and from which should come the enactment of their hopes and desires. He became, as it were, their composite, living personality.

Here, then, we have the great American trinity in the cause of liberty: Jefferson, who won for his nation its political freedom; Lincoln, who gave to a race its personal freedom; and George, who has given to the world, though it yet be in transition, its industrial freedom.

William M. Callingham.

1897: An Eloquent Tribute to Henry George, in the Sacramento Bee

This tribute, by Phil Francis, appeared in the 1897-11-12 issue of the Sacramento Bee, about 2 weeks after Henry George's death in NYC, and was reprinted from the Stockton Mail.  Some of seems a bit overwrought today, perhaps, particularly to those who haven't read George, but what caught me were these sentences:

He did for political economy what Bacon did for philosophy, what Bentham did for jurisprudence. He found it a gibberish and left it a science.

Now that Henry George is dead the bigness of the man will begin to fill the world’s eye. It is a curious eye, seeing nothing of proportion in those who move across the stage of events. While he lived, Henry George was the mark of many men's curiosity, the target of many fools’ abuse, the object of a few men's profound esteem. Time will prove the few to be right. Time always does that. Nine times in ten the minority is right. Nine times in ten the majority lacks nothing of the ass's qualities, except his good looks. The world crucifies its Christs and stones its prophets while they are in the flesh. Dead, the world builds temples and monuments to them. So it was yesterday, and is today and will be forever, perhaps. So it was with Henry George. His was the most lucid mind living. That superb thinking machine of his worked so easily in the making of great ideas that its force and power were not apparent to the casual glance. He did for political economy what Bacon did for philosophy, what Bentham did for jurisprudence. He found it a gibberish and left it a science. Because little minds could not follow along the paths his far-sighted and sure-footed intellect blazed, the vacant heads in which these same little minds slosh about were wagged in derision at the profoundest thinker of modern times. He himself looked down from far hights on these gibbering mimes and chattering apes with a kingly forbearance. But to those who knew his lofty character and his superb powers, it was hard to rein in the angry contempt which these mowing and moping fools excited.

The milk in our coconut

This is an editorial from the Leavenworth (KS) Labor News of February 10, 1893.  This newspaper is available on Newspapers.com, and it, along with the Fairhope (AL) Courier, is a wonderful resource.

The Galveston News has an editorial on the “Public Landlord” in which it attempts to show that the figures used by Mr. Thomas G. Shearman as to the total annual land values of the United States are incorrect, and then it proceeds to demolish the single tax idea. That’s the trouble with figure-mongers. What difference does it make whether Mr. Shearman’s figures are correct or not? The milk in our cocoanut lies in the statement that land does not possess in itself those qualities which enable it to be owned by an individual. It is not property, any more than the air, sunlight, or winds of heaven are property and subject to individual ownership.

Mr. Shearman is one of the most valued adherents to the single tax cause. We call him a “Single Taxer Limited.” He favors the single tax because of its simplicity as a fiscal measure.

We have all kinds of people in our camp; one highly valued Single Taxer is Billy Radcliff of Ohio, who goes around with a banjo singing our doctrine. Another is Rabbi Samuel Sale, of St. Louis, an orator whose words and figures of speech remind one of the lofty imagery of the prophet Isaiah. Then there is “Uncle Tom,” the poor workman, who writes with the eloquence, which, as Webster said, “was not taught in schools, but belongs to tho cause, the time and the occasion.”

Henry George, the philosopher; Judge Maguire and Louis F. Post, the lawyers; Dr. McGlynn, the religious teacher, and a countless number of professional men, artisans and common laborers make up our following, and run the entire gamut of human thought and endeavor.

If Thomas G. Shearman, the fiscal advocate of single tax, or Dr. McGlynn, the ethical advocate, or Louis F. Post, the legal advocate, or any other special pleader for our cause raises questions which, to men uninitiated in their special branches of learning seem to be untenable, what matters it?

The men who stand firmly upon the statement that individual ownership in land is the breeder of poverty, of sin and crime, and all the brood of evils which spring from an unjust and unrighteous act, care little whether the annual land values of the United States are seven hundred millions a year, or one million a year, or seven billions a year.

The point is that the annual value of land belongs to the creators of it, namely, to society in the aggregate—to the generation of men now living. The men who are dead have no part or lot in it; neither they nor their heirs who base their claims upon the fact that their ancestors claimed to own the land. When we die our interest in the land ceases and we do not believe that we can pass our title to our children as against the children of landless men who are living in the same generation with us.

If the annual land value be more or less than enough to support the state, what matters it? The value of land, be it great or small, belongs to all men who live on the land. That’s all there is to it.

If this contention can be sustained we need have no fears about other truths not being in harmony with our position. The first thing to do is to establish the truth that land cannot be owned by an individual — is not of a nature which permits it to be owned. After this is done, then the fiscal, ethical, legal, sentimental and utilitarian phases of the situation may be profitably considered and worked out. If our contention can be sustained, then there is a way to harmonize the details. This must be true, or else truth itself is a lie.

If you have time available, consider digging into those two newspapers.  They have a wealth of fascinating material and wisdom.

John Farrell, The Philosophy of the Single Tax, Part I: About Current Politics

The two letters to which this first article of the series respond are appended below the article itself.

The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, NSW: 1883-1930)  Sat 12 Oct 1889, Page 5  

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SINGLE TAX.
By J. Farrell.

No. 1. — About Current Politics.

A few days ago a correspondent, "H. M.," writing in The Daily Telegraph, expressed wonder that the single tax party could work hand in hand with the revenue tariff free traders.(1) He quoted some words used by the Hon. J. H. Carruthers to the effect that the man "who thinks by introducing any policy whatever he is going to bring about the millennium, and have no more poverty and no more pauperism, is a mad dreamer, and the best place for him is a lunatic asylum." Such a man, "H. M." very truly says, is Henry George, and such men are all those who endorse his doctrines. They do emphatically believe that poverty is an anomalous condition, made possible at the present time by anomalous laws, and one which with the reform of these laws will entirely disappear from the world. The extracts from George's works quoted by "H. M." truly and fairly represent the views of those who understand and accept his teachings. They do think that "we might all have leisure, comfort and abundance, not only of the necessaries, but even of what are now esteemed the elegancies and luxuries of life." They do believe "that we might all have enough wealth to satisfy reasonable desires; that we might all have so much of the material things we now struggle for that no one would want to rob or swindle his neighbor; that no one would worry all day or lie awake at night fearing that he might be brought to poverty; or thinking how he might acquire wealth." They agree with the author of "Protection or Free Trade," as against Mr. Carruthers, that "free trade is a movement which has for its aim and end nothing less than the abolition of poverty and the vice and crime and degradation that flow from it." This being so, "H. M." thinks that it is inconsistent in Mr. Carruthers and those who think with him to accept assistance from the single tax party, and foolish on the part of the latter to render it, and asks that an explanation be given.

John Farrell, The Philosophy of the Single Tax, Part II: The Need for Reform

The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, NSW: 1883-1930)  Sat 19 Oct 1889  Page 5  

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SINGLE TAX.
BY J. FARRELL

No. II.  THE NEED FOR REFORM.

The speaker with whose words I closed my paper of last week went on to say that if the followers of Henry George occasionally gave some reason for the very common accusation that they regarded their leader as an economic pope that pope had, at least, learned his business. But as a general rule there is no foundation for such a charge other than the density of those who make it. Of the prominent supporters of the single tax in these colonies, there is not one, I believe, who is not quite prepared to state his case from start to finish and justify every point of his belief with cogent reasons, and anyone who is conversant with the literature of the subject in the United States and England can readily believe that it is the same there. Whatever doubt existed in the minds of those who were at first inclined to accept "Progress and Poverty" as the revelation of a new truth was dispelled by the attempts made to controvert the writer's positions. After Arnold Toynbee, W. H. Matlock, the Duke of Argyll, and others less widely known, but in some cases infinitely more worthy to be heard, had spoken, it began to be realized that no coherent argument in opposition to the single tax theory could be put forward. But there has not been a blindfold acceptance of the whole belief of Henry George. His teaching has been very closely scrutinized indeed, and no better proof of this could be given than that a large number of the most diligent students of it, while holding his demonstration, that by taxing away land values poverty may be finally abolished, to be complete, refuse to accept his views with regard to the matter of interest. The point here at issue is highly problematical and perfectly immaterial, as it is one which must bring its own solution with it, but it is the only part of the work that those who have pored closely over the whole of it hesitate to endorse. The wonder is that such a stupendous task as the evolving of order and sequence out of the chaotic mass of contradictions which passed as a science a dozen years ago and was called political economy, should have been so well performed by one mind, not that one or two errors may have been made. It was superhuman work to undertake, such a work as a college of trained specialists, rather than an individual, should have engaged in. And, looking upon the result and knowing of the care and the patience and conscientious effort of the writer, and his great ability, it is surely about a fair thing to feel impatient when economists of the Teohey calibre undertake to declare that the single tax is unjust or unworkable. Here in Sydney there are dozens of people who tell you that they advocated land

John Farrell, The Philosophy of the Single Tax, Part X: In Conclusion

The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, NSW : 1883 - 1930)  Sat 8 Feb 1890  Page 9

The Philosophy of the Single Tax.
By J. Farrell.

 

X. IN CONCLUSION.

I have endeavored in the course of these articles to explain in a condensed form, and divested as far as possible of technicalities necessary to a textbook but unfamiliar to the general reader, the doctrine expounded by Henry George in "Progress and Poverty," and all his subsequent writings.  Here and there, perhaps, I have been too prolix or too concise. I have been to blame, may be, for undue repetition or insufficient demonstration. That this should happen is unavoidable in matter written hurriedly, and sometimes at the last moment before its publication. Any consideration of questions of political economy should be couched in terms of the utmost exactitude, every definition should be arbitrary, and every sentence clear and capable of but one interpretation. As in "Progress and Poverty" itself, every line should be read and reread, every obscurity removed and every unnecessary word pruned off. But although conscious of failing in this respect here and there, I feel confident that I have not in any essential point diverged from Mr. George's teaching.

The conclusions reached by Henry George in the course of a profound examination into the causes of poverty, misery and crime are shortly these: That labor is the producer of all things; that capital, a tool shaped by labor's own hand, can only be used to assist it; and that monopoly of the matter or material from which these two partners could produce everything requisite for the satisfaction of human needs is alone responsible for the shocking social conditions that now exist throughout the world.

The Henry George Idea in One Hundred Words

This appeared in a 1943 Henry George School newsletter (which I'm pretty sure was edited by my grandmother, Marjorie Carter (1902-1963) -- something I'd not been aware of!)  It is signed by Louis W. Weston.

 

The Henry George Idea in One Hundred Words

The rental value of land is due to our common human needs.  No single individual -- the people as a whole produce that value.  It grows larger as the population and its activities increase.

This natural law of rent gives the community the moral right to take all of this value which it creates. 

The mistake is made of permitting a few to take this value, thus creating speculation in land, upsetting economic stability, necessitating unemployment and the recurring breakdowns in our civilization.

This fundamental wrong must be righted before wars and all injustice can be abolished.

 

John Dewey's Foreword to Geiger's "The Philosophy of Henry George" (1933)

Many are familiar with John Dewey's 1928 "An Appreciation of Henry George," which prefaced the book "Significant Paragraphs from Progress and Poverty," but this 1933 essay is worth knowing, too, and it is harder to find online. [See also Dewey's 1933 radio address, "Steps to Economic Recovery".]

I like his summation, in the first paragraph: "Practical Idealism."

 

John Dewey's Foreword to The Philosophy of Henry George
by George Raymond Geiger

THE life history of Henry George is typically American even though it has few parallels in this country. There are many instances of rise from poverty and obscurity to wealth or fame or both in the realms of business and politics, and there have been many self-made thinkers in various fields. But Henry George stands almost alone in our history as an example of a man who, without a scholastic background, succeeded by sheer force of observation and thinking that were dictated by human sympathy, and who left an indelible impress on not only his own generation and country but on the world and the future. He is an outstanding example of something of which we hear a good deal, but mainly in the way of unjustified boasting, since the quality in question is more marked in talk than evident in conduct: Practical Idealism. He is an example of what may be accomplished by unswerving devotion and self-sacrifice to a dominating idea. He was, we might say, a man of a single idea, but the statement would be misleading unless we also said that he broadened this one idea until it included a vast range of social phenomena and became a comprehensive social philosophy.

Henry George is typically American not only in his career but in the practical bent of his mind, in his desire to do something about the phenomena he studied and not to be content with a theoretic study. Of course he was not unique in this respect. The same desire has been shared by many British economists. John Stuart Mill's theoretical writings were ultimately inspired by interest in social reform. But there is something distinctive in the ardent crusade which George carried on. His ideas were always of the nature of a challenge to action and a call to action. The "science" of political economy was to him a body of principles to provide the basis of policies to be executed, measures to be carried out, not just ideas to be intellectually entertained, plus a faint hope that they might sometime affect action. His ideas were intrinsically "plans of action."

Unfortunately, in some respects, the American public was practical-minded in a much narrower sense and shorter range than was Henry George himself. It is perfectly true that the culmination and indeed the meaning of his social philosophy is to be found in his proposals regarding taxation. It is also true that many persons accept and are justified in accepting his taxation scheme without having knowledge of or interest in the background of principles and aims with which this scheme was organically associated in the mind of Henry George himself. But nevertheless the connection between the theoretical part and the practical part was vital in the thought of George himself. Something vital in acquaintance with his thought is lost when the connection is broken. One may understand the plan of tax reform by itself but one comes far short in that case of understanding the idea which inspired Henry George.

In spite, therefore, of the immense circulation of George's writings, especially of Progress and Poverty (which I suppose has had a wider distribution than almost all other books on political economy put together), the full sweep of George's ideas is not at all adequately grasped by the American public, not even by that part which has experienced what we call a higher education. Henry George is one of a small number of definitely original social philosophers that the world has produced. Hence this lack of knowledge of the wider and deeper aspects of his thinking marks a great intellectual loss. In saying this, I am not speaking of acceptance of his ideas but of acquaintance with them, the kind of acquaintance that is expected as a matter of course of cultivated persons with other great social thinkers, irrespective of adoption or nonadoption of their policies.

I should hesitate to write in this way, lest I might be thought to depreciate the practical importance of his plan of social action were it not for two things. One of these things is the fact which I have already stated. His theoretical conceptions and his program of social action are so closely united that knowledge of the first will inevitably lead on to a better understanding of the second. The other reason is more immediately applicable. Actual social conditions (like those for example of the present) are bound to raise the problem of reform and revision of methods of taxation land public finance. The practical side of George's program is bound in any case to come forward for increased attention. It is impossible to conceive any scheme of permanent tax reform which does not include at least some part of George's appropriation by society for social purposes of rental value of land. For instance, we are just beginning to understand how large a part unregulated speculation has played in bringing about the present crisis. And I cannot imagine any informed student of social economy denying that land speculation is basic in the general wild orgy, or that this speculation would have been averted by social appropriation, through taxation, of rent. To a large extent, then, some knowledge of the directly practical side of George's thought is bound, in the long run, to result from the movement of social forces. A corresponding knowledge of George's theory of the importance of land -- in the broad sense in which he uses the word -- in social development, of the causes of moral progress and deterioration, cannot be secured, however, without an understanding of his underlying philosophy.

The importance of a knowledge of this underlying philosophy is urged in spite of the fact that the present writer does not believe in the conceptions of nature and natural rights which at first sight seem to be fundamental in the social philosophy of Henry George. For, as I see the matter, these conceptions are symbols, expressed in the temporary vocabulary of a certain stage of human history of a truth which can be stated in other language without any serious injury to the general philosophy implied. It has repeatedly been pointed out that the real issue in the "natural rights" conception is the relation of moral aims and criteria to legal and political phenomena. Personally, I have little difficulty in translating a considerable part of what George says on nature over into an assertion that economic phenomena, as well as legal and political, cannot be understood nor regulated apart from consideration of consequences upon human values, upon human good: that is, apart from moral considerations. The question whether a "science" of industry and finance, of wealth, or of law and the State, can exist in abstraction from ethical aims and principles is a much more fundamental one than is the adequacy of certain historical concepts of "nature" which George adopted as a means of expressing the supremacy of ethical concepts, and on this fundamental question I think George was in the right.

This statement brings me to the connection which exists between the foregoing remarks and the work of Dr. Geiger to which the remarks are introductory. In connection with every topic he discusses, Dr. Geiger makes it clear that a vital connection between ends, human values, and economic means is at the basis of George's distinctive treatment. This fact alone gives a distinctive and timely color to this book. Moreover, the significance of Dr. Geiger's treatment does not stop at this point. There is no phase of the work and the influence of Henry George which is not considered. The account of his life and development forms a personal thread which binds all the parts together. Dr. Geiger has given us a book which meets the contemporary demand for an adequate interpretation of the thought and activity of Henry George regarded as a vital whole and not as an aggregate of isolated parts. It will enable the reader to obtain a clear and comprehensive view of one of the world's great social philosophers, certainly the greatest which this country has produced.

JOHN DEWEY

 

The book is online at  http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006827034

Some thoughts about Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century"

I posted this comment elsewhere, and thought it worth sharing here:

I've not read far into the book yet -- and it is available online as a PDF file -- but by the time I was into the first chapter, it was clear that Dr. Piketty's economic education, extensive as it might be, entirely omitted the ideas of the classical economists who described a 3-factor economy: land, labor and capital. Piketty, like nearly everyone educated in economics in the past 40 to 80 years, writes as if there were only two factors -- labor and capital -- treating land as if it were a mere subset of capital, with no reason to recognize it as differentiated.

Land -- not only urban sites, but also the other things the classical economists would recognize as Land, such as water rights, oil, electromagnetic spectrum (our airwaves which we all say belong to the American people, but which are in reality owned by corporations), landing rights at busy landlocked airports, geosynchronous orbits, urban street parking, the value of dozens of other non-renewable natural resources -- is completely different in character from that which is created by labor. To fail to recognize that difference lies at the bottom of our inequality problem.

That which individuals and corporations produce is rightly individual property. That which the community and nature produce is rightly common property, belonging to all of us. Conflating Capital and Land leads us to permit the privatization of that which is rightly our common treasure.

You might be interested to know that the Landlord Game, invented by 1902, was intended to teach this concept. You have probably played Monopoly, which was based on this game, played with very different rules.

Explore the ideas of Henry George. Between 1885 and 1900 or so, everyone knew the name and many well understood his ideas. You might start with "Social Problems" or the more analytical "Progress and Poverty," or his speeches, "The Crime of Poverty," "Thou Shalt Not Steal," among others, online at http://www.wealthandwant.com. See also http://lvtfan.typepad.com.

Dr. Piketty and others whose education in economics has omitted George's ideas should not be treated as experts; they've mixed apples and oranges and not noticed that what they've created impoverishes the vast majority of us -- and enriches a few. (Parenthetically, consider who donates heavily to our universities.)

 

Better Insurance Against Inequality - NYTimes.com

Better Insurance Against Inequality - NYTimes.com

Better Insurance Against Inequality 

APRIL 12, 2014 

Economic View By ROBERT J. SHILLER 

Paying taxes is rarely pleasant, but as April 15 approaches it’s worth remembering that our tax system is a progressive one and serves a little-noticed but crucial purpose: It mitigates some of the worst consequences of income inequality. 

If any of us, as individuals, are unfortunate enough to have income drop significantly, the tax on that income will plummet as well — and a direct payment, or negative tax, might even be received from the government, thanks to the earned-income tax credit. In this way, the tax system can be viewed as a colossal insurance system, guarding against extreme income inequality. There are similar provisions in other countries.

But it’s also clear that while income inequality would be much worse without our current tax system, what we have isn’t nearly enough. It’s time — past time, actually — to tweak the system so that it can respond effectively if income inequality becomes more extreme.

"Respond effectively if"???

How about policies that would prevent a large portion of our current income inequality by either pre-collecting, for public purposes, the economic rent which rent-seekers love to capture as long as we let it hang out there, or putting a market price on privileges of various kinds -- the right to collect tolls, the right to use the airwaves, the right to string wires of various kinds along public rights-of-way, to occupy other parts of the commons and charge others to use what one puts on it.  One could call it "natural public revenue."

Bob Schiller knows some of the ways people grow wealthy in their sleep, without lifting a finger.  He knows about boom-bust cycles, and the economic agony they cause to ordinary human beings in our society.  He chronicles, he measures, he profits from the selling of those measurements.  

Probably once or twice it has passed through his mind that by some simple alterations to public policy, we could make our economy more stable, our society more just.

Perhaps he has played the game Monopoly, and maybe he knows that it was not created in the 1930s, but has its roots in The Landlord's Game, created by late 1902, to teach the ideas of Henry George, who, it is likely, was at least mentioned in his Eco 101 textbooks, though perhaps glossed over by a busy and unaware instructor.

Does he seek to reduce the income inequality by preventing it, or only collecting some piece of the privilege-payments after the fact without tweaking the system that permits them even a tiny bit?

Milton Friedman, another economic eminence, maintained that land value tax was the "least bad" tax, but never lifted his voice to promote it further than that acknowledgment (in 1968 and 2006 and perhaps in between).  He likely had other kinds of interests top of mind.

Let's not just "mitigate the worst effects."  Let's acquaint ourselves with the structures that create those worst effects, and destroy them!  Go to the root!  Be radical!  Eradicate those structures!  

It was Henry David Thoreau who said, 

 

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

 

Dare Professor Schiller strike at the root?  Dare he point to the root?  Has he sought the root?  Or is he content with hacking -- nibbling -- at branches, which doesn't help the victims a tenth as much as striking at the root?

Ironically, Professor Schiller is the "Sterling Professor of Economics" at Yale. That seat was endowed by Jack Sterling (1844-1915), co-founder of the law firm Shearman & Sterling with Thomas G. Shearman (1834-1900)*, upon his death in 1918.  Shearman knew where the root was, and devoted himself to seeking its eradication. (Explore the NYT archives for references.)  It is ironic that nearly 100 years later, the occupant of that seat (and many other things at Yale) is content with nibbling.  But maybe it isn't surprising.  Lots of alumni would not be happy to have those roots identified, and even a tenured professor could be uncomfortable being the one to call attention.   They might be the ones who endow the next set of professorships, from the gains they've made based on the unjust and unwise structures their respected -- and aspiring -- professors have failed to publicly question.

 

*See:

• "The Coming Billionaire" (1891)
• The Menace of Plutocracy (1889)
• The Distribution of Wealth (1887) - in 3 parts -- Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
• The Owners of the United States (1889)
• Natural Taxation -- see this and this

 

Let's not "insure against inequality." (Who gets to collect that insurance, and how does it compare to their losses?)  Let's find ways to create a level playing field on which all can prosper.   Sustainable and just to all.

 

And let's see about making it okay for tenured professors to share those ideas with their readers and students.  And more profitable than promoting structures that need to be "insured against."

The Charitable-Industrial Complex

Here are the final paragraphs in an interesting and perceptive NYT Op-Ed by Peter Buffett.  He comes up with an interesting phrase: "Philanthropic Colonialism"

The Charitable-Industrial Complex - NYTimes.com.

What we have is a crisis of imagination. Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same mind-set that created it. Foundation dollars should be the best “risk capital” out there. 

There are people working hard at showing examples of other ways to live in a functioning society that truly creates greater prosperity for all (and I don’t mean more people getting to have more stuff).  

Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex. But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine. 

It’s an old story; we really need a new one.

But perhaps Buffett's most important observation is this one:

"Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left." 

To which I can only insert ... "and are benefiting from."

He also points out,

As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.

But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over. Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life.

I hope Mr. Buffett will take the time to read Henry George's "Progress and Poverty."   He might be better able to identify the particular structures that create and maintain poverty and the concentrations of wealth, income and power.  And, based on that last sentence, I think Buffett would appreciate the final section of P&P.  (Bob Drake's 2006 abridgment is a fine starting place, but the unabridged is a pleasure of its own.)

Two eloquent statements about Henry George

Both come from Broadus Mitchell, the first in a 1931 piece entitled A Blast Against Economists: 

And American economists — but, be it noted, economists without the gates of institutionalism — proposed thoroughgoing remedies. Chief among these was Henry George, whose idealism was as high as his testimony was eloquent. It was sought to cry him down as a fanatic with a cure-all, but history will not permit his critics to reach to his knees.

That article begins,

"The business depression points an accusing finger at professional economists. This paper is not an apology for the economists—quite the contrary. At the same time it is proper to point out that when an epidemic disease attacks the community, (a fair analogy in the physiological world) we do not upbraid the doctors. We welcome them into our houses, place our individual sick in their hands, and listen anxiously to their guesses at the source of infection. We recognize that physicians are paid by individuals, and are not conservers of the public health in the strict sense, and so we do not hold them, even collectively, responsible for the spread of typhoid or influenza. They are to lock the individual stable door after the steed is stolen, and so long as they do this with reasonable quickness and accuracy, we do not complain.

American economists have been somewhat less occupied with the ills of the individual than have doctors as a class, and yet the share of their attention demanded by the enterpriser, the lender, the borrower, the speculator as such, absolves them in part from the indictment of neglecting the public interest. Until recently the forces in American economic life have been centrifugal, and students have been invited to become specialists. This direction of their effort was not always the case. The profession of "Political Economy" clearly implies a concern for public, collective problems, and it is only within the last two generations that American economists have departed from the historical tradition. The term "economics" in the narrow sense, and, more explicitly, the term "business economics," indicates the drift toward preoccupation with private economy. 

Elsewhere* I found this:

Broadus Mitchell, in his book, The World's Wealth — Its Use and Abuse, pays a high compliment to Henry George, the Economist who first proposed the taxation of rental value, saying that "If America were invited to contribute one name to an international economic hall of fame, the rest of the world would scarcely understand it if we did not nominate Henry George."  

*Arthur Otis: Added Revenue Without Burden; I could not find the Mitchell book online.

A third tribute to Henry George from Broadus Mitchell is online at the School of Cooperative Individualism.  It describes Mitchell as Associate Professor of Political Economy, Johns Hopkins University.

 

Gems from George: Economic Terms -- Land -- still more

I AM writing these pages on the shore of Long Island, where the Bay of New York contracts to what is called the Narrows, nearly opposite the point where our legalized robbers, the Custom-House officers, board incoming steamers to ask strangers to take their first American swear, and where, if false oaths really colored the atmosphere the air would be bluer than is the sky on this gracious day. I turn from my writing-machine to the window, and drink in, with a pleasure that never seems to pall, the glorious panorama. 

"What do you see?"  If in ordinary talk I were asked this, I should of course say, "I see land and water and sky, ships and houses, and light clouds, and the sun drawing to its setting over the low green hills of Staten Island and illuminating all." 

But if the question refer to the terms of political economy, I should say, "I see land and wealth." Land, which is the natural factor of production; and wealth, which is the natural factor so changed by the exertion of the human factor, labor, as to fit it for the satisfaction of human desires. For water and clouds, sky and sun, and the stars that will appear when the sun is sunk, are, in the terminology of political economy, as much land as is the dry surface of the earth to which we narrow the meaning of the word in ordinary talk. And the window through which I look; the flowers in the garden; the planted trees of the orchard; the cow that is browsing beneath them; the Shore Road under the window; the vessels that lie at anchor near the bank, and the little pier that juts out from it; the trans-Atlantic liner steaming through the channel; the crowded pleasure-steamers passing by; the puffing tug with its line of mud-scows; the fort and dwellings on the opposite side of the Narrows; the lighthouse that will soon begin to cast its far-gleaming eye from Sandy Hook; the big wooden elephant of Coney Island; and the graceful sweep of the Brooklyn Bridge, that may be discovered from a little higher up; all alike fall into the economic term wealth — land modified by labor so as to afford satisfaction to human desires. All in this panorama that was before man came here, and would remain were he to go, belongs to the economic category land; while all that has been produced by labor belongs to the economic category wealth, so long as it retains its quality of ministering to human desire. 

But on the hither shore, in view from the window, is a little rectangular piece of dry surface, evidently reclaimed from the line of water by filling in with rocks and earth. What is that? In ordinary speech it is land, as distinguished from water, and I should intelligibly indicate its origin by speaking of it as "made land." But in the categories of political economy there is no place for such a term as "made land." For the term land refers only and exclusively to productive powers derived wholly from nature and not at all from industry, and whatever is, and in so far as it is, derived from land by the exertion of  labor, is wealth. This bit of dry surface raised above the level of the water by filling in stones and soil, is, in the economic category, not land but wealth. It has land below it and around it, and the material of which it is composed has been drawn from land; but in itself it is, in the proper speech of political economy, wealth; just as truly as the ships I behold are not land but wealth, though they too have land below them and around them and are composed of material drawn from land.

— The Science of Political Economy 

unabridged: Book IV, Chapter 6, The Distribution of Wealth: Cause of Confusion as to Property 

 

Gems from George: Economic Terms -- Land - continued

THAT land is only a passive factor in production must be carefully kept in mind. . . . Land cannot act, it can only be acted upon. . . . Nor is this principle changed or avoided when we use the word land as expressive of the people who own land. . . . 

That the persons whom we call landowners may contribute their labor or their capital to production is of course true, but that they should contribute to production as landowners, and by virtue of that ownership, is as ridiculously impossible as that the belief of a lunatic in his ownership of the moon should be the cause of her brilliancy.

— The Science of Political Economy
unabridged: Book III, Chapter 15, The Production of Wealth: The First Factor of Production — Land 

Gems from George: On reasoning

THE power to reason correctly on general subjects is not to be learned in schools, nor does it come with special knowledge. It results from care in separating, from caution in combining, from the habit of asking ourselves the meaning of the words we use and making sure of one step before building another on it — and above all, from loyalty to truth.

— A Perplexed Philosopher (Introduction: The Reason for this Examination)

Gems from George: of Women, as of Men

I AM convinced that we make a great mistake in depriving one sex of voice in public matters, and that we could in no way so increase the attention, the intelligence and the devotion which may be brought to the solution of social problems as by enfranchising our women. Even if in a ruder state of society the intelligence of one sex suffices for the management of common interests, the vastly more intricate, more delicate and more important questions which the progress of civilization makes of public moment, require the intelligence of women as of men, and that we never can obtain until we interest them in public affairs. And I have come to believe that very much of the inattention, the flippancy, the want of conscience, which we see manifested in regard to public matters of the greatest moment, arises from the fact that we debar our women from taking their proper part in these matters. Nothing will fully interest men unless it also interests women. There are those who say that women are less intelligent than men; but who will say that they are less influential?

— Social Problems — Chapter 22: Conclusion

Gems from George: Social Reform

SOCIAL reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting; by complaints and denunciation; by the formation of parties, or the making of revolutions; but by the awakening of thought and the progress of ideas. Until there be correct thought, there cannot be right action; and when there is correct thought, right action will follow. Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.

— Social Problems — Chapter 22: Conclusion

Gems from George -- The Power of Thought: Trusting Reason

WE may be wise to distrust our knowledge; and, unless we have tested them, to distrust what we may call our reasonings; but never to distrust reason itself. . . . That the powers with which the human reason must work are limited and are subject to faults and failures, our reason itself teaches us as soon as it begins to examine what we find around us and to endeavor to look in upon our own consciousness. But human reason is the only reason that men can have, and to assume that in so far as it can see clearly it does not see truly, is in the man who does it not only to assume the possession of a superior to human reason, but it is to deny the validity of all thought and to reduce the mental world to chaos.

— The Science of Political Economy —
Book III, Chapter 5, The Production of Wealth: Of Space and Time 

Rich and Poor

We are laying the foundations in this state for a greater distinction of classes than exists in any state of the Union at the present day — as great as that which exists in England, where one man rolls in wealth and another can scarcely keep body and soul together. We are not much over twenty years old, and have in this great empire of our own hardly half a million people. Yet, there is already one man among us who is worth nearly ten million dollars, and quite a number who are worth from one to seven, while the best part of our land is divided off into estates, which in a little while, when population becomes denser, will make their owners as rich as the Duke of Argyll, or the Marquis of Bute.

There is a constantly increasing tendency to the concentration of wealth. The greater the fortune, the more rapidly it grows; and though the people who hold these great aggregations of money may be constantly changing, as they are changing in England, there will constantly remain the distinction between the very rich and the very poor. These two classes are the correlatives of each other; one man cannot become enormously rich without other men becoming proportionately poor. If not for our own sakes, at least for the sake of our children, is it not time for us to stop and ask what is the cause of this tendency of property to accumulate in a few hands? There is certainly nothing in the laws of Nature which requires the giving to one man of as much as can be had by ten thousand of his fellows.

-- Henry George, March 17, 1873, in the (San Francisco) Daily Evening Post,
quoted by Kenneth Wenzer in Henry George: Collected Journalistic Writings, Volume 1, pp. 69-70

Gems from George: the 14th century and the 19th -- progress?

FIVE centuries ago the wealth-producing power of England, man for man, was small indeed compared with what it is now. Not merely were all the great inventions and discoveries which since the Introduction of steam have revolutionized mechanical industry then undreamed of, but even agriculture was far ruder and less productive. Artificial grasses had not been discovered. The potato, the carrot, the turnip, the beet, and many other plants and vegetables which the farmer now finds most prolific, had not been introduced. The advantages which ensue from rotation of crops were unknown. Agricultural implements consisted of the spade, the sickle, the flail, the rude plow and the harrow. Cattle had not been bred to more than one-half the size they average now, and sheep did not yield half the fleece. Roads, where there were roads, were extremely bad, wheel vehicles scarce and rude, and places a hundred miles from each other were, in difficulties of transportation, practically as far apart as London and Hong Kong, or San Francisco and New York, are now. 

Gems from George: The Costs to Society of Inequality and Poverty

IF it were possible to express in figures the direct pecuniary loss which society suffers from the social mal-adjustments which condemn large classes to poverty and vice, the estimate would be appalling. England maintains over a million paupers on official charity; the city of New York alone spends over seven million dollars a year in a similar way. But what is spent from public funds, what is spent by charitable societies, and what is spent in individual charity, would, if aggregated, be but the first and smallest item in the account. The potential earnings of the labor thus going to waste, the cost of the reckless, improvident and idle habits thus generated, the pecuniary loss (to consider nothing more) suggested by the appalling statistics of mortality, and especially infant mortality, among the poorer classes; the waste indicated by the gin palaces or low groggeries which increase as poverty deepens; the damage done by the vermin of society that are bred of poverty and destitution — the thieves, prostitutes, beggars, and tramps; the cost of guarding society against them, are all items in the sum which the present unjust and unequal distribution of wealth takes from the aggregate which, with present means of production, society might enjoy. — Progress & Poverty — Book IX, Chapter 2: Effects of the Remedy, upon distribution and thence on production

see the corresponding passage in Drake's abridgment of P&P

Gems from George: Progress, and Poverty

THREE thousand years of advance, and still the moan goes up, "They have made our lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service!" Three thousand years of advance! and the piteous voices of little children are in the moan. We progress and we progress; we girdle continents with iron roads and knit cities together with the mesh of telegraph wires; each day brings some new invention; each year marks a fresh advance — the power of production increased, and the avenues of exchange cleared and broadened. Yet the complaint of "hard times" is louder and louder; everywhere are men harassed by care, and haunted by the fear of want. With swift, steady strides and prodigious leaps, the power of human hands to satisfy human wants advances and advances, is multiplied and multiplied. Yet the struggle for mere existence is more and more intense, and human labor is becoming the cheapest of commodities. Beside glutted warehouses human beings grow faint with hunger and shiver with cold; under the shadow of churches festers the vice that is born of wants.

— Speech: Moses 

Gems from George: Progress --- and Poverty

COULD a man of a century ago* — a Franklin or a Priestley — have seen, in a vision of the future, the steamship taking the place of the sailing vessel, the railroad train of the wagon, the reaping machine of the scythe, the threshing machine of the flail; could he have heard the throb of the engines that in obedience to human will, and for the satisfaction of human desire, exert a power greater than that of all the men and all the beasts of burden of the earth combined; could he have seen the forest tree transformed into finished lumber into doors, sashes, blinds, boxes or barrels, with hardly the touch of a human hand; the great workshops where boots and shoes are turned out by the case with less labor than the old-fashioned cobbler could have put on a sole; the factories where, under the eye of a girl, cotton becomes cloth faster than hundreds of stalwart weavers could have turned it out with their hand-looms; could he have seen steam hammers shaping mammoth shafts and mighty anchors, and delicate machinery making tiny watches; the diamond drill cutting through the heart of the rocks, and coal oil sparing the whale; could he have realized the enormous saving of labor resulting from improved facilities of exchange and communication — sheep killed in Australia eaten fresh in England, and the order given by the London banker in the afternoon executed in San Francisco in the morning of the same day; could he have conceived of the hundred thousand improvements which these only suggest, what would he have inferred as to the social condition of mankind? 

* Written in 1877.  Joseph Priestley was a remarkable scientist

It would not have seemed like an inference; further than the vision went, it would have seemed as though he saw, and his heart would have leaped and his nerves would have thrilled, as one who from a height beholds just ahead of the thirst-stricken caravan the living gleam of rustling woods and the glint of laughing waters. Plainly, in the sight of the imagination, he would have beheld these new forces elevating society from its very foundations, lifting the very poorest above the possibility of want, exempting the very lowest from anxiety for the material needs of life; he would have seen these slaves of the lamp of knowledge taking on themselves the traditional curse, these muscles of iron and sinews of steel making the poorest laborer's life a holiday, in which every high quality and noble impulse could have scope to grow. And out of these bounteous material conditions he would have seen arising, as necessary sequences, moral conditions realizing the golden age of which mankind have always dreamed. Youth no longer stunted and starved; age no longer harried by avarice; the child at play with the tiger; the man with the muck-rake drinking in the glory of the stars! Foul things fled, fierce things tame; discord turned to harmony! For how could there be greed where all had enough? How could the vice, the crime, the ignorance, the brutality, that spring from poverty and the fear of poverty, exist where poverty had vanished? Who should crouch where all were freemen, who oppress where all were peers?

-- Progress and Poverty, Introductory

see the same section from the abridged version:

Introducing "Gems from George"

Long before I became interested in Henry George's ideas, I had been nudged in their direction by 3 very enthusiastic grandparents.  I didn't find the time to read Progress and Poverty, despite receiving lovingly inscribed copies at several milestones in my young years.  But somewhere along the way, I acquired a modern reissue of a 1912 book entitled "Gems from George."  One of its beauties was that it could be read in short sections; another was that the headings on each page telegraphed the subject area.  I can't replicate the latter here, but want to share the gems.  I'll post one a day.   Today, I'd share Bob Drake's abridgment of P&P; its chapters are shorter, and one can digest them. The Gems, however, come from all George's books, and some of his speeches and articles.

Enjoy, and comment!  

 

Gems from George: The Influence of an Individual

LET no one imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.

— Social Problems — Chapter 22: Conclusion

Henry George's chapter in McNeill's "The Labor Movement: The Problem of Today" (1887)

I stumbled across an excerpt from this in The American Cooperator, and when I couldn't find the material in any of George's other books, I went looking for the source, an 1887 book with chapters by 16 authors.  

Enjoy!  (It prints out as about 9 pages, if you're so inclined)

http://archive.org/stream/labormovementpro00mcneiala/labormovementpro00mcneiala_djvu.txt

THE LABOR MOVEMENT;
THE PROBLEM OF TODAY.

THE HISTORY, PURPOSE AND
POSSIBILITIES OF LABOR ORGANIZATIONS
IN EUROPE AND AMERICA; GUILDS, TRADES-
UNIONS, AND KNIGHTS OF LABOR; WAGES AND PROFITS;
HOURS OF LABOR; FUNCTIONS OF CAPITAL; CHINESE LABOR:
COMPETITION; ARBITRATION; PROFIT-SHARING AND
CO-OPERATION; PRINCIPLES OF THE KNIGHTS OF
LABOR; MORAL AND EDUCATIONAL AS-
PECTS OF THE LABOR QUESTION.

EDITED BY GEORGE E. McNEILL,
First Deputy of Mass. Bureau of Statistics of Labor; Sec.-Treas. of D. A. 30, Knights of Labor.

ASSOCIATE AUTHORS: TERENCE V. POWDERLY, G. M. W., K. of L.; DR. EDMUND J. JAMES, University of Pennsylvania; HON. JOHN J. O'NEILL, of Missouri; HON. J. M. FARQUHAR, of New York; HON. ROBERT HOWARD, of Massachusetts; HENRY GEORGE, of New York; ADOLPH STRASSER, Pres. Cigar Makers' Union; JOHN JARRETT, of Pennsylvania; REV. R. HEBER NEWTON, of New York; F K. FOSTER, of Massachusetts; P. M. ARTHUR, Chief Engineer Locomotive Brotherhood; W. W. STONE and W. W. MORROW, of California; FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS, "Springfield Union"; JOHN McBRIDE, Secretary Coal Miners' Union; D.J.O'DONOGHUE, of Toronto, Canada; P. J. McGUIRE, Secretary Carpenters' Brotherhood, Ohio.

NEW YORK: THE M. W. HAZEN CO.
1887.

Copyright 1886, by
A M. BRIDGMAN & CO.

CHAPTER XXIII.  THE LAND QUESTION.

MAGNITUDE OF THE QUESTION — FIRST PRINCIPLES — THE LAND-OWNER THE ABSOLUTE MASTER OF MEN WHO MUST LIVE ON HIS LAND — THE ORDER OF NATURE INVERTED — EQUAL RIGHTS TO THE USE OF THE EARTH — SELFISHNESS, THE EVIL GENIUS OF MAN — THE IRISH PEOPLE FORCED TO BEG PERMISSION TO TILL THE SOIL — APPROPRIATION OF THE CHURCH-LANDS — LAND IN ITSELF HAS NO VALUE — THE GREAT CAUSE OF THE UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH — NO HOPE FOR THE LABORER, SO LONG AS PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND EXISTS — NOTHING MYSTERIOUS ABOUT THE LABOR QUESTION — THE DIFFICULTY IN FINDING EMPLOYMENT — NATURE OFFERS FREELY TO LABOR — NATURAL MEANS OF EMPLOYMENT MONOPOLIZED — SPECULATION IN THE BOUNTIES OF NATURE.

BENEATH all the great social questions of our time lies one of primary and universal importance, the question of the rights of men to the use of the earth.

The magnitude of the pecuniary interests involved, the fact that the influential classes in all communities where private property in land exists are interested in its maintenance, lead to a disposition to ignore or belittle the land question: but it is impossible to give any satisfactory explanation of the most important social phenomena without reference to it; and the growing unrest of the masses of all civilized countries, under conditions which they feel to be galling and unjust, must at length lead them, as the only way of securing the rights of labor, to turn to the land question.

To see that the land question does involve the problem of the equitable distribution of wealth; that it lies at the root of all the vexed social questions of our time, and is, indeed, but another name for the great labor question in all its phases, it is only needful to revert to first principles, and to consider the relations between men and the planet they inhabit.

We find ourselves on the surface of a sphere, circling through immeasurable space. Beneath our feet, the diameter of the planet extends for eight thousand miles; above our heads night reveals countless points of light, which science tells us are suns, that blaze billions of miles away. In this inconceivably vast universe, we are confined to the surface of our sphere, as the mariner in mid-ocean is confined to the deck of his ship. We are limited to that line where the exterior of the planet meets the atmospheric envelope that surrounds it. We may look beyond, but cannot pass. We are not denizens of one element, like the fish; but while our bodies must be upheld by one element, they must be laved in another. We live on the earth, and in the air. In the search for minerals men are able to descend for a few thousand feet into the earth's crust, provided communication with the surface be kept open, and air thus supplied; and in balloons men have ascended to like distances above the surface; but on a globe of thirty-five feet diameter, this range would be represented by the thickness of a sheet of paper. And though it is thus possible for man to ascend for a few thousand feet above the surface, or to descend for a few thousand feet below it, it is only on the surface of the earth that he can habitually live and supply his wants; nor can he do this on all parts of the surface of the globe, but only on that smaller part, which we call land, as distinguished from the water, while considerable parts even of the land are uninhabitable by him.

By constructing vessels of materials obtained from land, and provisioning them with the produce of land, it is true that man is able to traverse the fluid-surface of the globe; yet he is none the less dependent upon land. If the land of the globe were again to be submerged, human life could not long be maintained on the best-appointed ships.

Man, in short, is a land-animal. Physically considered, he is as much a product of land as is the tree. His body, composed of materials drawn from land, can only be maintained by nutriment furnished by land; and all the processes by which he secures food, clothing and shelter consist but in the working up of land or the products of land. Labor is possible only on condition of access to land, and all human production is but the union of land and labor, the transportation or transformation of previously existing matter into places or forms suited to the satisfaction of man's needs.

Land, being thus indispensable to man, the most important of social adjustments is that which fixes the relations between men with regard to that element. Where all are accorded equal rights to the use of the earth, no one needs ask another to give him employment, and no one can stand in fear of being deprived of the opportunity to make, a living. In such a community, there could be no "labor question." There could be neither degrading poverty nor demoralizing wealth. And the personal independence arising from such a condition of equality, in respect to the ability to get a living, must give character to all social and political institutions.

On the other hand, inequality of privilege in the use of the earth must beget inequality of wealth and power, must divide men into those who can command and those who are forced to serve. The rewards which nature yields to labor no longer go to the laborers in proportion to industry and skill; but a privileged class are enabled to live without labor by compelling a disinherited class to give up some part of their earnings for permission to live and work. Thus the order of nature is inverted, those who do no work become rich, and "workingman" becomes synonymous, with "poor man." Material progress tends to monstrous wealth on one side, and abject poverty on the other; and society is differentiated into masters and servants, rulers and ruled.

If one man were permitted to claim the land of the world as his individual property, he would be the absolute master of all humanity. All the rest of mankind could live only by his permission, and under such conditions as he chose to prescribe. So, if one man be permitted to treat as his own the land of any country, he becomes the absolute sovereign of its people. Or, if the land of a country be made the property of a class, a ruling aristocracy is created, who soon begin to regard themselves, and to be regarded, as of nobler blood and superior rights. That "God will think twice before he damns people of quality," is the natural feeling of those who are taught to believe that the land on which all must live is legitimately their private property.

Sprawl is Not a New Problem

Taxing Unoccupied and Unimproved Lands

St. Paul Pioneer Press

reprinted in The American Cooperator, circa 1904

The recent migration of thousands of American farmers to the cold and comparatively uninviting regions of western Canada has not been thru any lack of opportunity, in the more attractive regions of Minnesota and neighboring states, created by natural causes. Whatever lack of opportunity or ''room" exists, anywhere south of the boundary line, is the result of conditions wholly artificial in their origin. Chief among these is the tying up of large bodies of the best lands in the hands of speculators who are holding them for a rise. Take a trip on almost any railroad leading out of St. Paul and all along its line it will be found that the unimproved land exceeds in acreage the amount reduced to cultivation. In great numbers of instances there has been no thought of improving it by its present owners. They have bought it on speculation, and when they sell, it is an even chance that the transfer will be to some other speculator. Drive the speculator out of the field and the vacant stretches between villages will soon be occupied by farms. At present, even in the wonderfully fertile and productive region of the Red River of the North, a vast acreage is unoccupied — held on speculation.

If the Western farmers and legislators had formed a truer appreciation of the fundamental teachings of Henry George in that remarkable book, "Progress and Poverty," they would long ago have found a remedy for conditions which prevent the settlement of lands in their own neighborhoods, condemn the larger part of the fertile area in hundreds of counties to unproductive idleness, curtail the revenues of the stale, and double the burdens of the farmers who are really building up the country. That remedy is the taxation of unproductive at the same rate as productive land; the release from taxation of the farmer's house and barn and crops and cattle, and the laying of the entire tax on the land — including in the term "land" all franchises and monopolistic uses of natural opportunities, like water power, etc. If the land speculator had to pay the same tax, on every uncultivated acre, that the farmer pays on the cultivated — the amount being increased by the abolition of the personal property tax — he would soon be compelled to "sell out " at such figures as would remove all temptation for the homeseeker to travel to Canada or elsewhere in search of cheap land. That the clear, shining virtue of Mr George's proposition should have been obscured by its forced and unnecessary connection with the questions of individual land owning and "free trade" is one of the misfortunes of the century. Divested of this connection, it affords the most direct and equitable solution yet suggested for the multiform problems involved in the right adjustment of taxation.

 

Baltimore Ground Rents -- some history and some principles

Just Taxation

Among no class of reformers do we find more clear thinking or a sounder political economy than among the "single-taxers." Following the writings of the late Henry George there is a considerable and important literature upon this subject. Land monopoly and speculation should be stopped. Labor should not be taxed. The resources of nature should be made to minister equitably to the whole people. Now the weakest pay the most tax. It should be the strongest and they whom the government most benefits. 

A Baltimore Instance

The Public

A single tax man of Baltimore, Mr John Salmon, expresses no little surprise that Senator Hanna's candidate for governor of Ohio supposes that the single tax has been a disastrous failure wherever tried. Of Mr Herrick and his notion Mr Salmon writes: This stamps him as being a twisted thinker and a loose observer. The single tax is in operation all over the United States, flowing into the pockets of private individuals, which is what single taxers object to. Here in Baltimore more than in any other section of the country, it is strongly apparent. We have the ground rent system in operation, 90 percent of the real estate being held on leaseholds. The custom is an old English one grafted on the Maryland colonies by Lord Baltimore and his English compeers, and it has grown and flourished like a green bay tree. When one buys a home here it is in nine cases out of ten subject to a ground rent. These ground rents are dealt in as a form of investment the same as a mortgage or any other form of investment; but the point to observe is that they are a single tax, pure and simple, the price paid for the use of the ground per se and for ground only.

Our last assessment separated the value of the land from the value of improvements, and it is done every day in our community. Baltimore has more houses per capita than any city in the country, due to the ground rent system; and a house costing $1,200 to build is very often sold for $800 or $900 in order to create a ground rent ranging from three dollars a front foot to $20 and $40 a front foot. To explain more fully: Bonus buildings are run up on plats of ground split up into lots of 15x90, and a ground rent say of $6 per front foot is put on the lot, making $90 a year ground rent, which the buyer agrees to pay, and in his ground rent is a clause that he will also pay all taxes. This $90 is essentially a single tax. The agreement to pay it is exactly the same kind of a contract that is in vogue in Fairhope, Ala. With this extremely important exception, that whereas we in Baltimore bind ourselves to pay all the taxes, in Fairhope the company or lessor, agrees to pay all taxes. Talk of its being a disastrous failure! Not on your life. Ground rents are as scarce as hen's teeth, and can only be bought on a three percent basis. They command as good a price as government bonds, and it is estimated that $14,000,000 at least is raised in Baltimore alone from this source —  nearly twice as much as the city and state taxes amount to. And what is this tax of $14,000,000 paid for? Why, merely for the privilege of living in the city of Baltimore. That's all the payers get for it. And the only kick we've got coming is that the private individuals get that money instead of the city and state.

-- found in "The American Cooperator" (1903); "The Public" was a weekly newspaper, out of Chicago, edited by Louis F. Post, who went on to serve in Woodrow Wilson's administration.

"Stir Up" Sunday

I always thought of "Stir-Up Sunday" as the reminder that it was time to bake fruitcake, but will now probably think of this passage:

The Church Reformer (London) says: "On Sunday next before Advent the priest before every altar in England prayed for a divine excitement - 'Stir up, O Lord, we beseech Thee, the wills of thy faithful people.' Men are beginning to see what is at the bottom of our misery. Henry George's enormous vote in New York has compelled attention to the fact that whether or no relief works and eight-hour bills and free dinners are to come, nothing can do any good permanently while land, the mother, is divorced from labor, the father of all wealth. If then God's servants who did the church's work on that Sunday in Trafalgar Square, in creating a divine excitement, in asking the question how the hungry are to be fed, and in protesting against the oppression of the poorest laborer, are to continue their work to completion, they must go boldly for nothing less than the full restoration to the people of the whole of the value they give to the land; they may nationalize machinery, capital, what they like, but until they have nationalized the land the poverty of the workers will remain."

-- from The Standard, January 8, 1887

Want Less Inequality? Tax It

Want Less Inequality? Tax It.

Pigou, a key bridge figure in the history of his field, was one of the earliest classical economists to notice that markets do not always produce the best possible social outcomes. The pollution generated by a factory imposes costs on those who live downstream or in the path of its airborne emissions. The risks assumed by banks leading up to the recent financial crisis imposed costs on just about everybody. Market transactions often generate what economists call “externalities” — side effects, sometimes positive but often negative, that affect people who do not participate in the transaction. 

Pigou, having recognized the problem, was the first to propose a solution. Society should tax the negative externalities and subsidize the positive ones. This simple notion — if you want less of something, tax it — is why his ideas periodically bubble up in the service of combating a recognizable cost to society, like pollution. We think that his approach offers an answer to another great problem of our time: inequality.    

Does the extreme degree of inequality in America today really create, as Pigou would put it, negative externalities? Does the fact that hedge-fund manager Mr. Jones rakes in 100 or 1,000 times what office manager Mrs. Smith earns impose costs on everybody else? Plenty of Americans think not. Defenders of our skewed income distribution point out that a free-enterprise system requires some inequality. Unequal rewards give people an incentive to work hard and acquire new skills. They encourage inventors to invent, entrepreneurs to start companies, investors to take risks. It’s fine in this view that some people get astronomically rich. As Mitt Romney likes to say, “I’m not going to apologize for being successful.”  

On the other side, many of us have a gut feeling that inequality has gone too far. Our times are reminiscent of the Gilded Age’s worst excesses. Hence the popularity of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s slogan, “We are the 99 percent.”

LVTfan here: Wouldn't it be better to prevent the inequality by such measures as treating the natural creation as our common treasure, instead of permitting its privatization and then taxing back what is taken?   Treating the natural creation, and that which the community creates by its presence and its investment in public goods -- schools, roads, libraries, etc. -- as our COMMON treasure would create equal opportunity for all, a much better idea than permitting some to capture it and then taxing some of their booty back after the fact.   When we let some reap what others sow, and then take back a share after the fact, we're still permitting them to reap which deprives the sowers of that right.  Whether it be nature doing the sowing, or the community as a whole, no good can come of permitting the privatization of that.  Henry George, in "Progress and Poverty" and "Social Problems" showed the logical, efficient, just way to do better.

To be worthy, not respectable

Came across this in a book of editorials from the Hearst newspapers, circa 1914.  It is entitled "William Henry Channing's Symphony."  

 

WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING'S SYMPHONY

The thought—

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common — this is my symphony.

William Henry Channing.

To live content with small means.

This means to realize to the full the possibilities of life. Contentment means absence of worry. It is only when free from worry that the brain can act normally, up to its highest standard. The man content with small means does his best work, devotes his energies to that which is worth while, and not to acquiring that which has no value.

To seek elegance rather than luxury.

The difference between elegance and luxury is the difference between the thin, graceful deer, browsing on the scanty but sufficient forest pasture, and the fat swine revelling in plentiful garbage.

Refinement rather than fashion.

The difference between refinement and fashion is the difference between brains and clothing, the difference between an Emerson or a Huxley and a Beau Brummel or other worthless but elaborately decked carcass.

To be worthy, not respectable.

In other words, to be like Henry George, and not like the owner of a trust.

Wealthy, not rich.

The man who has a good wife and good children, enough to take care of them, but not enough to spoil them, is wealthy. He is happier than the man who is rich enough to be worried, rich enough to make it certain that his children will be ruined by extravagance, and perhaps live to be ashamed of him.

To listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart.

This means to enjoy the noblest gifts that God has given to man. He is happy who takes more pleasure in a beautiful sunset than in the sight of a flunky with powdered hair, artificial calves and lofty manners, handing him something indigestible on a plate of gold.

To study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently.

To exercise in this way the brain that is given to us is to lead the life of a man, a life of self-control, a life that is worth while, that leads to something and helps forward the improvement of the race.

In the words which we have quoted at the top of this column William Henry Channing has given a recipe for wise living.

---------

Who was Channing?

 

Individual Account Retirement Plans: An Analysis of the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances | EBRI

Note: this has some statistics you might want to know, but it is primarily a post on public policy.

Individual Account Retirement Plans: An Analysis of the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances | EBRI.

... many Americans are facing the likelihood of not having sufficient income in retirement unless they increase their savings, work longer, or significantly decrease their expenditures in retirement if they hope to make ends meet.

The Employee Benefits Research Institute recently published an analysis of 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances data.  It demonstrates how few people have the traditional defined-benefit retirement plans, and the account balances people of various demographics have in their individually-directed retirement accounts.

Here are some statistics worth considering as we think about the effects of a system which permits a few of us to capture a large share of the nation's net worth and a large share of its income, and to unduly influence our elections with advertising which works to conceal and reinforce the structures of that system:

• 38% of all families -- of all ages -- had a family member with a retirement plan. [Figure 2]
  • of those 38%, 18% had only a defined benefit plan; 61% had only a defined contribution plan; 21% had both.  82% had a 401(k) type plan, and of that 82%, 22% also had a defined benefit plan
  • Among those families whose head was 55-64, 43% had a member with a retirement plan; among those 45-54, 53% did.
  • Interestingly, the top 75% of the net worth spectrum all had rates in the 41% to 46% range; in the bottom 25%, only 21%.
• Among families whose head was under 65 and working, 52% had a member participating in a retirement plan [Figure 3].  
  • Among households with income abov e $100,000, 76% had retirement plans; in the $50,000 to $100,000 income range, 64%; in the lower income groups, the rate ranged from 44% down to 9% 
  • In the 55-64 age group, 59% had a retirement plan; in the 45-54 group, 61%. 
  • Within this working-age universe, similar trends held: the top 50% had roughly 61-67% availability of employment-related retirement plans; for the next 25%, only 53%; for the bottom 25% of working families, only 29%.   
• IRAs and Keogh plans: 28% had one or both; median value, $40,000 (up from $34,574 in 2007). Among those 55-64, 41% had one or both; median value $60,000 (down from $68,101); among those 45-54, 29% had one or both; median value $40,000, up from $37,717. [Figure 5]
  • Even among those in the top 10% of the net worth spectrum, only 77% had IRA or Keogh accounts, median value $200,,000, up from $142,487 in 2007; in the next 15% of the net worth spectrum, median value was $60,000.  
• Of all families, 64% had some sort of retirement account from a current or previous employer (down from 66% in 2007) 
• Retirement assets in Defined Contribution plans and IRAs typically [that is, at the median] represent 61% to 66% of total financial assets, which is to say that most have less in mutual funds, stocks, checking and other accounts than they do in their retirement accounts. [Figure 8]
• Only in the top 10% do retirement assets represent less than half of financial assets.
• As is typical of median/average ratios, average holdings are considerably higher -- that is, the holdings of the top few are huge, and most of us are below average.  The average balance is $173,232; in the top 10% of the net worth spectrum, average balances are $519,034.  For the next 15% of us, the average balance is 147,061 -- well below the average of all of us! [Figure 9]  Recall from Figure 6 that 64% of us have such a plan; the other 36% have no balance at all (and likely a significant percentage have very small account balances).
• For those in the 65-74 age group, the average balance is $324,199; for those in the 55-64 group, the average balance is $297,903.
• For those in the top 10%, average account balance is $519,034.  One might reasonably guess that the top 5% have the lion's share of this.
• It might be worth noting that a 70 year old must withdraw at least 1/27 of his IRA per year.  Based on that 65-74 age group average balance, that's $12,000 per year.  (Another rule of thumb says that if one only withdraws 3% per year, one's account should last forever. That would be $9,725 per year, for that "average" -- not median -- family in the 65-74 age group. 

 Enough said.  Time to circle back to the study's conclusion:

... many Americans are facing the likelihood of not having sufficient income in retirement unless they increase their savings, work longer, or significantly decrease their expenditures in retirement if they hope to make ends meet.

What public policy reforms might one suggest based on these data points?

• Find a way to raise wages for ordinary workers
• Find a way to lower the cost of living for ordinary workers and retirees
• Find a way to reduce the sum of the taxes we pay and the costs of housing without reducing the public goods which those taxes provide (unless it is by reducing the demand for social safety net 

If you have other suggestions, I'd like to hear them.

But the reason for this blog is that I believe I have found the public policy reform which would accomplish these goals, in collecting the lion's share of the annual rental value of our land, and in collecting for the commons certain other kinds of natural public revenue which our current system permits to accrue to individuals and corporations.  I didn't invent it.  Henry George is the clearest exponent of it, but not the first or last.  Is it perfect?  No, but it is vastly superior to what we've got now, and I believe it is consistent with the ideals to which Americans pay the most honor.

Harpers: Monopoly is Theft

Monopoly Is Theft | Harper's Magazine.

The game’s true origins, however, go unmentioned in the official literature. Three decades before Darrow’s patent, in 1903, a Maryland actress named Lizzie Magie created a proto-Monopoly as a tool for teaching the philosophy of Henry George, a nineteenth-century writer who had popularized the notion that no single person could claim to “own” land. In his book Progress and Poverty (1879), George called private land ownership an “erroneous and destructive principle” and argued that land should be held in common, with members of society acting collectively as “the general landlord.” 

Magie called her invention The Landlord’s Game, and when it was released in 1906 it looked remarkably similar to what we know today as Monopoly. It featured a continuous track along each side of a square board; the track was divided into blocks, each marked with the name of a property, its purchase price, and its rental value. The game was played with dice and scrip cash, and players moved pawns around the track. It had railroads and public utilities — the Soakum Lighting System, the Slambang Trolley — and a “luxury tax” of $75. It also had Chance cards with quotes attributed to Thomas Jefferson (“The earth belongs in usufruct to the living”), John Ruskin (“It begins to be asked on many sides how the possessors of the land became possessed of it”), and Andrew Carnegie (“The greatest astonishment of my life was the discovery that the man who does the work is not the man who gets rich”). The game’s most expensive properties to buy, and those most remunerative to own, were New York City’s Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and Wall Street. In place of Monopoly’s “Go!” was a box marked “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.” The Landlord Game’s chief entertainment was the same as in Monopoly: competitors were to be saddled with debt and ultimately reduced to financial ruin, and only one person, the supermonopolist, would stand tall in the end. The players could, however, vote to do something not officially allowed in Monopoly: cooperate. Under this alternative rule set, they would pay land rent not to a property’s title holder but into a common pot—the rent effectively socialized so that, as Magie later wrote, “Prosperity is achieved.”

Readers of this blog know that Lizzie Magie had created her game and started to promote it by the Fall of 1902.

“Monopoly players around the kitchen table”—which is to say, most people—“think the game is all about accumulation,” he said. “You know, making a lot of money. But the real object is to bankrupt your opponents as quickly as possible. To have just enough so that everybody else has nothing.” In this view, Monopoly is not about unleashing creativity and innovation among many competing parties, nor is it about opening markets and expanding trade or creating wealth through hard work and enlightened self-interest, the virtues Adam Smith thought of as the invisible hands that would produce a dynamic and prosperous society. It’s about shutting down the marketplace. All the players have to do is sit on their land and wait for the suckers to roll the dice.

Smith described such monopolist rent-seekers, who in his day were typified by the landed gentry of England, as the great parasites in the capitalist order. They avoided productive labor, innovated nothing, created nothing—the land was already there—and made a great deal of money while bleeding those who had to pay rent. The initial phase of competition in Monopoly, the free-trade phase that happens to be the most exciting part of the game to watch, is really about ending free trade and nixing competition in order to replace it with rent-seeking.

This is a good article, and I commend it in its entirety to your attention.  It also provides links to Tom Forsythe's new site, http://landlordsgame.info/, whose graphics show many early versions of the Landlord's Game, which I look forward to exploring.  I learned for the first time that the game layout that I had thought was an early one, with a lake in the center, was actually a 1939 version, based on Lizzie Magie's design but published by Parker Brothers.  (I ought to have figured that out sooner, since the board includes her married name!)  

It is interesting that one of the earlier versions -- 1909 -- was based on Altoona's streets.  In the past year, Altoona has shifted to taxing land and not taxing buildings to fund its municipal spending.  (This was a gradual shift, accomplished over a number of years; they must have liked the effect!)

Chrystia Freeland: Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

Chrystia Freeland: Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.

Henry George is the most famous American popular economist you've never heard of, a 19th century cross between Michael Lewis, Howard Dean and Ron Paul. Progress and Poverty, George's most important book, sold three million copies and was translated into German, French, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Hebrew and Mandarin. During his lifetime, George was probably the third best-known American, eclipsed only by Thomas Edison and Mark Twain. He was admired by the foreign luminaries of the age, too -- Leo Tolstoy, Sun-Yat Sen and Albert Einstein, who wrote that "men like Henry George are unfortunately rare. One cannot image a more beautiful combination of intellectual keenness, artistic form and fervent love of justice." George Bernard Shaw described his own thinking about the political economy as a continuation of the ideas of George, whom he had once heard deliver a speech.

Later, she writes,

What George found most mysterious about the economic consequences of the industrial revolution was that its failure to deliver economic prosperity was not uniform -- instead it had created a winner-take-all society: "Some get an infinitely better and easier living, but others find it hard to get a living at all. The 'tramp' comes with the locomotives, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the marks of 'material progress' as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses and magnificent churches. Upon streets lighted with gas and patrolled by uniformed policeman, beggars wait for the passer-by, and in the shadow of college, and library, and museum, are gathering the more hideous Huns and fiercer Vandals of whom Macaulay prophesied."

George's diagnosis was beguilingly simple -- the fruits of innovation weren't widely shared because they were going to the landlords. This was a very American indictment of industrial capitalism: at a time when Marx was responding to Europe's version of progress and poverty with a wholesale denunciation of private property, George was an enthusiastic supporter of industry, free trade and a limited role for government. His culprits were the rentier rich, the landowners who profited hugely from industrialization and urbanization, but did not contribute to it.

George had such tremendous popular appeal because he addressed the obvious inequity of 19th century American capitalism without disavowing capitalism itself. George wasn't trying to build a communist utopia. His campaign promise was to rescue America from the clutches of the robber barons and to return it to "the democracy of Thomas Jefferson." That ideal -- as much Tea Party as Occupy Wall Street -- won support not only among working class voters and their leaders, like Samuel Gompers, but also resonated with many small businessmen. Robert Ingersoll, a Republican orator, attorney and intellectual, was a George supporter. He urged his fellow Republicans to back his man and thereby "show that their sympathies are not given to bankers, corporations and millionaires."

 

 

I commend the entire post, adapted from Freeland's new book, Plutocrats.  It ends with these paragraphs:

"America today urgently needs a 21st century Henry George -- a thinker who embraces the wealth-creating power of capitalism, but squarely faces the inequity of its current manifestation. That kind of thinking is missing on the right, which is still relying on Reagan-era trickle-down economics and hopes complaints about income inequality can be silenced with accusations of class war. But the left isn't doing much better either, preferring nostalgia for the high-wage, medium-skill manufacturing jobs of the post-war era and China-bashing to a serious and original effort to figure out how to make 21st century capitalism work for the middle class.

Globalization and the technology revolution aren't going away -- and thank goodness for that. Industrialization didn't go away either. But between 1886, when George lost the mayoral race, and the presidency of FDR, American progressives invented, fought for and implemented a broad range of new social and political institutions to make capitalism serve the whole of society -- ranging from trust-busting, to the income tax, to the welfare state.

We are living in an era of comparably tumultuous economic change. The great challenge of our time is to devise the new social and political institutions we need to make the new economy work for everyone. So far, that is a historic task neither party is taking on with enough energy, honesty or originality."

Those looking for a starting point might look for Walt Rybeck's book, Re-Solving the Economic Puzzle.

Along the same lines, you might find interesting an earlier post here, an article by Thomas Shearman entitled "Henry George's Mistakes."  (He was a co-founder of Shearman & Sterling, and went on to write some excellent articles on plutocracy in The Standard, October, 1887.)

On Wages, from an 1887 weekly ... and relevant in 2012 America

"The wages problem resolves itself into a very simple question, viz.: Which is the better for a community — to have 10,000,000 men earning $2.50 a day, with hours that enable them to read and rest and pass a fair proportion of their time with their families, and at the same time have no millionaires, or to have those 10,000,000 men working fifteen hours a day at $1.50, and have a few score millionaires?"

This was a bit of end-of-column filler from the January 29, 1887, issue of Henry George's weekly newspaper, The Standard, and is attributed to The San Francisco Reporter. 

The Standard was devoted to issues like this, and makes excellent reading in this decade and century.

It might be worth noting that in those days when one spoke of a millionaire, the reference was to someone whose assets totalled over $1 million.  Today, it is commonly used to refer to someone whose annual income is over $1 million.  But you'll notice what workmen's wages were in 1887 -- $1.50 a day is $468 per year*, and likely didn't leave much, if anything, for savings. [6 days a week.]

So which IS better for the community?  The families making $1.50 or $2.50 a day are spending nearly every penny of that, just in order to get by.  The millionaires can only spend so much on the necessities of daily life, plus some generous amount on luxuries.  The rest they will invest, one way or another, and the wise ones, in our current structure, will "invest" in land -- particularly choice urban sites -- and natural resources, since we as a society are so generous about letting the owners of these assets keep most of what those assets earn, despite them having nothing to do with having created those assets, and being in no position to create more in response to demand, which will naturally increase with population!! 

THAT is the problem with our current "generosity."

The spending of the 10 million on the necessities of daily life creates jobs for a lot of other people.  (The portion that goes to their landlords in payment for the right to occupy bits of urban -- or other -- land, DOESN'T create any jobs; it simply enriches the landlord.  I don't begrudge the landlord the portion that relates to the building, or to services he provides, such as, say, a doorman in the city.)

 

Henry George (b. Philadelphia, 9/2/1839; d. NYC, 10/29/1897) - and Tolstoy's "The Great Iniquity" (1905)

 

 

 

 

The drawing is by J. W. Bengough, the great Canadian writer and cartoonist.  It appeared in The Public, Louis F. Post's weekly newspaper, on September 30, 1905.  (Tolstoy died about 6 years later.)

You can read more about Tolstoy's advocacy of George's ideas at http://www.wealthandwant.com/auth/Tolstoy.htm. 

On August 1, 1905, Tolstoy's letter, "The Great Iniquity" was published in the London Times.  The text follows.  It quotes extensively from Henry George's speech, The Crime of Poverty, which is one of the two speeches that initially "grabbed" me to look more closely at George's ideas.

Henry George, on money in elections (The Standard, 10/8/1887)

I'm reading through parts of The Standard, Henry George's weekly newspaper from 125 years ago.  In the issue I finished the other day, there was a reference to there being 154 contributors to that issue (and 100,000 readers, a figure one might find a bit difficult to believe -- this was in the first year of publication, though pass-along readership, particularly in the numerous local "land and labor" and "single tax" clubs, and library copies might make that credible).  Though each issue at this time runs 8 printed pages, when I do "print preview" there are generally 90 to 110 pages of text per issue.

The piece below is signed by George, and while it is speaking to the anarchist trial in Chicago, it contains a lot that is extremely relevant in this election year 125 years later.  It comes from page 1 of the October 8, 1887 issue.

I have seen no statement of the ground on which the authorities of Union Hill, New Jersey, prohibited the meeting of sympathy for the Chicago anarchists, which was to have been held there on Sunday afternoon, and was prevented by the police with a free use of their clubs. But whatever may have been the legal excuse, the action was wrong in principle and mistaken in policy. We cannot too carefully guard the right of free speech, and the surest way to prevent the spread of doctrines wrong in themselves is to allow them to be freely ventilated, drawing the line only when overt acts of violence are committed or incited to.

This, is illustrated by the effect which the violent language used by the sympathizers of the Chicago anarchists has been producing, and which is likely to be retarded by such occurrences as that at Union Hill. The withdrawal from the Central labor union on Sunday week of the representatives of the strongest and most influential of its component bodies rather than permit themselves to be trapped into action which would have been used as an expression of the sympathy of the workingmen of New York with the methods and deeds of the Chicago anarchists is indicative of the marked change, of opinion, which has been produced by the ravings of the socialists of the progressive labor party.

Among the great body of workingmen there has never been any sympathy with the bomb throwers of Chicago or any justification of anarchistic methods, but there was a widespread impression that the men condemned at Chicago had, in their excited state of public opinion, failed to get a fair trial: and this feeling led some of the representative men of the New-York trades unions, upon the first receipt of the news that the anarchists had been refused a new trial, to consent to put their names to a circular calling for a protest against the execution of the sentence. But the violent utterances of the “progressive socialists," one of whom, at the meeting of the Central labor union last Sunday week, called on God to bless the hand that threw the bomb at Chicago, and their attempt to put the Chicago anarchists in the light of leaders of the industrial movement who were being persecuted to the death for legitimate and laudable efforts in the cause of labor, have produced a strong reaction, well, indeed, may the personal friends of the men who in Chicago are under sentence of death declare that their blatant “sympathizers” are their worst enemies.

---------

The truth is that there is no ground for asking executive clemency in behalf of the Chicago anarchists as a matter of right. An unlawful and murderous deed was committed in Chicago, the penalty of which by the laws of the state of Illinois is death. Seven men were tried on the charge of being accessory to the crime, and after a long trial were convicted. The case was appealed to the supreme court of the state of Illinois, and that body, composed of seven judges, removed, both in time and place, from the excitement which may have been supposed to have affected public opinion in Chicago during the first trial, have, after an elaborate examination of the evidence and the law, unanimously confirmed the sentence.

That seven judges of the highest court of Illinois, men accustomed to weigh evidence and to pass upon judicial rulings, should, after a full examination of the testimony and the record, and with the responsibility of life and death resting upon them, unanimously sustain the verdict and the sentence, is inconsistent with the idea that the Chicago anarchists were condemned on insufficient evidence. And the elaborate review of the testimony which is given in the decision of the supreme court dissipates the impression that these men were only connected with the bomb throwing by general and vague incitements to and preparations for acts of this kind. Even discarding the testimony (contradicted by other testimony) that Spies handed a bomb to the man who is supposed to have thrown it, there was enough evidence left to connect the seven men with a specific conspiracy to prepare dynamite bombs and to use them against the police on the evening on which the bomb was thrown. It was not indeed proved that any of the seven men threw the bomb, nor even was it proved who did throw the bomb, but it was proved beyond any reasonable doubt that these men were engaged in a conspiracy, as a result of which the bomb was thrown, and were therefore under the laws of Illinois as guilty as though they themselves had done the act. It may be said that these men had worked themselves up to the belief that it is only by acts of violence and bloodshed that social reform can be attained, but that does not affect the justice of their sentence. No matter how honest or how intense may have been their conviction on this point, organized society is none the less justified in protecting itself against such acts.

---------

There may be countries in which the suppression by an absolute despotism of all freedom of speech and action justifies the use of force, if the use of force ever can be justified. But even in such countries complaint cannot be made when the sword is unsheathed against those who draw the sword. In this country, however, where a freedom of speech which extends almost to license is seldom interfered with, and where all political power rests upon the will of the people, those who counsel to force or to the use of force in the name of political or social reform are enemies of society, and especially are they enemies of the working masses. What in this country holds the masses down and permits the social injustice of which they are becoming so bitterly conscious, is not any superimposed tyranny, but their own ignorance. The workingmen of the United States have in their own hands the power to remedy political abuses and to change social conditions by rewriting the laws as they will. For the intelligent use of this power thought must be aroused and reason invoked. But the effect of force, on the contrary, is always to awaken prejudice and to kindle passion.

There is legitimate ground on which executive clemency may be asked for the Chicago anarchists — that, being imbued with ideas which germinate in countries where the legitimate freedom of speech and action is sternly repressed, they were not fully conscious of the moral criminality of their action, and that the main purpose of their punishment — the prevention of such crimes in future — will be as well served, if not even better served, by a commutation of the sentence of death into a sentence of imprisonment.

This last is a very strong ground for the interposition of executive clemency; and it is sincerely to be hoped that the governor of Illinois will see its force.  A tragical death always tends to condone mistakes and crimes, and a certain amount of sympathy will undoubtedly attach to the Chicago anarchists if they are hanged, which would not be aroused if they were merely imprisoned.   

But in whatever expression of opinion associations of workingmen who do not themselves believe in the use of dynamite may see fit to make upon this subject, there should be nothing which tends to put the Chicago anarchists in the light of leaders and martyrs in the cause of American social reform.

---------

There are certain lessons connected with this Chicago tragedy that are well worth the consideration of every thoughtful American. The appearance in this country of a violent phase of anarchism is not to be imputed entirely to the ignorance or viciousness of foreigners unacquainted with our institutions. If they did not find in this country deep and grievous social injustice, they would not retain the idea of violence as a remedy for social evils after coming here; and were it not for this injustice which large bodies of our people keenly feel, the man who should propose violence or plot violence as a means for improving the condition of the people would be laughed into silence. The really dangerous thing in this country is not the presence of foreign born incendiaries, but the existence of industrial conditions, which, in the midst of plenty, deprive the laborer of what he knows to be the fair earnings of his toil, and condemn men able to work and willing to work to enforced idleness. And the most dangerous men are in reality not the socialists or anarchists, but the comfortable classes who declare that things as they are are just what they ought to be, and who not only do not address themselves to finding any reasonable or peaceful solution for social difficulties, but do their utmost to prevent any such peaceful solution from being generally accepted.

Nor is the talking about force confined to anarchists. The rich and influential are too ready to talk about it, and to condone such applications of it as the employment of Pinkerton's detectives and the clubbing of peaceful assemblages by police. And the readiness with which the idea has spread that the Chicago anarchists have been unjustly and illegally condemned is a grave warning of the loss of faith in our judicial system consequent upon the corruption of our politics. We are yet far from the point at which it can be rationally assumed that seven judges of a highest state court would condemn a number of their fellow creatures to death against law and evidence; but when, as in this state, $60,000 is sometimes spent to secure a judicial nomination, and great corporations can make their influence felt in politics to secure friends on the bench, the belief in judicial integrity is surely on the wane.

Henry George.

 

 

NYT 1887-09-04: "Ready for Labor Day"

Another from the NYT, the day before Labor Day, 1887.  (Don't miss the last paragraph.)

The organization of the parade is reminiscent of a parade that took place during the 1886 election, described in Chapter 10 of Post & Leubuscher's book, Henry George's 1886 Campaign: An Account of the George-Hewitt Campaign in the New York Municipal Election of 1886.  (Incidentally, while the NYT earliest references to Labor Day are in 1887, after the NYS legislature had made it official there, P&L, writing in December, 1886, refer to a Labor Day parade in Newark on Labor Day, September 6, 1886).

I've not yet read The Standard's account of the day. (Text files of the months leading up to it are online; I'll have to read the PDF original for the following issue, which one can order on disk from the bookstore at schalkenbach.org.)  Here's the relevant passage from the 9/3/87 issue, including the blurb immediately above it, which quotes the fellow who defeated George in the election; it neatly encapsulates the distinction between the kinds of taxation.

"The true theory of taxation," says Mayor Hewitt, as reported in the World, "is to tax value wherever you find it." There was once a certain man traveling from Jerusalem to Samaria, who fell in with a set of tax gatherers who conducted business on just that principle.

*

Labor day will be celebrated in New York this year as a legal holiday. It was in 1882 that the Central labor union, then recently formed, issued a call to the labor organizations of New York to parade through the heart of the city on the first Monday of September. It was only with the greatest exertion on the part of a few men that the parade was made a success; but a success it was, and immediately after it was suggested that labor organizations set aside the first Monday of September in each year as labor’s holiday.

In 1883 the celebration here was much more significant than in 1882, and in several other cities it was also observed. During the following three years the voluntary observance of the day by organized labor grew into an institution in all the leading cities of the Union, and at the late session of our legislature it was legally made a public holiday in this state.

It is evident that the day will be very extensively recognized. Parades and meetings are to be held not only in the large cities, but in towns and villages. The farming population is not yet aroused to the significance of the day to them. Such persistent efforts to narrow the labor movement to artisans have been made by the pro-poverty press, to which a few members of labor organizations have unfortunately lent their influence, that farmers are disposed to count themselves out of the labor movement. But as this narrowness is giving way to broader views of labor, labor day will become a welcome and honored anniversary with all who work, whether in factory or office, in the shop or on the farm.

 

Ready for Labor Day

For the Great Parade Expected to Include 60,000 Persons

The preparations for the Central Labor Union Parade tomorrow have been completed.  Grand Marshal John Morrison issued a proclamation yesterday requesting all workingmen and workingwomen to assemble at their respective places of meeting, whence they will march to take their places in the parade.  Thereby they will show that although they may differ from each other in other matters they are as a unit upon industrial questions.  All workers, whether they be trades unionists, Knights of Labor, Socialists, or Greenbackers, are asked to unite in the parade, provided they believe in the principles of the Central Labor Union and in a united labor movement, for the emancipation of labor, against the common enemy, capital.

No national flags other than American ones are to be permitted in the procession. The Grand Marshal has appointed as his aides, Hugh Whoriskey, A. J. Johnson, T. J. Mahon, F. Opitz, B. Abrahams, Michael O'Brien, M. Sullivan, P. T. Larkin, William Drebs, and Charles Burton.

The printing trades have been given the right of line, and Marshal William H. Bailey will be in command of this section.  The chapels of all the morning papers, with one exception, will be in line.  The printing trades section will have 12 divisions that will form along the streets crossing the Bowery from Fourth-street to Grand-street.  Mr. Morrison yesterday estimated that fully 60,000 men will take part in the parade.

The entire police force of the city has been ordered on duty Monday.  Superintendent Murray, who has been, and is still, with his family at Far Rockaway, will return to duty on that day and will assume command of the force.  One thousand patrolmen, with the necessary officers, have been detailed to preserve order along the line of the parade.   They will be under command of Inspectors Steers and Williams and Capts. Brogan, Ryan, McDonnell, McElwain, Allaire, Clinchy, Eskins, Reilly, Gunner, and Killalea.  There will also be a large reserve force on hand in case of emergency.

In Brooklyn Monday the public schools will be closed.  All the municipal departments of that city will be closed, and the City Hall will be decorated with various flags and bunting.  In this case the employes in the County Clerk's office will celebrate by eating their annual clambake at DeWitt's Cottage Hotel, Broadway Station, Long Island.  Many of these gentlemen are said to be afflicted with a most egregious bivalvular consumption and confidently expect to excoriate all historic annals concerning the disappearance of the clam.  In Westchester County the indications seem to be that Labor Day will be observed by laboring.  There will be hard work in all but one or two factories.  The convicts in Sing Sing Prison will also observe the day by laboring as usual.

NYT 1887-09-04: "Labor Day and Idle Saturday"

Looking for the earliest references to "Labor Day" in the New York Times, I came across some interesting material.  This comes from early September, 1887, 10 months after the 1886 NYC Mayoral election in which a coalition of labor groups asked Henry George to run as their candidate.

(An August 31, 2004 NYT article on the origins of Labor Day by Edward T. O'Donnell takes it back to September, 1882.  Evidently the NYT of the day chose to take no note until after the Legislature had passed the bill establishing Labor Day.  Nor does an archive search on "central labor union" provide as early a reference as the O'Donnell does; NYT's earliest is 9/15/1884.)

I'm still curious about how the first Monday in September was chosen.  Was it only a coincidence that Henry George's birthday was September 2?

 

1887-09-04

Labor Day and Idle Saturday

The last Legislature did two very foolish things when it established the first Monday of September as a holiday to be known as "Labor Day," and when it enacted that every Saturday afternoon should be a half holiday.  Gov. Hill has more than the usual executive share of responsibility for the former of these performances.  He recommended the measure beforehand because he thought that by pleasing "Labor" he would be playing a clever demagogue's trick, and the Legislature adopted the suggestion because its members were afraid of being outwitted by the Governor in their competition for the Labor vote.  As a matter of fact, we have seen no evidence that the real workingmen demanded Labor Day.  Most workmen can take a day off now and then at their own cost and take it when they want it, which they are not sure of doing if they take it on a fixed day. If they had any notion of getting Labor Day at the boss's expense that notion will be effectually dispelled.  They will lose a day's work and forfeit a day's wages as on any other public holiday.  The only people who are benefited by Labor Day are the people who are paid by the week or the month -- clerks, salesmen, bookkeepers, and so forth, and these do not count as "labor" at all in the estimation of the Knights.

It is silly to set apart a day on which no labor is to be done as Labor Day.  It may also be mischievous.  The use of the day which is suggested by its title is to organize demonstrations of Labor, by Labor, and for Labor.  Now these demonstrations, as everybody knows, are apt to be demonstrations of the discontent which manual laborers, as well as laborers of other kinds, and idlers, and indeed all men whatsoever, feel about their lot, and attempts to hold somebody other than the discontented persons themselves to account for the unhappiness of their fates.  With Labor this attempt takes the form of arraigning "Capital," or, concretely, of finding fault with the bosses.  If, therefore, Labor Day is to be observed in any specific and distinguishing manner it will be used as a day on which one class of the community assembles to hear another class blackguarded, a suspension of labor being enjoined upon all classes for this purpose, and the whole performance going on under the express sanction of the State.  To establish a holiday for this purpose is to give public authority to an un-American, undemocratic, and senseless procedure.

We have said that the only people really benefited from their own point of view by Labor Day are the men employed by the month as assistants in mercantile houses.  They get their day off without any diminution of their pay.  It is also for their express and exclusive benefit that the Saturday halfholiday has been established.  This does "Labor" in the political sense no good whatever.  If a laborer can afford to lose half a day's wages once a week he could in almost all callings arrange to do so without losing his place.  If he cannot afford that loss it is a great piece of cruelty, in intention at least, for the law-making power to enact a statute which, if it were effectual, would compel him to do so.  In cities, during the heat of Summer a kindly and sensible custom has grown up in many kinds of business of shutting up shop at noon on Saturday.  It was very well to recognize and sanction this custom, and to encourage its extension, by making Saturday afternoon in July and August half holidays.  There was no doubt a certain risk in doing this for men engaged in business that required constant communication with the banks.  But the "heated term" coincides with the dullest season of such business, and the risk was worth taking.  That is a very different thing from making fifty-two half holidays in the courts of the year during seasons when there is no pretext of necessity or use in idleness.  If the law could be enforced it would cut down by one-twelfth the amount of work done in the State of New-York.  That is a handicap which no industrial community in the world could successfully carry.  Of course the law cannot be enforced.  The laborers who are their own employers, including mechanics as well as farmers, will pay no attention to it whatever.  Mechanics who work for other men will feel no more inclined to forfeit their wages on Saturday afternoons than on any other afternoons.  Tradesmen cannot afford, now that the busy season is reopening, to lose their Saturday's trade, and even their clerks will not be benefited by the nominal half holiday if the disregard of the statute is so general as it now seems likely to be.  The banks are bound by the law, and their clerks, with the clerks in public offices, will be able to spend Saturday afternoon in idleness.  For this boon a new and perilous element is to be reckoned with in all credits and a source of disturbance to be introduced into business of all kinds.

Evidently this is not worth while.  The judgment of all business men is that a weekly half holiday on which no debts are collectible, in addition to Sunday and adjoining it, is injurious and dangerous.  Both the holiday laws should be repealed, the "Labor Day" law because it established a general holiday for the use of a special class, and the Saturday half holiday law because, except during the Summer months, the half holiday it establishes does more mischief than good.

Plenty of room?

Another item from the editorial page of the second issue of The Standard (see the preceding post, below this one for a link):

The president recently advised a young man whom he had pardoned to go to work and make himself a useful citizen, adding, "There is plenty of room for you in the world." Where? There is certainly no place in this country where a repentant convict can find opportunity for work, unless he has a good deal of money.

What we propose -- and the alternative

It is not proposed to confiscate any value that has been created by human industry. This would be robbery. But when the community creates wealth it is entitled to it as much as the individual is to the wealth he creates.

-- From The Irish World, cited in the first issue of Henry George's weekly newspaper, The Standard.

Michael Kinsley: Inequality is even worse than everyone thought | iPolitics

Inequality is even worse than everyone thought | iPolitics.

Posted on Sat, Jun 16, 2012, 9:31 am by Michael Kinsley

The current debate about rich and poor — the 1 percent versus the 99 percent — is a bit misleading because the evidence usually is data about income, not wealth. Looking at wealth would make the comparison even starker.

There are some nice deals to be had in the income tax code these days, but most wealth accumulates and passes from generation to generation with no tax at all. Warren Buffett (who has selflessly taken on the role of all-purpose tape measure in these matters) is worth $45 billion or so. Do you think that all of that $45 billion, or even most of it, has appeared on any Form 1040 on its way to the cookie jar? Even at the special, low 15 percent rate the U.S. insanely confers on capital gains?

Unlikely. Much of that $45 billion is unrealized capital gains — increases in the value of Buffett’s stock that have never been cashed in, and therefore have never been taxed. I’m not saying that unrealized capital gains should be taxed (although it’s a thought). I’m just noting that you only pay income tax when an investment is liquidated, and very wealthy people don’t have to liquidate until they actually need to spend the money.

For most of the very rich, this time is never. When you die, any unrealized capital gains disappear for tax purposes. Your heirs, if and when they sell, pay taxes only on any increase in value since they got the money. And there is no estate tax at the moment on estates of $5.12 million or less.

Really Skewed

The Federal Reserve released new numbers on Monday. Unsurprisingly, wealth distribution is even more skewed than income distribution. In 2010, the median family had assets (including their house but subtracting their mortgage) of $77,300. The top 10 percent had almost $1.2 million, or more than 15 times as much.

But the headlines — and rightly so — went to the dismal fact that household wealth has been sinking for all categories of Americans. As I said, the net worth of the median family in 2010 was $77,300. In 2007, the net worth of the median family was $126,400. That’s a drop of almost 40 percent in just three years. (All these numbers are corrected for inflation.)

Characteristically taking the longer view, the New York Times led with the fact that household savings were back to where they had been in the early 1990s, “erasing almost two decades of accumulated prosperity.”

Most of the lost household net worth of recent years is due to the drop in housing prices. This is comforting, in a way, because the price of land and things built on land — and what, ultimately, is not? — are different from the price of other goods and services.

Let me tell you about my favorite economist, an indulgence I allow myself every couple of decades. (The last time was 1989, pre-hyperlink, unfortunately.) He was an American named Henry George, who died in 1897 at the age of 58. If you took economics in college, there might have been one sentence about him in your textbook. He once ran for mayor of New York. (Fancy that. He lost.)

George would look at our present situation and ask: In what sense were we richer three or four years ago, when the exact same housing stock sold for up to twice as much? In what sense are we poorer now? Land is special because, as Realtors like to remind us, they aren’t making any more of it. This means that you can get rich owning land without doing anything productive with it.

(Henry George: “You may sit down and smoke your pipe; you may lie around like the lazzaroni of Naples or the leperos of Mexico; you may go up in a balloon, or down a hole in the ground. …”) The natural increase in population will do the trick.

Tuna Fish

This is also true, to varying degrees, of other investments. It is true to some extent of any product that can’t be easily and quickly reproduced. It is somewhat true of houses, once they are built. (As Tolstoy didn’t write, “Cans of tuna fish are all alike, but every house is a house in its own way.”) But it is especially true of land.

My Bloomberg View colleague Clive Crook claimed recently to be a “supply-side liberal.” So was Henry George. He was as concerned about income equality as the most bleeding-heart liberal and as concerned about economic growth as the noisiest supply-side conservative.

George’s solution to everything was to eliminate all taxes on working, saving and investing, and to put the entire tax burden on unproductive land, which can’t escape the tax by moving. There are problems with this idea. But it’s provocative.

I don’t have room to do George justice, but take a look at his masterwork, “Progress and Poverty.” For an economics tract, it’s actually a fun read. And, yes, you’re responsible for it on the final exam.

(Michael Kinsley is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Resource Rentals for Revenue -- The 3 R's of fixing our economy

I came across an excellent site at http://www.resourcerentalsrevenue.org, and thought their FAQ page particularly worth sharing.   The links will take you to answers.

We don't HAVE to burden ourselves and our economy with taxes which throw a wet blanket on jobs, on production, on homes.  There is a better way to finance our common spending!

Resource Rentals for Revenue.

The following list comprises the most commonly asked questions about the concept of making land and resource rentals the source of revenue for government. As you continue this study, you will see the value from giving resources the respect they deserve and the benefits resulting from the freeing of labour, production and exchange from taxation. If you have any questions which are not covered here, or observations you would like to put to our panel, please feel free to do so by sending your question as an e-mail query and we will attempt to respond.

The inclusion of land and resources in the economic equation is central to any solution for revenue raising. A taxation solution which does not consider the nature of taxation itself and allows the continuing private monopolisation of community land and resources fails to recognise the essential role land plays in the economic equation and will not work. Land is the only element in the economic equation which is both fixed and finite. It can be monopolised. It is a unique class of asset which must be treated accordingly. If we were to wrest not the land itself, but its unimproved value from private monopolies and return the value to the community — whose very presence creates it — then we would have reduced many problems in one stroke with great benefit to production, to the environment and to the cause of individual freedom and justice.

On the subject of land and resource rents, Henry George said this:

The tax upon land values is the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by nature be attained.

1.Understandings

• What’s with all the terminology?
• Won’t the site rent be passed on to the tenant?
• It sounds too simple
• What is the difference between Land Value and Land Price?
• What is meant by ‘unimproved’ value?
• Why is income from land ‘unearned’ income?
• There is no such thing as a free lunch.
• There is no unimproved land value!
• This tax, like a debits tax, ignores two of the basic principles of raising tax
• It’s incorrect to suggest that income derived from holding land or resources out of use is not a productive activity. It is, since it produces income for the owner.

2.Interest Groups

• Will I be better off with Resource Rentals?
• Are resource rentals fair?
• Wouldn’t the wealthy simply find some way of evading it?
• Wouldn’t the wealthy sell up and flee with their wealth?
• Won’t the poor get caught, while the rich escape as usual?
• Would farmers be able to afford the tax?
• How will it affect multinationals (MNC’s)?
• How will it affect lenders and borrowers?
• Entrepreneurs and Manufacturers?
• Exporters and Importers?
• Environmentalists?
• Won’t it fall harder on the prince in his mansion than on the pauper in his hovel?
• How would old age pensioners on valuable sites be able to pay the site rent as suggested?
• What happens to the self-funded or partly self-funded retiree?
• Unemployed adults - currently untaxed but perhaps owning their own home? Will they have to pay as well?
• The investor in a site has taken a risk, and tied up their capital – who else could possibly be entitled to their capital gain?

3.Implementation

• How would such a system be implemented?
• What would happen to Land Prices?
• If resource rentals are such a good idea, why don’t we have them?
• Why would anyone want to own land under this system?
• How do I buy a property?
• If site values fall, won’t revenue fall too?
• How will it curb unemployment?
• Wouldn’t we run out of space?
• Who wins; who loses?
• Will pensioners and retirees - currently untaxed but living in their own property, be liable for site rents? Will they be reimbursed for past taxes paid?
• New enterprises - yet to realise any profit but paying tax on the property from which they operate? If you tax them, won’t they fail?
• Why don’t we impose reciprocal import duties?
• What about anti-pollution tax rebates?
• What about a Debits Tax?
• Site Rent for Revenue is a crackpot idea.
• Why put the entire burden of taxation on one area of economic activity?

Good questions -- and good answers!

Henry George's teaching in a nutshell

Henry George's teaching in a nutshell: To deprive men of the power to take what belongs to others.

-- From The Beacon, an Australian Single Tax journal, quoted in "The New Earth," (1899)

The Earth-for-All Calendar: April 30 -- Henry George

Place one hundred men on an island from which there is no escape, and whether you make one of these men the absolute owner of the other ninety-nine, or the absolute owner of the soil of the island, will make no difference either to him or to them.

— HENRY GEORGE, Progress and Poverty, Book VII., Chap. 2, p. 312.

Bob Andelson: The Earth is the Lord's!

I've taken some liberties with the formatting, because sometimes bullet points help ... you can find the original in the online library at http://schalkenbach.org/  I was fortunate enoguh to meet Bob

The Earth is the Lord's

by Robert V. Andelson
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy,
Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama

George Bernard Shaw, in a letter written in 1905 to Hamlin Garland, describes how, more than twenty years earlier, he had attended Henry George's first platform appearance in London. He knew at once, he said, that the speaker must be an American, for four reasons:

• "Because he pronounced 'necessarily' . . . with the accent on the third syllable instead of the first;
• because he was deliberately and intentionally oratorical, which is not customary among shy people like the English;
• because he spoke of Liberty, Justice, Truth, Natural Law, and other strange 18th-century superstitions; and
• because he explained with great simplicity and sincerity the views of the Creator, who had gone completely out of fashion in London in the previous decade and had not been heard of there since."

George's magnum opus, Progress and Poverty (the centenary of which occurred in 1979), is characterized by the same moral and religious emphasis remarked by Shaw in its author's London lecture, an emphasis that rises in the final chapter to the noble declaration of a faith revived. It is, I think, therefore entirely appropriate that I focus today on the moral and religious aspects of his basic proposal for economic reform — his proposal to lift the burden of taxation from the fruits of individual labor, while appropriating for public use the socially-engendered value of the land.

For land value taxation is

• not just a fiscal measure (although it is a fiscal measure, and a sound one);
• not just a method of urban redevelopment (although it is a method of urban redevelopment, and an effective one);
• not just a means of stimulating business (although it is a means of stimulating business, and a wholesome one);
• not just an answer to unemployment (although it is an answer to unemployment, and a powerful one),
• not just a way to better housing (although it is a way to better housing, and a proven one);
• not just an approach to rational land use (although it is an approach to rational land use, and a non-bureaucratic one).

It is all of these things, but it is also something infinitely more: it is the affirmation, prosaic though it be, of a fundamental spiritual principle — that "the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof."

It is the affirmation of the same principle to which Moses gave embodiment in the institution of the Jubilee, and in the prohibition against removing ancient landmarks, and in the decree that the land shall not be sold forever. It is the affirmation of the same principle to which the prophets of old gave utterance when they inveighed against those who lay field to field, and who use their neighbor's service without wages. It is the affirmation of the same principle to which Koheleth gave voice when he asserted in the fifth chapter of Ecclesiastes that "the profit of the earth is for all."

The earth is the Lord's! Consider what this means. It means that

• our God is not a pale abstraction.
• Our God is not a remote being who sits enthroned on some ethereal height, absorbed in the contemplation of his own perfection, oblivious to this grubby realm in which we live.
• Our God is concerned with the tangible, with the mundane, with what goes on in the field, in the factory, in the courthouse, in the exchange.
• Our God is the maker of a material world — a world of eating and sleeping and working and begetting, a world he loved so much that he himself became flesh and blood for its salvation. In this sense, then,
• our God is eminently materialistic, and nowhere is this more clearly recognized than in the Bible, which, for that very reason, has always been a stumbling-block and an offense to those Gnostics, past and present, whose delicacy is embarrassed by the fact that they inhabit bodies, and for whom religion is essentially the effort to escape from or deny that fact.
• Our God is not a dainty aesthete who considers politics and economics subjects too crass or sordid for his notice.
• Neither is he a capricious tyrant who has enjoined an order of distribution that condemns retirees after a lifetime of toil to subsist on cat food while parasitic sybarites titillate palates jaded by the most refined achievements of the haute cuisine. It is men who have enjoined this order in denial of his sovereignty, in defiance of his righteous will.

The earth is the Lord's! To the biblical writers, this was no mere platitude. They spelled out what it meant in concrete terms. For them, it meant that the material universe which had been provided as a storehouse of natural opportunity for the children of men was not to be monopolized or despoiled or treated as speculative merchandise, but was rather to be used reverently, and conserved dutifully, and, above all, maintained as a source from which every man, by the application of his labor, might sustain himself in decent comfort. It was seen as an inalienable trust, which no individual or class could legitimately appropriate so as to exclude others, and which no generation could legitimately barter away.

The earth is the Lord's! With the recognition of this principle comes the recognition of the right of every man to the produce which the earth has yielded to his efforts. As the Apostle Paul says in his first letter to the Church at Corinth, if the ox has a right to a share in the grain which it treads out, surely a human being must have a right to the fruits of his labor. For the exercise of this right, he is, of course, accountable to God — but against the world, it holds.

To one who takes seriously, as I do, that insight about human nature which is expressed in the doctrine of original sin, there can be nothing self-evident about the rights of man. In the words of my friend, Edmund A. Opitz, "the idea of natural rights is not the kind of concept which has legs of its own to stand on; as a deduction from religious premises it makes sense, otherwise not." The French Revolution and its culmination in the Reign of Terror demonstrated that humanistic assumptions afford no secure foundation for the concept of human rights. That concept, for the believer, can be neither understood nor justified except in terms of what Lord Acton so eloquently speaks of as "the equal claim of every man to be unhindered in the fulfilment by man of duty to God."

This is what it comes down to: How can a person be "unhindered in the fulfilment of duty to God" if he be denied, on the one hand, fair access to nature, the raw material without which there can be no wealth; and on the other, the full and free ownership of his own labor and its earnings?

You who have studied the history of the Peasants' Revolt in sixteenth century Germany know that in calling for the abolition of serfdom and the restoration of the common lands, the peasants were simply voicing demands which were logically implied by Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers — that the service of God to which all the faithful are elected requires, as I have said, access to the land and its resources, and the free disposal of one's person and of the guerdon [editor's note: reward] of one's toil. Despite the excesses that accompanied this uprising, Luther's part in the suppression of a movement which stemmed logically from his own teaching must always be a source of pain to those of us who revere him for his spiritual genius and integrity.

The earth is the Lord's! The same God who established the just authority of governments has also in his providence ordained for the major source of revenue. Allow me to quote from Henry George:

In the great social fact that as population increases, and improvements are made, and men progress in civilization, the one thing that rises everywhere in value is land, we may see a proof of the beneficence of the Creator . . . In a rude state of society where there is no need for common expenditure, there is no value attaching to land. The only value which attaches there is to things produced by labor. But as civilization goes on, as a division of labor takes place, as men come into centers, so do the common wants increase and so does the necessity for public revenue arise. And so in that value which attaches to land, not by reason of anything the individual does, but by reason of the growth of the community, is a provision, intended — we may safely say intended — to meet that social want. Just as society grows, so do the common needs grow, and so grows the value attaching to land — the provided fund from which they can be supplied (George 1889).

On another occasion he wrote:

The tax on land values is the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses (George, P&P, 421).

And yet, my friends, in the topsy-turvy world in which we live, this provided fund goes mainly into the pockets of speculators and monopolists, while the body politic meets its needs by extorting from individual producers the fruits of honest toil. If ever there were any doubt about the perversity of human nature, our present system of taxation is the proof! Everywhere about us, we see the ironic spectacle of the community penalizing the individual for his industry and initiative, and taking away from him a share of that which he produces, yet at the same time lavishing upon the non-producer undeserved windfalls which it — the community — produces. And, as Winston Churchill put it, the unearned increment, the socially-produced value of the land, is reaped by the speculator in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice, done. "The greater the injury to society, the greater the reward."

We hear constantly a vast clamor against the abuse of welfare. I do not for a moment condone such abuse. Yet I ask you, who is the biggest swiller at the public trough?

• Is it the sluggard who refuses to seek work when there is work available?
• Is it the slattern who generates offspring solely for the sake of the allotment they command?
• Or is it the man — perhaps a civic leader and a pillar of his church — who sits back, and, with perfect propriety and respectability, collects thousands and maybe even millions of dollars in unearned increments created by the public, as his reward for withholding land from those who wish to put it to productive use.

Talk about free enterprise! This isn't free enterprise; this is a free ride.

But if that same person were to improve his site — if he were to use it to beautify his neighborhood, or to provide goods for consumers and jobs for workers, or housing for his fellow townsmen — instead of being treated as the public benefactor he had become, he would be fined as if he were a criminal, in the form of heavier taxes. What kind of justice is this, I ask you? How does it comport with the Divine Plan, or with the notion of human rights?

Let me make this clear: Acquisitiveness, or the "profit motive," if you will, is a well-nigh universal fact of human nature, and I have no wish to suggest that the land monopolist or speculator has any corner on it. Even when I speak of him as a parasite, this is not to single him out for personal moral condemnation. He is not necessarily any more greedy than the average run of people. As my late friend, Sidney G. Evans, used to say: "if you have to live under a corrupt system, it's better to be a beneficiary than a victim of it." But the profit motive can be channeled in ways which are socially desirable as well as in ways which are socially destructive. Is it not our duty to do everything we can to build an order without victims one in which the profit motive is put to use in such a way that everybody benefits?

I do not harbor the illusion that the millennium is going to be ushered in by any program of social betterment. My theological orientation does not happen to be one which minimizes the stubbornness of man's depravity. Yet to make the depth of human wickedness an alibi for indifference to the demands of social justice is to ignore the will of him who said:

Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
(Amos 5:23-24)

To some of you, the promotion of specific programs for social justice is seen as part of the responsibility of the institutional church; to others it is not. But all of us, I am sure, can agree that the individual Christian (or Jew or Moslem, Hindu or Buddhist, as the case may be) has a solemn moral obligation to study the issues carefully, and then involve himself strenuously in whatever social and political efforts his informed conscience tells him best advance the cause of right.

O shame to us who rest content
While lust and greed for gain
In street and shop and tenement
Wring gold from human pain,
And bitter lips in blind despair
Cry, "Christ hath died in vain!"
Give us, O God, the strength to build
The city that hath stood
Too long a dream, whose laws are love,
Whose ways are brotherhood,
And where the sun that shineth is
God's grace for human good.*

The earth is the Lord's!

* From "O Holy City, Seen of John" by Walter Russell Bowie. Copyright, 1910, by A. S. Barnes and Company. Quoted by permission.

Free Trade, Free Land and Free Men (1888 Brooklyn Eagle Article)

The Brooklyn Eagle, October 24, 1888, page 1

FOR SINGLE TAX
Henry George Men Hold a Mass Meeting at the Rink.
Cleveland's Name Enthusiastically Cheered.
Addresses by the Author of "Progress and Poverty," by Hon. Thomas G. Shearman, Rev. Hugh O. Pentecost, Louis F. Post and Others.

Another great audience gathered at the Clermont Avenue Rink last night to hear the discussion of political issues. It filled every seat in the big hall, crowded the platform and the galleries, choked the entrances and formed a dark dado around the sides of the room wherever standing place was available. It was the single tax men's night to own the speakers' platform, and the key to all that was said was conveyed in plain words above the speakers' desk: "Free Trade, Free Land, Free Men." The audience was not only large, but it was wide awake. It enjoyed the brass band and it listened attentively to every word of the single tax orators and cheered vociferously in the right places to show that a large proportion of the crowd was in sympathy with the sentiment expressed above the speaker's head.  It had a habit of hissing, too, and whenever Mr. Blame, Mr. Andrew Carnegie or the Tory Government of England was mentioned it practiced this habit. The meeting was of citizens who favor the election of Cleveland and Thurman, and though less was said on this subject than on "Free Trade, Free Land and Free Men," the occasional mention of Mr. Cleveland's name left no doubt as to the sentiment of the vast assemblage regarding his candidacy. They cheered for him uproariously, spontaneously and untiringly. The slightest allusion to him called forth a, wild outbreak.

C. T. Christensen had agreed to preside at the meeting, but was called out of town at the last moment, and Thomas G. Shearman, who was booked as one of the speakers of the evening, acted as chairman. Beside him on the platform sat Henry George, the Rev. Hugh O. Pentecost, Louis F. Post, James Hickling and others of the shining lights of the Single Tax legions. Mr. Shearman called the meeting to order and said:

While we hope and trust that in this audience there are many Protectionists, that both sides of this great question are represented here, we wish it understood that on this platform we stand for no half way politics, no semi Protection, no false pretenses, no evasions. We are absolutely for Free Trade [applause] as we are for free land and for free men. In the old time of slavery the master would give everything to his slave rather than Free Trade. He would give him free whisky as the Republicans would give tree whisky to the white slaves of today. Slavery was a system of "Protection" to the inferior workman. The slave was protected in the liberty to work for his employer. The Irish people have had Protection. Within the last hundred years 80 statutes have been passed by a British Tory Parliament, composed mostly of Protectionists, furnishing "Protection" to Ireland, the very statute under which Dill on was imprisoned in an Irish jail without the privilege of a trial by jury or by any decent Judge was a "Protection" law.  The Tory Parliament gave it the name Protection.  But Irishmen called it Coercion. Mezeroffs paper, that preaches the assassination of innocent women and children, is being circulated by the First Ward Republicans, because of its advocacy of Protection. He should advocate this American system of Tariff, for it is simply coercion. Protection coerces the American workingman into assisting the development of monopolists and Trusts. It puts coercion upon him and upon American industry. It fosters no industry. It murders industry. What does a Tariff do? Can any one look me in the face and say it assures him better pay for his toil? It is simply coercion to prohibit you from carrying on an industry that brings you into relations with other nations. What does the Government do when it puts a "Protective" Tariff on coal?  It says, You shall get no more coal for your labor than Mr. Elkins, Mr. Maine and the other coal monopolists shall allow you to have. The land owners of this country, those who have been sharp enough to get possession of the richly productive mining tracts, grind the manufacturers that grind you. You must first get $100,000 to put into a mine or manufactory to be protected under this American system. We are for Free Trade because it means the highest wages: because the history of this country shows that with every advance of the Tariff there has been a depression of wages. What stuff is talked to you about the importation of foreign goods throwing out of employment American workmen. The Protectionists shout that increased importations will drive out the gold of the country. There never was enough gold in this country to pay for a single year's importations. All the gold in the world would not buy the goods that have come across the ocean to this country in the last ten years. So what can't be done, in spite of the tearful arguments of Protectionists, won 't be done. In the last 27 years, since our Protective Tariff began, more gold has gone out of this country than during the years of '46 and '47, when we had Free Trade. When the Tariff reached its highest point the greatest amount of gold went out. The export of gold is merely a mercantile transaction. The other charge is that Free Trade will throw the American workman out of employment. If you could import $7,000,000,000 instead of $700,000,000 worth of goods the call for American labor would advance ten times what it is now. Why are Brooklyn and New York great manufacturing cities? Why are we more successful than Chicago or St. Louis? They have markets on both sides of the ocean, while by our system of Protection we are cut off from one side, it is because we, from our location, can get more readily material from across the ocean. If the mad scheme of the Protectionists could be carried out to shut out entirely this foreign material, and compel us to rely on our home production, what a blight would fall upon this city. Sweep away this Protection system and we would have all this foreign material brought in to work up, and would have two markets instead of one. Yet you will go on in one way or another "protecting." You might have liberty, freedom of trade and of commerce, and double the manufacturing business of those cities. You hear of the revenue reformer being converted into a Free Trader; of the moderate Protectionist into a revenue reformer, but in this campaign you read of no Free Trader being converted to Protection. Every gain the Republican party has made from the Democratic ranks has been of those men who opposed the freeing of the slave.

After the cheering had died away Mr. Post stepped forward upon the platform and amid renewed applause walked back and forth triumphantly. "Last night," he said , "Mr. McKinley stood upon this platform." [Laughter, applause and hisses.] Then an enthusiastic Republican got up and shouted "Three cheers for McKinley." In the confusion the crowd thought that he was yelling for Post and followed his lead with a will.  Mr. Post continued:

I am glad to hear that demonstration for, in the first place, it shows that we have people here to convert, and in the second, because it is due him from Protectionists as the best representative of Chinese polities in the country. [Long continued cheers.] He says that the Tariff is not a tax, that it is paid by the man who sends his goods to this country to sell. The Tariff on firecrackers is 100%. I want Mr. McKinley to explain how much the Chinaman makes on his fireworks after he has paid that tax. Our Chinaman says we are absolute Free Traders. It is true there is no 7% about us. We are with the Democratic party because we get that little reduction from them, which is better than nothing and a step in the right direction. If we are to have trade, why should we not have it free. We have Free Trade all over the United States. In fact, here is the only example of absolute Free Trade in the whole world. I have a horse that I want to exchange for two mules. I can take him to New York, to Pennsylvania or New Jersey and make whatever terms I am able. It is only when a policeman comes alone and says I can't trade that I get Protection. If I desire to trade with a Canadian not only must I give him one horse for his mules, but I must give the Government another. What do they want of that other horse? They want to put him in the Treasury vaults or else compel me to go over into Pennsylvania and sell to someone, Carnegie for instance, who demands a horse and three-quarters for a couple of mules. [Laughter and applause.] But this man doesn't want the extra three-quarters to divide among his men who raise mules, unless they are organized and strong enough to make him. The employer always gets the bonus, and divides with his employes — when he thinks best. Workingmen are getting sick of being fooled about this notion that the Tariff gives them higher wages. Some, however, are afraid that shops will be closed and that foreign goods will run us out of the market. How can we buy foreign goods unless we have our own goods to exchange for them. This shop closing story is another great fraud. The truth is the monopolists have a soft thing, and they are going to hold on to it. That is what makes me think of a story. A darky was working at $5 a week for a Protectionist boss. One day he was in great trouble, for he had a dream. He told his employer, that he was dead and had gone to hell. "Well, that's a bad place," was the answer. "Did you see anyone there you knew?'' "Oh yes, lots of them." "Did you see any Protectionists?" "Yes, I did, and every one held a $5 darky between himself and the fire to keep off the heat." Nor do Protectionists like to let go their victims in this world. Every day we buy the necessities of life from whomsoever we please. We give for them the product of our labor, or its equivalent. We don 't want Protection in this trade. We had absolute Protection from outsiders when the Republican blizzard of last March came along and I for one didn't like it. About 3000 years ago the children of Israel were going through the wilderness. God sent quails to them from Heaven. It was all import and no export and almost everybody liked it. Finally Aaron went to Moses and said: "This invasion of quails ought to be stopped. I have an infant industry that must be protected. In short, I have started a little poultry yard." It was no use to put on an ad valorem duty of 100%, as suggested, because the quails had no money value, so it was determined to put on a specific duty of $5 a dozen. I don't wonder that you doubt this story and believe the incidents never happened. Well, the story is not true. Do you know why? Because Moses and Aaron led "the children of Israel through the wilderness, and not Blaine, Harrison or Carnegie. Whenever you tax a product of labor you make that commodity harder to get, but the more you tax land the cheaper it becomes. It is only by abolishing the tax on labor and coming down to a single land tax basis that we accomplish our great purpose. We shall then have cheap goods, cheap land, high wages and free men, for they all go together.

When Henry George rose to speak he was greeted with a thunder roll of applause. When it stopped for want of breath someone who had saved his lungs shouted lustily, "Three cheers for Henry George." They were given. "Three cheers for the 68,000" were called for, but failed, because the great single tax advocate had begun to speak. Mr. George said:

The gentleman says "Three cheers for the 68,000." He means the men who voted for me two years ago when I ran for Mayor of New York City.  I ran as a candidate then for the purpose of introducing into our politics a principle. I ran because I believe it is only by political action and through political action that the emancipation of labor can be secured. For the very same reason that I was a candidate two years ago, from my belief in and my love for these same principles, I stand here to advocate the election of Grover Cleveland.

At the mention of the President's name there was a great roar of applause, beginning not gradually, but at its full volume, the instant the speaker had spoken the name. The cheering continued for more than a minute. Mr. George then continued:

I told you then that we needed the formation of no new party, but the revival of that party of the people which Thomas Jefferson called Republican and Andrew Jackson called Democrat, that party of equal rights that represents the true idea of a government for the people by the people. I never dreamed two years ago that I would now be standing here advocating the election of a Democratic candidate. I had not the confidence in the party that would allow me to believe that they could have given me the opportunity I now possess. Thanks to Grover Cleveland the Democratic party in this national contest again has raised the standard of Jeffersonian Democracy, timidly, it is true, falteringly. Only a 7% move. But we hail it as a beginning. We are for that 7%. Not for that alone, but because we know this movement, once started, can never be stopped. I trust my friend, the previous speaker, will live long enough to see the full consummation of his wishes. If he lives to three score years and ten I have faith by that time we will have swept all Tariff away. I have faith in that because I have faith in the American people. A fair discussion will bring death to Protection. The American people are nobody's fool. Protection is repugnant to the genius of American institutions. It existed in Europe before it was borrowed by us. It is an old scheme of monarchy and aristocracy. Free Trade is as much a right of the people as free speech. Protection should indeed be called coercion. We don't want Protection. The American idea is that each should support the church that pleases him best. No state church. Apply this to trade. Why should not those who believe in Protection take up a voluntary subscription for the infant industries? That would leave us all free men. Mr. McKinley said in this hall, so I am told, that Protection does not raise prices. If that is true, what does anyone want Protection for? The whole end and aim of Protection is to raise prices. When. I was a boy it was, indeed, Protection to infant industries.  They ceased to talk about that later on. It used to be, a good while ago, Protection to American capitalists. But that, also, is of the past. Now it is Protection to labor. How they do love the laborer, these good monopolists, such as Andrew Carnegie! How does labor get this vaunted Protection? It doesn't get it. It goes to the employing producer. It is only when by some combination, trust or monopoly by which domestic as well as foreign competition is choked off that Protection yields its full value of protection — to the monopolist. It is not the profit his employer is making that fixes a man's wages. Not at all. It is the price at which the employer can get a man to take the workman's place. It is in the protected industries of our country that laborers have had to fight most and make the greatest efforts to escape being crushed to the wall. But I believe that now a spirit of self respect is awakened among American workingmen. Think of it. Is labor such a poor, helpless thing that it must have protection? Are the American people so inferior to the rest of the world that the industry of 60,000,000 people is to be jeopardized by the law of the British lion unless he is kept at bay by men in buttons? Trusts need protection but labor can protect itself if you only sweep away restrictions and give it a chance. This campaign is the opening of a discussion of all economic questions. The appeal of intelligence will not stop here. We have started on the road to freedom and I have sufficient faith in my countrymen to think that we will not stop till we reach the goal: till we have swept away every tax that deprives the worker of the fair result ot his work. We will make our one direct tax the means of breaking down monopoly. Every tax on the products of labor diminishes their amount. It is the same way with a tax on imports, which tends to lessen the aggregate amount of wealth there is for all and brings to some too much and to others too little. A tax on products requires more capital for carrying on the business. Indirect taxes were never objected to by the first person who paid them. Why were match manufacturers anxious to have the tax kept on? Because as in every other case the price was increased and the man with large capital had an advantage over the man with small. Under that scheme the man who begins as a laborer shall remain one. But there is a tax that takes from no one anything that is due him from his industry — that is the tax on land values. [Long continued applause.] The value of land differs essentially from that of anything produced by labor. This house has a value representing the labor required to put it up and the materials used. With the land on which the house stands the case is very different. That was not produced by labor. Yet the value of the land is ever increasing and that of the building decreasing. The increased value of the land has been produced not by industry, but by the number of people around here. It has been produced by the whole community, belongs to the whole community, and is therefore the proper basis for tax. Instead of promoting monopoly by our plan we are diminishing and destroying it, and we are making it harder for dogs in the manger to hold land that they cannot use. This is the absolute Free Trade at which we single tax men aim. We do not support Grover Cleveland because we imagine that he aims at any kind of Free Trade, nor because we imagine that the Democratic party favors it. But we support Grover Cleveland [cheers and applause] because this is the direction in which he is leading. We stand with the Democratic party because at last its face is turned in the right road, and it has only to keep on to become as Democratic as Thomas Jefferson himself. A gentleman said to me tonight as I came into this hall, "There are people in Brooklyn so stupid as to think the Cobden Club is running this campaign. "I am a member of the Cobden Club [great applause] and if they have any money they might send me a little. I am very willing to take it and use it. The only complaint I have is that the Cobden Club doesn't believe in Free Trade. They see what American Free Trade would do to them. In regard to this question I once said to an Englishman: Once our people are started they will never stop as in England. They will go on till Free Trade ultimates in free land and free men. When I was elected an honorary member of the Cobden Club I was very glad to accept as a mark of respect to Richard Cobden [applause], a man who sought to get justice for Ireland, a man who, when aristocratic England was on the side of the States that would break up the Union, saw in our side this light for freedon; the man that wanted to break down barriers that divide nations, to disband armies and unite the world by a fraternal bond of peace. When Gladstone is restored to power and Ireland has the restoration of home rule the movement for the natural and equal rights in land will spring up with power to grow. And this little movement here beginning with a 7% reduction will go on and on. I am proud to have lived to see this time. This is not a struggle for the protection of labor, but for the emancipation of labor; not to give a few monopolists a few more percent profit at the expense or their fellow citizens, but to give to all their full and equal rights of making this a republic worthy of a name, in which there shall be no master and no tramps, no monstrous fortunes or monstrous poverty, a republic in which there shall be room for all and abundance for all.

The Rev. Hugh O. Pentecost was introduced eulogistically by Mr. Shearman. Among other things Mr. Pentecost said:

Your chairman has told you a truth. I do not believe in all the doctrines of Christianity, as perhaps you do not, but I have a perfect belief in the Founder of Christianity. If Jesus of Nazareth were on earth today He would be engaged in this work. This meeting was called under tho auspices of a single text — Cleveland and Thurman Campaign Committee. That is a combination that some in this audience may not understand. If the men who are thus ignorant have recovered from the shock of the recent remarks about Mr. Cobden they can be enlightened by my explanation. What do the single tax men desire? First, the abolition of every form of indirect taxation — the Tariff tax and the Internal Revenue tax. Indirect taxation is sneaking taxation. It sneaks into your house and taxes everything you use without your knowing you are being taxed. It is peculiarly in favor with despots. When a monarch wishes to raise money without disturbance he uses indirect taxation. It is cowardly. A man goes into a store and buys a suit ot clothes. Nothing is said about the tax on them as it is included in their price. Should a "man in buttons" meet you at the door of the clothing store and demand $10 tax of you for the clothes you had bought your indignation would know no bounds. It is easy to overtax the people by indirect taxation. The single tax men are opposed to the tax on products of labor. What we want is not less wealth, but more wealth. Our system keeps men from producing the very thing we stand in need of. It is idiotic. It punishes a man that does just the thing we want him to. Is he going to do the monstrous thing of building a house? We tax every step he takes, every nail and stick he buys. I know a man who wants to build a back kitchen on his house, but daren't do it for fear of the increased assessment. There is probably not a man in this house who is not at least once a year regularly a liar. Men who in church or family are too honorable, to stain their lips with a lie, yet swear to the tax assessor that they do not own certain property which they know they do. Even ministers who go to Europe and make many purchases there sometimes deceive the customs officers. But it is not his fault. A man goes to Europe and buys certain articles, then if he doesn't pay a fine to the Government they are taken away from him. This is on a par with the policy which taxes the most industrious of our people and makes the burden upon the owners of lots, vacant and rapidly rising in price, as light as possible. Any man who cannot see the absurdity of this policy is as blind as a bat. When Grover Cleveland said that "unnecessary taxation is unjust taxation," he told the truth. [Cheers and long continued applause.] We can prove from facts that it is unnecessary to tax the products of labor. We propose to put a tax upon the value or land. We believe in that single tax because it is right, and we never saw any one who could demonstrate that it wasn't right. A man produced this house, therefore it belongs to him. God produced the land; whom, then, does it belong to? [A voice: "God."] You are right: He has never given it away; He has never sold or willed it away. If the transfers cannot be shown we shall hold that it belongs to God. Between the land and the house is the value of land. Did God produce that? No, but the people did, and why does not the land belong to them? The house belongs to the man because he produced it. God produced the land and it belongs to all His children. What we want is for the people to stop the stealing from the man who owns the house and take what belongs to them. When the New York Sun in its wonderful wisdom says [hisses] that all the wealth of the country if divided equally would give but $800 to each inhabitant, don't you see that we want to produce wealth so that it will go around. The only way we can do that is by lessening not increasing the cost of Protection. You may shout again now if you choose for I am going to mention McKinley's name. [Hisses.] He tried to tell an audience in this hall last night that articles were made cheaper by laying on a tax. That is not so, as any one can see, but this is a fact. The more we tax land the cheaper it gets. We want to have land so cheap that when a workingman wants to build a house he will not have to spend his life in saving money to buy the lot. We want also to make it impossible for men to keep land vacant, to let it lie idle doing no one any good and increasing in price simply because more people are living near it each day. This is an increase in value to which no man has exclusive right. After we have got this reform established other reforms will come much easier. It has often been asked how it happens that we work with the Democratic party. I will tell you. Because we want all taxes removed. We want to get rid of the Protective Tariff first, then the revenue tax, till we get down to our single tax. The Democratic party has made a beginning, and that is a great thing to do after all the years of high Protective Tariff talk that has been poured into the ears of the workingmen. They have heard the Protection side of the story till they have begun to think that it must be true. Perhaps the truth has been impressed upon them more forcibly and terribly. A story is told of an Englishman who had been stopping at a hotel in the far West, and who finally asked for his bill. "Three dollars without potatoes, $4 with," was the reply. The Englishman said he thought the charges were exorbitant and growled considerably. Pulling a big pistol from his pocket the landlord told his guest to look out of the window. "Do you see that graveyard?" he inquired. Well, that place is filled with men who thought my charges were too high. What do you think now?" The Englishman expressed himself as very satisfied. So the American workingman is "satisfied" with the High Tariff robbery of the manufacturers, only, in this latter case the pistol is starvation which affects not himself alone, but wife and little ones. No wonder that under such circumstances the bosses' view has been the laborer's. You know what a fetish is? A savage worships in his cave. Every time he comes back from a hunt, fish, or fight  successful he gives that miserable fetish all the credit. All his bad luck he attributes to other causes. As the savage grows more intelligent he drops his fetish. The Tariff is the fetish of the Protectionist. Just at this time Mr. Blaine is its great high priest and Benjamin and Levi are altar boys. All our fine weather, plentiful crops and beautiful women are due to the Tariff. I sometimes think that the old hymn should read as follows:

"Tis Protection that can give

Sweetest pleasures while we live;
Tis Protection that can give
Solid comfort when we die.

The rhyme is not just right, but I think you see the meaning. Like the Indian, the Protectionist doest not blame his fetish for the growling growing discontent in the ranks of labor, this dark shadow on the land. There are people who believe every good comes from Protection and every bad from some other causes. Just when this superstition was at its height Grover Cleveland walked into the temple. He did not quite dare to strike down the miserable fetish, but he slapped its face and said to the congregation; This thing you worship is a humbug." We honor him because of this, and because he brought on this great discussion that will not end until we have Free Trade in goods, free travel for men and free land for labor.

After Mr. Pentecost's speech half of the audience remained to hear Mr. George and the other speakers answer questions.