By MICHAEL HUDSON
January 2008

Continued from Part 1

Alfred Marshall solved this problem by generalizing the concept of economic rent as accruing not only to land and mineral deposits but also to monopolies and finance, along with quasi-rents for low-cost industrial producers. This became the main way in which rent theory survived in academia. He supported capital to such an extent that he made little effort to explain just where its profits ended and monopoly rent began. His illustrative examples in Progress and Poverty depicted workers as making their own tools—axes or canoes—and deriving a profit from their added productivity, like small businessmen working on their own account.42 Whereas socialist and labor reformers referred to expensive machinery in large urban factories employing labor under exploitative terms, or monopolies seeking extortionate revenue without costs, George treated capital merely as tools embodying labor.

10. The Narrowness of George’s Theorizing Beyond the Land Question as Such

George’s single-mindedness made his call for economic reform narrower than most of his admirers desired. Although his journalistic writings denounced the railroad barons, Wall Street trusts and stock watering (diverting income to insiders by issuing bonds to them), his political program did not address bad working conditions and related exploitation of labor and consumers, or urban housing, or natural monopolies apart from land or finance capital and the volume of debt expanding through the dynamics of compound interest. Financially, George viewed savings as consisting of labor’s saved-up earnings, not in its manifestation of finance capital. This microeconomic approach prompted Flürscheim to accuse George’s brand of individualism as being naïve:

Free competition had gradually eventuated in the most extensive monopoly the world ever saw; subjection to a few plutocrats proved to be the latest phase of individualism.43

Lacking a broad theory of capital along the lines Veblen was soon to analyze, George left himself without a way to measure how much income represents socially necessary profit as compared to unearned economic rent. He did not come to terms with the extent to which much of what passed for “capital” was property in the form of special privilege akin to land rent. The upshot is that rather than generalizing the concept of economic rent to apply to industrial capital (what Marshall called quasi-rents), monopolies and finance capital, and rather than proposing an across-the-board policy challenging all forms of rentier income (as Flürscheim, Patten and others urged), George made the Single Tax his single reform policy. He focused on economic polarization developing only from land monopoly, not from the dynamics of industrial and financial capital.

The irony is that whereas Marx assumed that productive industrial credit would develop in due course, banks have found economic rent to be the most attractive form of revenue to capitalize as collateral for their loans. Bank credit now serves mainly to bid up prices for rent yielding properties. Taxing rent rather than wages and profits would make it unavailable to pledge as collateral, and therefore would tend to channel more credit to tangible capital formation. The failure of George and his followers to theorize along these lines held them behind other reformers, leading to splits within the Single Tax movement, especially in Britain, where the School for Economic Science moved away from George to place major emphasis on debt and financial reform.

11. George’s Alliance with the Right Wing of the Political Spectrum

By the early 20th century, George’s economic individualism had allied itself with libertarian anti-government ideology. This led to a political alignment of Single Taxers just the opposite of what his early supporters favored. His opposition to public regulation (Section 4 above), along with his support of capital (Section 3) even when it became monopolistic, extortionate or abusive of workplace conditions prompted the socialist Arthur Lewis to observe in 1916 that “what Huxley calls George’s ‘superfluous rhetorical confectionery’” alienated his natural constituency, splitting the land tax off from contemporary reform movements. As soon as pro-labor reformers “saw the real bent of his teaching they began to oppose [it],” Lewis concluded. In 1883, when he visited England to lecture on the invitation of the Land Reform Union, the treasurer, Mr. Champion, and the secretary, Mr. Frost, both Socialists, waited on George and told him that, unless he advocated the nationalization of capital as well as land, the Socialists in the organization would be compelled to oppose his campaign. To this George sharply and justly replied that they should have been able to find out from his books what he stood for before they invited him.44

The upshot was that other reformers went their own way, leaving the land issue to the Single Taxers alone.

What made their efforts so unsuccessful was the fact that despite George’s denial that his Single Tax was socialist, this was not how property owners saw it. The threat it posed to property and its income seemed more immediate and far-reaching than industrial socialism. The vested interests—including the financial interests, which in Ricardo’s day had favored industry rather than the landed interest — responded by promoting an anti-government individualism and a claim that all income was earned. This left by the wayside the idea of exploitative, unearned property and monopoly income as economic rent, picked up neither by the political right or the left.

H. G. Wells worried that a full land tax would lead to much larger government. He wrote in his autobiography that he had picked up a copy of Progress and Poverty at a college bookstore during his Oxford days, and found it as implicitly statist as Marxism. The difference was that where Marxism advocated direct political control of the state by the working class, Wells believed that George’s program would lead to this same end simply by fiscal policy. “He saw the life of mankind limited and dwarfed by the continual rise in rents. His naive remedy was to tax the landowner, as Marx’s naive remedy was to expropriate the capitalist, and just as Marx never gave his disciples the ghost of an idea for a competent administration of the expropriated economic plant and resources of the world, so Henry George never indicated how, in the world of implacable individualism he advocated, the taxing authority was to find a use for its ever-increasing tax receipts.”45 Economic rent accounts for about a third of national income (and the bulk of “capital gains” in the form of loans and financial securities capitalizing the flow of rent). Should the government charge the full economic rent available under market conditions? Or, should it refrain from charging rent for essential public utilities?

Neither George nor his followers answered these questions by explaining how their land tax proposal would work in practice. “If land were nationalised, and afterwards chartered to an Agricultural Guild, its amenities would be socialized,” wrote the editors of London’s New Age.46 “By this means the amenities that now confuse the Single-taxers would be eliminated as matters of contention.” But without proposing a quantitative explanation of how government would collect and distribute the flow of rent, George’s followers lacked a clear basis for engaging in serious political discussion. Their argument remained more philosophical than concrete. “The tenacity with which the Single-tax proposal sticks to life is proof that it contains an element of reason,” The New Age editors observed, “but the fact that its adherents do not increase in numbers is evidence that it also contains elements of unreason.” The missing element ultimately was political.

It would take until the end of the 20th century for some of George’s followers to propose paying a “citizens’ dividend” out of public collection of land and resource rent, e.g. along the lines that the State of Alaska has done with its oil royalties. This would solve the problem to which Wells pointed, and would appeal to the libertarian movement that emerged in the late 20th century. But that movement is essentially anti-tax. In particular, it opposes taxing the higher wealth brackets — precisely those on whom a land tax would fall most heavily. The natural political allies for a land tax thus are not libertarian tax cutters advocating small government.

George’s individualism thus turned out to be the Achilles heel of his reform effort, while his narrow focus on the ground rent of large absentee landlords set his Single Taxers apart from other reformers. The 20th century saw many libertarians sympathize with his individualism, but their opposition to strong government has disabled its ability to tax rent and land-price gains. The political effect of libertarian populism has been to oppose the taxation of property. This makes “libertarian Georgism” something of an oxymoron, and helps explain why there is less interest today in taxing real estate and monopolies than existed in George’s day, in contrast to the populist momentum that once existed for the Single Tax.

12. George’s Hope that the Single Tax Could Be Enacted Gradually Without Radical Confrontation

By the mid-20th century the major industrial economies had adopted most of the reforms advocated by George’s contemporaries. Land taxation was the major reform not to survive. Part of the explanation is that the labor and social welfare reforms proposed in George’s day were less threatening to property—and to mortgage lenders and other financial interests—than taxing ground rent. Full land taxation could have succeeded only by keeping the issue before the public and at the center of academic economics, combined with lobbying efforts backed by research reports and policy think tanks. Instead, George and his followers acted as if a few simple ideas would take on a life of their own. On purely abstract philosophical grounds without supporting statistical documentation to explain just what land taxation would mean 1.2 practice. This made the political platform nebulous as far as the concrete interest of voters was concerned.

Central to George’s evolving political strategy was his hope that land taxation could be introduced gradually, as a merely technical reform with minimal political confrontation. The failure of this approach is reflected in the fact that of all the major reforms in George’s day, the Single Tax actually was the most radical, given the embedded character of land tenure in society’s wealthiest and most politically powerful families, and the fact that mortgage lending was becoming the banking industry’s major business.

A wide gap existed between the far-reaching political implications of George’s land tax and the tentative political steps that he and his followers took. On the one hand he claimed that the Single Tax would transform the economy so fundamentally that it had to be the pivot on which all other reforms turned. This conviction led him to reject working with other reformers, whose efforts he felt to be a distraction. Yet his alliance with capital led him to pull his punches politically, by not acknowledging how great a threat the taxation of ground rent and other economic rent posed to the vested interests. Political confrontation was especially muted after his 1886 mayoral adventure inspired dreams of political acceptability among well-to-do supporters. After his death George’s followers proposed even more minimalist solutions, focusing on marginal local rather than national reforms.

Robert Andelson recently observed:

In recent years, the Georgist camp has sustained something of a rift between those who would direct its limited resources toward local (usually two-rate) property tax reform, and those who would focus on ambitious nationwide agendas.

The latter consider it “municipal trivialization” to woo city mayors and other local politicians and their major campaign contributors—real estate developers—as the cutting edge of land taxation.47

One wonders how people ever could have expected this local constituency to be a major vehicle for land taxation. Noting that “only homeopathy maintains that remedies are very effective in minute doses,” Andelson finds that land-value taxation now seems to be in retreat in so many places where it was established. Too mild an application of a beneficial program will produce benefits too mild to stimulate strong and enduring general support. Andelson has cited my answer (Hudson 2000) to a hypothetical question he raised regarding how a tax on the land’s rent might be phased in gradually.48 The political problem is that such a tax would stop new purchases of property by buyers whose major attraction to real estate is the prospect of rising land prices and continued tax subsidy for absentee ownership and land speculation (e.g., by taxing capital gains at a lower rate than profits and other income, by deferring taxation of such gains, by almost unlimited depreciation allowances, and by tax deductibility of interest payments). Withdrawal by speculators would reduce demand by 15 to 20 percent, lowering property prices sharply. Meanwhile, introducing a full rent tax slowly and marginally would give property owners and Wall Street plenty of time to organize a public relations campaign to lobby against the tax and prevent further increases from being realized. It would be the late
19th-century fight all over again.

In sum, what appeared merely as a rent problem in George’s day has become a financial problem now that mortgage bankers end up with most of the current rental income. Taxing rents fully today would threaten indebted real estate (and monopolies) with default and banks with insolvency. Although landlords no longer control the world’s lawmaking bodies, land and natural monopolies remain the economy’s largest assets, and hence the major form of collateral that can be pledged to creditors to pay interest charges. This fact has prompted the financial sector to throw its political support behind real estate and monopolies as its major customer.

II Conclusion: George’s Political Legacy

PROGRESS AND POVERTY helped inspire the reform movement in the United States, yet George withdrew from its leadership despite his early position at its forefront. He was a loner, not a joiner. When New York City’s labor coalition nominated him as their celebrity candidate for mayor in 1886, he stripped away their reforms and ended up fighting with the political leaders and activists who were his natural constituency, moving to the right of the political spectrum.

A modern-day follower of George has likened his attitude to what Sir Basil Liddell-Hart called the “martyr” character, in contrast to the “strategist.”49 The martyr’s lot is to declare what is right for the world to hear without softening the message, and typically to suffer the consequences, almost reveling in rejection by the vested interests. The strategist’s task is to get measures implemented. George selected followers whose tactics emulated his spirit of martyrdom rather than developing alliances. Following his proclivities, they moved to the right wing of the political spectrum rather than working with the most successful reform groups.

To be sure, many socialists and anarchists, including Emma Goldman, were sent around the country speaking before early Henry George clubs. After George’s death, Louis Post’s Single-Tax periodical The Public was broadly pro-reform and gave sympathetic coverage to socialists. Still, the failure of the Single Tax movement can be attributed largely to its adoption of George’s own idiosyncrasies. He criticized the evils of landlordism without confronting the abuses of capital or placing land and real estate in the financial context of interest-bearing mortgage debt. Most seriously, he chose followers who made little attempt to develop a more general analysis along the broad lines that other reformers were pursuing. By focusing on ground rent to the exclusion of other forms of rentier income, and by opposing public regulation of industrial capital, they became opponents of mainstream reformers. Most became anti-socialist libertarians by the mid-20th century. Few played a role in academic economic discussion, nor did they create think tanks or research organizations to advocate land taxation. The last organ promoting the Single Tax, Britain’s Land and Liberty, recently ceased publication.

Most reformers, and also most industrialists for that matter, looked to the government to regulate the economy so as to minimize the exploitation and extortionate pricing in excess of what Patten called “physical valuation,” that is, direct non-rentier costs. A strong government was the only power able to counter monopolies, tax the land and collect economic rent.

George’s strongest political quality—his ability to place the problem of land and its rent at the center of political discussion—became his greatest shortcoming when it became exclusive and sectarian. Rent theory came to be so closely associated with George’s increasingly pro-capital, anti-labor and anti-government politics that the land tax began to sound crankish, prompting other reformers to avoid it. Even critics of property came to reject George. The reforms of the New Deal in the United States and of Britain’s Labour Party and other European social democratic parties followed just the opposite political alignment and strategy from that which he advocated. Their reforms were successful; the Single Tax was left standing at the gate.

This is what makes George so tragic a figure. His self-centered personality and political behavior helped bring about the opposite effect from that which he hoped to see. A major reason why subsequent reformers have ignored the land tax has been its identification with George’s reputation and his propensity—carried on by his followers—to fight against other reforms, especially those involving labor or strengthening government regulatory power.

His denunciation of the landlord’s free lunch inspired many muckrakers to expose the railroads, mining trusts and other trusts being forged in Wall Street offices and other financial centers, and to denounce watered financial costs as being as economically unnecessary as land rent. But George himself not only refrained from extending his concepts, he attacked his own associates for “diluting” the aim of taxing the land. His “Single Tax” thus became so single-minded as to make his followers sectarian. Promoted by a sect of martyrs, the Single Tax remained the most deeply challenging and hence implicitly revolutionary proposal of the 19th century, without the political tactics that would have been needed to achieve concrete reforms in the face of the power wielded by property owners over government, the press and universities. The cultishness of Single Taxers became an excuse for dropping rent theory from the academic curriculum, despite its position at the center of classical political economy challenging landlords and other vested interests.

The tragedy of Henry George was his self-destructive political strategy after he qot bit by the political bug in 1885. He alienated his closest followers and would-be supporters by refusing to discuss debt and interest. His Single Tax offended the propertied classes by threatening their free lunch. His Progress and Poverty made land taxation a popular political cause. This made his natural allies the socialists and labor parties. But he offended them by his attacks on government and on labor unions, leaving his followers to focus so one-sidedly on land rent that rent theory itself came to be viewed as an ill-tempered sectarian exercise.

Every dramatic hero has a tragic flaw. That of George was his encouragement of increasingly cultish followers who sought support from the propertied interests themselves—the very class against whom land taxation was directed—and from anti-socialists. George threw his support behind “capital,” and although his sectarian journal criticized monopoly gains, his books did not extend the critique of economic rent beyond land. The result was a failure to analyze extortionate monopoly “super-profits” as rent.

So thoroughly did advocates of public rent collection disappear from active participation in public debate after the income tax was introduced that no meaningful calculations were made as to just how much land rent, monopoly rent or other economic rent existed to be taxed, how large the market value of land was or the annual gains in market price. Thus, as rentier interests lowered the tax rate on “capital” gains sharply below income tax rates on earned income (wages and profits), there was no basis for pointing out that most “capital” gains consist of rising land prices.

Land remained the largest economic asset throughout the 20th century, and remains so today. But lacking a sense of proportion regarding the magnitude of its rent and proper valuation, advocates of land taxation had scant grounds for participating in debates over fiscal policy, or for countering the academic tendency to minimize rent. This attempt to trivialize ground rent and land valuation was shared by government statisticians. There was, in short, almost nothing to criticize in the idea that George had tried to popularize in Progress and Poverty. After World War I the economic, professional and political discussion became a one-sided defense of untaxing property rent and land-price gains.

There probably can be no greater temptation to sectarian infighting than the existence of a financial endowment. This became the case with the Georgist-funded institutions, and helps explain the long history of lawsuits among them. Claims to be a “true believer” have become weapons—although legally blunt ones—as George is not around to respond.

One looks in vain for followers of George with prestigious economic credentials such as those of other non-mainstream schools—the Marxists, Keynesians, monetarist Chicago School or post-Keynesians. Each of these schools has established its own journals and books, university departments, academically respected statistics and indeed, commentary on economic and social history to establish a working relationship with the mainstream. This cannot be said of George’s followers, and the problem may be traced back to George himself. In retrospect, one must conclude that George the politician turned out to be the worst enemy of George the economic journalist and reformer. This was the common theme of George’s political critics. Rarely has so well argued a tax reform with so wide an early following been handled with such political ineptitude.

In my own belief, the main reason why George’s followers have been so politically ineffective in mobilizing popular support (or even discussion) of a land tax is their attempt to become junior partners in a political alliance with libertarians that never had much chance of success. Libertarian ideology in America is essentially an anti-tax ideology, and a land tax remains among the most politically contentious economic proposals, having been a major factor impelling mainstream economics since Clark’s day away from the classical antipathy toward the “free lunch” of economic rent to a rationalization of such rent—and even land-price gains—as being earned. By turning the Henry George Schools into a funnel into the anti-tax ideology of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises, George’s followers have walked into an effective political wall, while breaking with the opposite wing of the political spectrum that still treats Progress and Poverty as a socialist classic. This political position reflects that of George himself. In the final analysis, this political problem boils down to one of personalities as loners prone to sectarianism, and a reluctance even to take their case of outsiders, that is, to the mainstream. Although Georgism failed to achieve land-value taxation for three reasons. First, although more than a century has passed since George’s death, Georgists have made no attempt to quantify the magnitude of land rent that can be taxed. Without such a calculation, it is not possible to give a sense of proportion as to how much of the federal, state and local budgets a land tax could provide.

Second, no concept of economic rent has been popularized, although this concept was central to classical political economy. Land rent is the paradigmatic example, but other forms of property rent are also important—minerals and fuels, the broadcasting and communications spectrum, patents and monopoly rent. Without distinguishing gross real estate rent from net economic rent—and distinguishing the rent-of-location for land sites from that portion of gross rent that reimburses property owners for their buildings—there is no basis in theory, and hence in statistics and fiscal practice, for appraising the magnitude of economic rent.

Third, Georgists have made no attempt to trace who ends up with land rent and other economic rent. This misses the symbiosis between mortgage banking and real estate that has developed over the past century. In Ricardo’s day, finance backed industry against England’s landlord class, anticipating that free trade would greatly expand markets for commercial lending. But by the late 19th century it became clear that real estate, monopolies and other rent-yielding assets were the major market for bank loans.

For real estate investors in today’s world, the motto is: “Rent is for paying interest.” What the tax collector relinquishes is “freed” to be pledged to banks—for loans to buy rent-yielding property. But Georgists have deemed the analysis of finance and Wall Street to be a socialist concern, and emulate George’s own conflation of physical and financial capital. There has been no attempt even to trace the incidence of land-price gains (“capital” gains), and many Georgists view such gains as legitimate returns to capital rather than as financial capitalizations of land rent bid up on credit. Not even the post-2002 real estate bubble has spurred research and publication along these lines. The failure to place land rent and other forms of economic rent in its macroeconomic setting has blocked a serious discussion of land-value taxation from academia and congressional law making, and hence from playing the popular role that it did in George’s own day.

Notes

1. Cherbuliez (1841: 128ff.). The title of this work, Wealth or Poverty? Is remarkably similar to George’s Progress and Poverty. Marx (1971:Part III, 397ff) cites this work in reviewing the early literature on rent theory and land-tax policy.

2. Commons (1918: 448ff). Commons had founded a Henry George club when in college. His subsequent views reflect the disillusionment that many of George’s early admirers felt.

3. Barker (1955: 513ff).

4. Ibid., 563. Barker points out (565ff) that on the occasion of an academic debate in which George participated at the annual meeting of the American Social Science Association in George’s annus horrabilus 1889, E. R. A. Seligman pointed out that “Bellamy’s socialism had grown at George’s expense because it recognized that other values than land gained unearned increments.” Seligman elaborated this line of criticism in subsequent writings.

5. Ibid., 533 points out that this meeting “does seem a high point in Henry George’s lifetime. Yet he actually attended only one or two sessions. . . . He found freedom, before he left, to do some sight-seeing in the City.”

6. As late as 1923, George’s political manager Louis Post, who became Assistant Secretary of Labor from 1913–1921, published his Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty with Kerr.

7. Patten (1891: 355).

8. Ibid., 361. By “watered stocks,” Patten meant arbitrary financial charges for securities issued and built into the railroads’ transport charges, typically for “fictitious” capital claims arranged by the insiders who controlled the railroads
for their own gain.

9. Sinclair (1924). For a discussion, see http://earthsharing.org.au/node/ 35.

10. Shaw (1995: 587ff).

11. For a full bibliography of Marx’s observations on George, see Hal Draper, Marx-Engels Cyclopedia (New York, Schocken Books), The Marx- Engels Glossary (New York: 1986), p. 78, The Marx-Engels Register (New York: 1985), #E174 (p. 104), and The Marx-Engels Chronicle (New York: 1985), pp. 217 (#23), 218 (#31), 220 (#61), 228 (#19), 229 (#27), 245 (#47). In April or May of 1881, Marx received copies of Progress and Poverty from John Swinton and Willard Brown, and later another from Friedrich Sorge, organizer of the Working Men’s Party in New York. On June 2, he described George as a “panacea monger,” and on December 15 he noted that George had embarrassed himself as a “humbug” on his lecture trip to Ireland and England. He made marginal notes in George’s book on The Irish Land Question, which Sorge asked to publish along with Marx’s letters regarding George. These observations were printed in Engels’, 1887 pamphlet on The Labor Movement in America. The George movement—The Knights of Labor—The Socialists.

12. Marx, [1847]: 155.

13. Letter from Nelson Field, The New Age, July 4, 1912, p. 239. The debate had begun in December 1908 and continued through Mr. Fels’s death in 1914.

14. Patten, “The Interpretation of Ricardo,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 7 (April 1893): 322–353, in Essays in Economic Theory (1924): 153. Hudson (1975) discusses Patten’s points further.

15. Patten ([1924] 1893: 153). Hudson (1975) discusses Patten’s points further.

16. Anon., Socialism vs. Single Tax (1907: 45). A similar point is made in Maguire and Harriman (1895).

17. Progress and Poverty, Book 3, Ch. 4: “a government bond is not capital, nor yet is it the representative of capital. . . . The immense sums which are . . . taken from the produce of every modern country to pay interest on public debts are not the earnings or increase of capital—are not really interest in the strict sense of the term, but are taxes levied on the produce of labor and capital, leaving so much less for wages and so much less for real interest.” By “interest in the strict sense of the term,” George meant profits on direct investment.

18. Engels to Otto von Boenigk, Aug. 21, 1890 (Marx and Engels n.d.: 716).

19. Quoted by Louis Untermann, Anon. (1907: 4ff).

20. Social Problems, Ch. 16, and Progress and Poverty, Book 8, Ch. 3.

21. In “The Letter Carriers” (The Standard, July 14, 1888), George wrote: “The true reason for carrying of letters by the government is that the business is in its nature a monopoly. . . . as the development and integration of society goes on, still other necessary monopolies are arising. Thus the proper functions of government—national, state, and municipal—are constantly increasing.” See also Social Problems (Ch. 16, “The Functions of Government”): “The great ‘railroad question,’ with its dangers and perplexities, is a most striking instance of the evil consequences which result from the failure of the state to assume functions that properly belong to it. . . . a union of railroading with the other functions of government is inevitable. We may not like it, but we cannot avoid it. Either government must manage the railroads, or the railroads must manage the government.” Citing the Post Office, as well as England’s telegraph and parcel-carrying and savings-bank businesses as efficient government enterprises, George concluded: “All I have said of the railroad applies, of course, to the telegraph, the telephone, the supplying of cities with gas, water, heat and electricity,—in short to all businesses which are in their nature monopolies. . . . Businesses that are in their nature monopolies are properly functions of the state.”

22. Patten (1892).

23. Patten (1892: 96).
24. Flürscheim (1902: 353). 42 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology1

25. Arthur Kitson, A Scientific Solution of the Money Question, quoted in Flürscheim (1902: 356).

26. Flürscheim (1902: 491), citing a letter of Aug. 28, 1890.

27. Tolstoy (1891: 133ff). This was the first major group of social essays translated into English. Flürscheim picked up Tolstoy’s essay in his Clue to the Economic Labyrinth (156ff). George’s followers have failed to mention this critique.

28. Flürscheim (1902: 85).

29. Bennett (1895: 38 and 26).

30. Brown (1898: 91, 127, and 94).

31. Brown (1898: 91).

32. Barker (1955: 533).

33. Ibid., 564.

34. The most he would grant was that “[t]here is no more reason why the state should lend its machinery of constables, sheriffs, courts, and . . . its prisons to the collection of the debts of the individual, than that it should undertake to black his boots in the morning or tuck him into bed at night. The abolition of all laws for the collection of private debts would not only free our judicial machinery from a clogging mass of business which to a large degree prevents its performance of proper functions, but it would unquestionably lead to a far higher standard of personal and commercial morality, since character would then be the prime element in credit” (“‘Various Matters:’ On the Debt,” The Standard, Feb. 11, 1888). In addition to being legally unattainable under the conditions of modern civilization, George’s position did not address the problem on which his financially-oriented critics focused.

35. Socialism vs. Single Tax (see fn 12):17.

36. Ibid.

37. Thompson (1882).

38. See especially Report of the Commissioner of Patents, 1849 and 1852, Vol. II: Agriculture. I have surveyed these environmental arguments as they pertain to the trade debate in Economics and Technology in 19th-CenturyAmerican Thought: The Neglected American Economists (New York: Garland, 1975): 353–370.

39. Barker (1955: 241).

40. Patten (1891: 356).

41. See Mason Gaffney, “Neo-classical Economics as a Stratagem Against Henry George,” in Gaffney and Harrison (1994: 29–163).

42. In Capital and Interest (1890), Eugen Böhm-Bawerk criticized George’s views as an example of “naive productivity theory” of capital and interest.

43. Flürscheim (1902: 471).

44. Arthur Lewis, Ten Blind Leaders of the Blind (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr):39f.

45. Wells (1936: 37). Henry George’s Political Critics 43

46. “A Reformer’s Note Book,” The New Age, November 14, 1918, p. 26.

47. Robert V. Andelson, “Neo-Georgism,” in Andelson (2004: 723). For a similar judgment, which he traces back to George’s own personality and policy, see Wenzer (2000). I discuss much the same points in Hudson (2004).

48. Ibid., 724ff., citing Hudson (2000: 23ff), “Land Taxation in Mesopotamia and Classical Antiquity,” in Andelson (2000: 23ff).

49. Hart (1967: xx–xxi). I am grateful to Dan Sullivan for this and for drawing my attention to numerous references from George’s writings, to Mark Sullivan for the reference to Tucker and to Bill Frambach for the Fillebrown reference.

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——. (2004). Critics of Henry George, Vol. 2. Oxford: Blackwell.

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*The author is Distinguished Research Professor of Economics, University of Missouri (Kansas City).

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 67, No. 1 (January, 2008).
© 2008 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.