Since 1932, tens of thousands of students
have taken courses in economics and social
philosophy at the Henry George School, gaining
insights into the nature of society and
practical solutions for our seemingly
intractable social problems. Classes, offered in
English and in Spanish, attract students from
all walks of life, and all levels of academic
achievement.
The major program of study, Principles of
Political Economy, is comprised of three
ten-week courses: Progress and Poverty: First
Principles (which is the pre-requisite for
all other courses), Applied Economics: The
Issue of Globalization and Economic
Science: Progress and Prosperity.
Our headquarters is a freshly remodeled
townhouse with five comfortable classrooms.
We're on 30th Street, between Park Avenue South
and Lexington Avenue, two short blocks from the
Lex Ave. IRT stop at 28th St. For over seven
decades, New Yorkers have made the Henry George
School a regular stop for "learning for its own
sake" in a friendly and energizing setting.
Why study political economy?
Many students at the Henry George School have
already studied "Economics", but gained nothing
from it that they could apply to help them
understand their world. We refer to our courses
as "political economy", rather than the more
modern "economics", to stress our search for
basic principles, true in all places and times,
upon which a clear understanding of economic
behavior can be built. This solid foundation is
necessary for understanding any science. This
work is vitally important -- for, unlike
physics, botany or astronomy, political economy
affects every person, every day: it is the
science of how people make a living.
The basic question that Henry George sought
to answer is still with us: Why in spite of all
the inventions, innovations and marvelous
increases in productivity, do wages not
increase? Why are so many people who are willing
and able to work, unable to exchange their labor
for the products of other people's labor? Henry
George approached the problem with clear logic,
and he advanced a practical solution.
The School and the Georgist Movement
Although you don't have to become a "Georgist"
to benefit from your experience at the School,
the Henry George School was founded as part of a
reform movement which sought to establish
fundamental economic justice and sustainable
prosperity for all. The "Single Tax" movement
was inspired by Henry George's classic work
Progress and Poverty (1879), "An inquiry
into the cause of industrial depressions and the
increase of want with the increase of wealth."
Progress and Poverty was a runaway best
seller and, to this day, is the all-time most
widely-read book on political economy. A long
list of eminent people, including Winston
Churchill, Sun Yat Sen, Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey
and Albert Einstein, endorsed George's
proposals.
In its heyday, the Single Tax movment was
large and vibrant, organizing political parties
in the US and Great Britain, getting candidates
elected to office, and achieving public-revenue
policy reforms, notably in Denmark, Australia
and Taiwan. But, world events, particularly
World War I and the Great Depression of the
1930s, sapped the political strength of the
Georgist movement. It became evident that more
people had to follow Henry George's advice that
Social reform is not the be secured by
noice 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.
- Social Problems, 1886
Realizing Utopia or
Sundry Reflections on the Future of Georgism
Cay Hehner, Ph.D.
[A
speech delivered at the banquet of the Council
of Georgist Organizations conference held in
Philadelphia, 6 August, 2005. Cay Hehner is
Director of the Henry George School of Social
Science, New York, NY. Reprinted from
GroundSwell, September-October 2005]
"After all the
rest has failed you shall find within yourself
the key to perfect change" Sri Aurabindo
It is an honor to work with people who have not
become cynical in Face of the world's dire
injustices. I want to thank all of you who have been
organizing this CGO Conference, and all who have
been responsible for hiring me to the position as
Director of the Henry George School, especially its
President and all its members of the Board of
Trustees. Since I have worked for the
UNESCO-endorsed international city-project Auroville
in South India since 1978 this has been the most
rewarding work experience of my life. Even with
working weekends this kind of work is its own reward
regardless of its remuneration in lucre.
The media recently ran a story of Ted Gwartney,
long-time Georgist and assessor of Bridgeport, Ct..
having upgraded the land value of a considerable
piece of farm property owned by Mel Gibson, because
he did not find it credible that Gibson was actually
doing any personal work there as a farmer. The
downside of this, Ted, of course, is that none of us
will henceforth ever be eligible for a bit part in
one of his movies.
In expressing my gratitude I have to single out one
more person who has been my mentor, since the days
when I first became a student and then a teacher at
the Henry George School, and that person is George
Collins. Everything that I learned about Henry
George I more or less owe to George Collins. If from
kindergarden through postgraduate work I had a
hundred teachers - let's say they were a hundred -
about 95 of them were so bad that I can still only
speak of them in expletives deleted. There were five
that were great, inspiring, and genuine educators.
And George Collins was one of these five.
And this leads me to the topic of this evening: How
to Realize Utopia and the Future of Georgism. I have
a trick question for you: What do George Collins and
I have in common? It may sound presumptuous to make
an undue comparison with my mentor, but 1 think the
one thing we have in common -- and we talked about
this recently. George -- George Collins and I seem
to be the only Gcorgists who have no cavils with
Henry George! We think Henry George had great ideas
and they can be implemented today exactly as he
proposed. All the other Georgists seem to be saying
George is alright but here he was wrong and there he
made a mistake and that doesn't work. In the
day-to-day grind of our work we tend to lose touch
of a lot of things. We tend to lose sight of the
horizon. My father was a four-time Gold medalist and
he sailed the Atlantic twice, the Pacific twice and
he taught me the virtue of keeping the larger
picture in mind. If you go on a long arduous voyage
into the unknown you need to have your navigation
intact, your celestial navigation. This is an
in-joke between some of the HGS Board members and
faculty and myself referring to a trip we once look
together. In other words when you go on a difficult
voyage into the unknown you need to know were you
are going! If we lose sight of our horizn and our
stars as humankind we shall not survive. John Dewey
said in his famous appraisal of world philosophy
that from Plato down there are only about ten social
philosophers of the first magnitude and he counted
Henry George amongst them. We concur entirely. There
are only about one, two handful of philosophers who
have throughout the vicissitudes of the ages not
lost sight of the horizon for humankind.
Who is also certainly amongst those ten, is the
Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo, one of whose
aphorisms I have selected as the guiding idea for
this speech.. Sri Aurobindo was also the founder of
the City of Auroville for which I worked as a young
man at the age of 22, four years younger than my own
son is now. Lindy Davies recently put an article on
his website entitled: Malthus -- Still Wrong After
All Those Years. I couldn't agree more and next to
the excellent arguments Lindy Davies puts forth
proving the good minister wrong there is one
additional one that I always found most striking. If
Malthus were right none of us could be here, at
least not in these numbers. Malthus proved
conclusively that the earth would not be capable to
support a world population of 6.6 billion. So in a
way all of us through our very existence are proving
Neo-Malthusianism or Geo-Malthusianism - to use an
appropriate term of Mark Sullivan and Lindy Davies
-- wrong. The on-going refutation of Malthus does
not only mark one of the stellar hours in the
History of Philosophy, it marks in a way the stellar
hour and birth of Henry George's own philosophy
which obviously encompasses but does not remain
limited to the land question.
The conundrum that so baffled Malthus is indeed a
vexing and serious one: why do with increasing
material and technological progress increasing
numbers of people are forced to a race to the bottom
below the level of sustainable subsistence rather
than being engaged in a leisurely walk to the top of
wealth and comfort for all? According to the last
count of the UN about half the world population
lives on less than two dollars a day, that is, it is
imminently impacted by life-threatening levels of
poverty. This is a scandal that should put all of us
to shame! Especially so, since no eminent economist,
and no one in his or her right mind who has given
the question some thought, denies that world
production of food, shelter, and clothing can take
comfortably care of many times a world population
than the one we have.
Malthus, like Marx, saw and identified a social
issue of paramount importance, but also like Marx he
did not happen upon the right solution. The issue in
Malthus's case is. of course, overpopulation.
Malthus's undoing was not the identification of that
issue, his undoing was that, albeit, he was
historically made the first paid economist, he
understood precious little of economics and in our
humble opinion he would have fared far better
staying with his original line of vocation of being
a parson.
It was Henry George who correctly pointed out that
Malthus analysis never penetrated the surface. In
identifying not increasing world populations as the
main poverty-inducing culprit but Ricardo's Law of
Rent, George cut the Gordian knot of economics and
social science. In reversing the increasing
monopolizing of land and natural resources through
Land Value Taxation (LVT) George gave a practicable
solution to the problem of world poverty and a
credible superhighway to wealth and well-being for
all.
Mark Sullivan some years ago wrote a penetrating
essay in which he analyzed correctly the various
failures of Georgism to achieve a level of
recognition and importance that it no doubt merits
on the mere quality of its veracity. We would like
to take Lindy Davies's and Mark Sullivan's essays as
points of departure and in identifying the major
problems and solutions we are facing at the present
time and underscore why George is still right after
all these years and how he did not only give us a
blueprint of the Land Value Tax, but a concrete
vision of a palpable, practical and highly
realizable Utopia.
When asked what is holding Georgism back as a world
force (I mean we have the earth on our side, that is
not bad for starters, and it is more than anyone
else has), when examining the question carefully
four answers come to mind:
For about the last century and a half
Marxism monopolized progressive thought to such
a degree on a global scale that it made it all
but impossible to continue activism along
Georgist lines without constantly having to
defend oneself the reproach of impracticality
and the condoning of social injustice from the
left (of not expropriating all the means of
production), and of being a kind of totalitarian
socialism in itself from the right.
The second answer is the obvious and rather
deplorable human trait to fight more with one's
brethren than with one's enemies (Does that
sound familiar?) As long as we continue to
magnify the mote in our brother's eye while
sweeping under the rug the beam in our own eye
we shall continue to remain a house divided
against itself and we shall continue to remain
inconsequential and weak as a social force.
The third answer is a kind of faulty
historical analysis. It is no doubt correct that
great things have been achieved in the past. It
is no doubt further correct that seasoned
veterans of the Georgist movement have much
wisdom and experience to contribute to our
cause. It is incorrect, however, to think that
we can survive as a social, economic, and
political force if we target as our first and
primary audience and potential of alliance and
allegiance the class of 1935 rather than the
class of 2005. It is correct that those who do
not know their history are condemned to repeat
its mistakes. Reverting back to the past,
however, as a social movement does not lead to
the conquest of the Future, but to a premature
death and decay. The Future are our children and
grandchildren and the upcoming generations, not
our grandparents and great grandparents, God
bless their hearts.
The fourth answer to what is hindering the
realization of a Georgist economics is of course
the question of ownership. If we continue to
monopolize Henry George's analysis and economic
insights and fail to put it at the disposition
of the world in face of the most serious global
threats the planets has ever faced on a global
scale we make ourselves complicit to its
destruction rather than - as was originally
intended by George -- to contribute to its
peaceful continuation and solution of its
problems. In other words we have to open our
discourse to the world rather than staying in
our comfortable parochial little corner.
Many Georgists had parents or relatives from the
preceding generations who adhered to the same
philosophy. My own grandfather was a Georgist, so we
pass on the torch from generation to generation, and
that is well.
Another trick question: Who now are the potential
Georgists of the future and from where do we recruit
them? I don't think that there is any question in
the world that is more easily answered.
Potential Georgists are 66 billion people in the
world and our "ground of recruitment" is the Good
Earth in its entirety. Tolstoy was right: Henry
George cannot be refuted, he can only be ignored! It
is up to us who have "seen the cat", or who have
understood and tested the validity of his economic
theorems to spread that message. How many people on
earth now don't have any direct access to land, how
many in being thus locked out from the land and thus
from the gaining of their rightful livelihood are
imperiled in their very existence? I have not seen
the latest figures, but my guess is that this number
by far exceeds the 3.25 billion skirting poverty
line as quoted above. It is basically the ratio of
landowners and natural resource monopolists to
non-landowners and non-monopolists. A valiant war
was fought in this country from 1860-1865 to end
slavery on ethnic grounds once and for all.
Unfortunately, given today's economic practices in
most parts of the globe, this becomes only a heroic
job half done. Slavery on the grounds of economic
injustice is rampant and all-pervasive everywhere
and as long as we let this injustice remain
unchallenged and unabolished, our entire planet,
nay, all of our very existence remains gravely and
permanently imperiled! What lies before us is not to
fight the US-Civil War all over again, but to
prevent a War of Secession between the so few very
rich and the so many so very poor from going global
and literally blowing all of us individually and
collectively to smithereens off the face of the
planet. Upton Sinclair identified the Spanish Civil
War fought from 1936 to 1939 as the beginning of the
first Global Civil War. And unfortunately we are
right in it!
To go back to our initial quote: "After all the rest
has failed we shall find within ourselves the key to
perfect change." This quote from the Indian
philosopher, statesman, and revolutionary Sri
Aurobindo highlights and illuminates one of the
fortes of George's insights and it throws into stark
relief what needs to be done. We ourselves as zoon
politikon - to use the phrase of Aristotle - or
barely thinking social animals are imminently and
eminently depending on nature for our very survival,
indeed, in a certain sense, we are barely anything
else but nature ourselves. If we earmark nature and
the ownership and access thereof, to all but a
privileged "happy few" we indeed are sawing off the
very branch of livelihood on which we are sitting
ourselves. All natural resources have been
monopolized down to and including water. Air has not
been successfully monopolized, no doubt plans in
this direction are in the works, it has only been
exposed to global pollution which in a number of
densely populated areas at peak times reaches
life-threatening levels. One does not need to be a
trained economist or a died-in-the-wool Georgist to
realize that the moment all air has been monopolized
and put up for sale, those who don't happen to have
the ready change to buy their very air to breathe
will perish. If we allow this to happen we enter
into connivance with a kind of unconscious or
half-conscious Eco-Fascism or Eco-Social Darwinism.
And by inference we become only slightly less guilty
of an avoidable foolishly man-made global
catastrophe than all those in the first decades of
the 20th Century who did not check and nip in the
bud Hitler's extremely avoidable rise to power.
It is a widely accepted truism that there remains an
unbridgeable gulf and mutually exclusive dichotomy
between economics and ecology -- between the Science
of Wealth and the Science of the Environment. Either
you make profit and money galore for the happy few
and you destroy the environment as an inevitable
fall-out effect or you pamper nature and forfeit all
profit. We identified this land of fallacious
thinking as Geo or rather Neo-Geo-Malthusianism a
little while ago. The man who sanely, forcefully,
and rightfully exploded this kind of fallacy of
course was Henry George. He becomes not only the
father, but the "mother" of all ecologists, because
in admiting the traditionally "female" element of
Nature and traditionally "male" element of Spirit
and all the other various dichotomies into the
process of analysis he reestablished the original
balance and he found the key and correct solution to
our continual conundrums. Nobody in this world is or
ever has been so depraved as to wanting to sell his
or her own mother. Not even Hitler!
Comparative anthropology teaches us that the vast
majority of cultures both ancient and contemporary
identifies Heaven with the male and Earth with the
female principle. We globally think it the ultimate
epitome of ethical depravation to sell our mothers,
however, we think nothing of it to sell land
perpetually! If there were no other arguments
against the absolute private ownership of land to
the detriment of the communal and "eminent domain"
interest there always remains one that strikes me as
more convincing than all the rest of them put
together. Absolute private ownership of land
presupposes the practically eternal life of the
individual proprietor. Short of achieving that I
fail to see how it can be otherwise justified.
I would like to end these reflections with a
question and with a proposal: The question is the
obvious one: How could we have gone so very wrong
economically for such a very long time given the
collective genius of all the eminent economists of
all ages? The answer leads to another question:
Since economics and the world economies have been so
very mismanaged to all of our detriment for all this
time the only possible solution to this dismal
economic quandary is the following: The great
economists haven't done their homework properly!
Rephrase this as another question and you get: Which
of the great economists haven't done their homework?
And for the answer I would like to single out all
but two of the most eminent: Adam Smith on the
right, and Karl Marx on the left, both arguably with
Henry George the most globally influential
economists of all times.
Strangely enough they all firmly stand on the
irrefutable and well-established grounds of the
School of Classical Economics. And with equal and
unexpected strangeness they all do agree on the
fundamentals:
Land, Labor, and Capital are the principal basic
factors of production; rent, wages, and interest are
the avenues of [re-]distribution. While Smith and
Marx pay ample, initial lip service to that
trichotomy, they quickly forget the factor land or
nature for all practical purposes and henceforth
work with an equation of two elements, leaving the
third, most basic, and most importantly nourishing
and balancing element out and unheeded. It may not
be a coincidence in this context that Smith was a
bachelor and that Marx was heavily abusive of his
wife Jenny von Westphalen. And it may not be a
mistake either that Henry George was by all accounts
a considerate husband and ardent life-long lover of
his consort Annie Fox George. So George alone did
his homework and never for one second forgot to
include land/nature as the basic factor of the
economic equation.
For that reason he alone of all the great economic
thinkers is still with us and we have to go back to
the future to redress the global balance and
re-establish the lost balance between ecology and
economics according to his theorems. And this leads
me to a concluding proposal. If we want to stop
dividing our own house sincerely and if we want to
stop to look for minute motes in the eyes of our
brethren while sweeping underline carpet the
gigantic beams of our own eyes till the carpet
scandalously hits the ceiling and breaks the roof of
the divided house why not stop looking at this
dismal spectacle of seeing the Nobel Prize of
Economics be given every year to economists whose
equations solve nothing, but who just entrench and
deepen the gulf between the Haves and the Have-Nots?
It is true that the venerable William Vickery
received the Prize, alas, for a piece of economic
analysis which had nothing whatsoever to do with
Georgist economics. At the outset of the 3rd
Millenium to my knowledge we have three great
Georgist economists worthy of that prize -- and I
gladly take additional suggestions:
The late Professor Robert Andelson
Professor Mason Gaffney
Professor Steven Cord
Why not propose all three as candidates for the
Nobel Prize of Economics 2005 and set a sign and
example of our joint will to go forward and in an
open, united, and integrating fashion?
In concluding these reflections I would like to
return to my initial question: the reason for the
failure of Georgian to become a visible global
force. After everything has been analyzed, said and
done, it amounts to a common weakness in many
Georgist friends and many an aspiring Georgist
student, teacher, or activist: Don't put your light
under a bushel! I repeat: Don't put your light under
a bushel. After all has been analyzed, said and
done, two things are needed to change our nature and
implement social justice on a global scale -- and
here I am quoting again from Sri Aurobindo: If you
have the twin qualities of Courage and Love, all the
rest will be added onto you.