Featured artist Irie Wata
It was not Henry George, but Joseph Pierre Proudhon who suggested that property is theft. He explained that if we take a property's title to see who owned it before, and before them, and before them, all the way to the beginning, we would inevitably find the person who stole it in the first place. From this perspective this idea that the land essentially should belong to everyone is common sense. Things did not, however, evolve in such a way that we can now claim the Earth equally for all. Property ownership has become a basic human right, albeit unfortunately, a right only to those who can afford it. There is no turning back now so what is the remedy? Henry George asked himself why it is that progress continues alongside poverty. His inquiry into the fundamentals of political economy and the philosophy of labor led him to the simple understanding that all value arises from a common stock. Although he would argue that intellectual property is common stock, he was able to clearly exemplify how land and labor are exploited and how a simple land value taxation system could remedy poverty all together. A self-educated autodidactic man, traveling from San Francisco to New York, wrote and published his first and most widely known book Progress and Poverty at age 40.
Henry George
As the story goes, he fell to the floor and tears upon finishing. Karl Marx had not yet been translated into English and Progress and Poverty became very successful for its time. Through this success George was able to have an abundant political career and has now influenced many economists and philosophers after him, including Milton Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz. The primary differences between Marxist-thought and Georgist-thought is that Marx put control in the hands of the proletariat, which is perhaps great politically speaking. However, this does not seem to solve problems economically speaking. Marx balanced the power structure in theory, but didn't directly address what drives progress and what creates poverty. We can find many examples of places where people own land and where poverty still exists. The key factor to George's philosophy is that anyone claiming ownership of land must then pay a land value tax. This land value tax serves as a taxation in the form of rent which drives progress. The rich and poor alike pay rent on land that they claim ownership of. In the case of a wealthy person claiming ownership of land, they could easily allow people to live on the land for free so long as it still pays the land value tax. Just the same they could ask for their tenants to divide that land value tax between themselves. in any case the land value tax then returns into a revolving fund of sorts for the benefit of all. The question that comes up for modern-day land investors is, "Why would I pay rent on my own land?". It seems like a fair question, although it is somewhat myopic. Perhaps if we expand on this question it might sound something more like, "Why would I pay rent on my own land when I can continue to exploit it for resources and exploit my tenants for their labor?" Leo Tolstoy was a promoter of Georgist themes and himself suggested that to collect rent as profit on land where one does not live is the same as having slaves. For many this sounds quite harsh, when actually it just points out the extreme injustice in our current models of land tenure. The ideas of Henry George were intended to be applied to a centralized national government as we have today. In today's business world it is increasingly more popular to have a business be socially responsible. I can imagine that in the near future the ideas of Henry George could be very beneficial to a company's image if used appropriately. For example, if Google, Amazon or Facebook were do pay a land value tax on any or all of the properties that they have acquired, all of this rental revenue when turned back to the collective good in the form of healthcare, maternity leave, retirement, and other benefits, would be easily accounted for and could even be operated as a separate business entity and the rent itself as a business write-off. George's philosophy has a wide range of applications. The rise of decentralized technologies like blockchain and others could be useful adjuncts in the Georgist arena. In any case I feel it is important to remember the basic premise that exploitation of land and labor is an injustice to humanity. Both progress and poverty have a cause. George's land value tax promotes progress while eliminating unnecessary poverty, although this concept can be challenging to fully understand, it is a deceptively simple application. Starting today we can hold land owners accountable to drive progress, eliminate poverty and create a more humane existence on planet Earth.
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