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Henry George: Moses, Apostle
of Freedom (1878 speech)
Moses saw that the real cause of the
enslavement of the masses of Egypt was – what has
everywhere produced enslavement – the possession by a
class of land upon which and from which the whole people
must live. He saw that to permit in land the same
unqualified private ownership that by natural right
attaches to the things produced by labour, would be
inevitably to separate the people into the very rich and
the very poor, inevitably to enslave labour – to make
the few the masters of the many, no matter what the
political forms, to bring vice and degradation no matter
what the religion.
And with the foresight of the philosophic
statesman who legislates not for the need of a day, but
for all the future, he sought, in ways suited to his
times and conditions, to guard against this
error.
Everywhere in the Mosaic
institutions is the land treated as the gift of the
Creator to His common creatures, which no one has the
right to monopolise. Everywhere it is, not your
estate, or your property, not the land which you bought,
or the land which you conquered, but "the land which the
Lord thy God giveth thee" – "the land which the
Lord lendeth thee". And by practical legislation, by
regulations to which he gave the highest sanctions, he
tried to guard against the wrong that converted ancient
civilisations into despotisms – the wrong that in
after centuries ate out the heart of Rome, that produced
the imbruting serfdom of Poland and the gaunt misery of
Ireland, the wrong that is today filling American cities
with idle men, and our virgin states with
tramps.
He not only provided for a redistribution of the
land for every fifty people, and for making it fallow and
common every seventh year, but by the institution of the
Jubilee he provided for a redistribution of the land
every fifty years, and made monopoly
impossible.
I do not say that these institutions were, for
their ultimate purpose, the best that might even then
have been devised; but Moses had to work, as all great
constructive statesmen have to work, with the tools that
came to his hand, and upon materials as he found them.
Still less do I mean to say that forms suitable for that
time and people are suitable for every time and people.
I ask, not veneration of the form, but
recognition of the spirit.
Yet how common it is to venerate
the form and to deny the spirit. There are many
who believe that the Mosaic institutions were literally
dictated by the Almighty, yet who would denounce as
irreligious any application of their spirit to the
present day. And yet today how much we owe to these
institutions! This very day the only
thing that stands between our working classes and
ceaseless toil is one of these Mosaic
institutions.
Let the mistakes of those who think
that "man was made for the Sabbath," rather than
"the Sabbath was made for man," be
what they may; that there is one day in
the week that the working people may call their own,
one day in the week on which hammer is silent and loom
stands idle, is due, through Christianity, to Judaism
– to the code promulgated in the Sinaitic
wilderness. ...
read the whole
speech
Lindy Davies: Land and Justice
We were talking about the tendency for landowners to
use land as an investment — a sensible thing to do
— not to use it now if they don't need to, but to
think in terms of enjoying its increase in value over
time. We even identified that as the key to the problem
of poverty. But — good heavens, what can we do
about that? Isn't that just how the economy works? Isn't
the private ownership of land a basic part of a modern
economy? How can we do without such an important
institution?
Or in other words — won't the poor always be
with us?
Not necessarily. It has been plain, since very
earliest days of civil society, that the private
ownership of land leads to exploitation and great
extremes of wealth and poverty. And, since the time of
the Book of Leviticus, we have had a pretty good idea of
what to do about it. In that book were recorded the words
"The land shall not be sold for ever, for the land is
Mine, for ye are strangers and sojourners with me."
This ideal was codified into a remarkable three-stage
program for economic justice and social harmony: the land
laws of Leviticus. The stages were:
1. The Sabbath. Every seventh day
was the Lord's day; people were enjoined to keep it
holy and refrain from work. Now, we were told in Sunday
school that this was all about going to church, but, as
so often happens, our teachers missed the deeper
significance. Kids who try to get out of, say, taking
out the garbage on the Sabbath realized that the
prohibition was really against gainful work; folks were
still allowed to weed the garden and stuff.
What the Sabbath did was to force people to focus on
things that had meaning beyond striving and striving to
get ahead. Indeed, if one did work on the Sabbath,
while one's neighbors did not, one could become
wealthier, at their expense — which was why the
Sabbath was a very big deal: one of the ten
commandments.
2. The Sabbatical. Every seventh year,
the fields were to lie fallow — thus recognizing
the right of the earth itself to be protected against
depletion and misuse. And, in the sabbatical year,
debts were to be forgiven. A debt that could not be
paid off after six years was well on the way to
becoming a usurious burden, a guaranteed flow from the
labors of one into the coffers of another. The
canceling of debts in the seventh year was designed to
ensure that nobody got too far ahead, or too far
behind.
3. The Jubilee. Even seven times seven
years (actually, every 50th year), each family could
return to its original allotment, or heritage, of land
— even if it had been sold in the meantime. Under
biblical law, then, land could not be sold for ever
— never for more than a single generation.
Now it is interesting to note that the economic vision
presented in the bible is not a precursor of communism.
Two of the ten commandments explicitly support the
institution of private property, and the prophets
consistently railed against landlords and rulers who
robbed the people of the fruits of their labor. The laws
of Leviticus, which Jesus said he "came not to destroy
but to fulfill," envisioned a community in which everyone
was secure in his own home and property, "beneath his
vine and fig tree".
(Incidentally, the quote on the American Liberty Bell,
from Leviticus, chapter 25, was a direct reference to
these principles : "Proclaim liberty throughout the land
and to all the people thereof." It was a reference to the
Jubilee, and the freedom it provided was from debt and
servitude.)
The division is clear: there is to be a sacred right
of private property in the things that are made by
people. But people were not to own the things that were
made by God. The 7th commandment sums up both principles
in 4 words: Thou shalt not steal.
Modern society has looked away from these principles,
calling them quaint, naive, inapplicable to the
complexities of our time — yet, modern society
finds itself mired in chronic economic and social
problems for which it can find no solutions — and
which threaten to pull down all the advances of
civilization into a dark age — occasioned by some
combination of war, financial implosion or ecological
collapse.
If there is any way out of this dark future, it can
only come by way of solving the problem of land and
justice.
Fortunately, there exists a plan for that.
This plan takes the shape of a "fiscal reform",
because it applies a definition of the relationship
between the individual and the society that is consistent
with both economic efficiency and moral law. It calls for
us to respect the right of labor to create and to save
wealth, and we acknowledge that the value of land is
created not by its “owners”, but by the
entire community.
Therefore, we will abolish all taxes on income,
products and sales — and collect the full rental
value of land and other natural resources for public
revenue. ... read the whole
speech
James Kiefer: James Huntington and the
ideas of Henry George
Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty, argued
that, while some forms of wealth are produced by human
activity, and are rightly the property of the producers
(or those who have obtained them from the previous owners
by voluntary gift or exchange), land and natural
resources are bestowed by God on the human race, and that
every one of the N inhabitants of the earth has a claim
to 1/Nth of the coal beds, 1/Nth of the oil wells, 1/Nth
of the mines, and 1/Nth of the fertile soil. God wills a
society where everyone may sit in peace under his own
vine and his own fig tree.
The Law of Moses undertook to implement this by making
the ownership of land hereditary, with a man's land
divided among his sons (or, in the absence of sons, his
daughters), and prohibiting the permanent sale of land.
(See Leviticus 25:13-17,23.) The most a man might do with
his land is sell the use of it until the next Jubilee
year, an amnesty declared once every fifty years, when
all debts were cancelled and all land returned to its
hereditary owner.
Henry George's proposed implementation is to tax all
land at about 99.99% of its rental value, leaving the
owner of record enough to cover his bookkeeping expenses.
The resulting revenues would be divided equally among the
natural owners of the land, viz. the people of the
country, with everyone receiving a dividend check
regularly for the use of his share of the earth (here I
am anticipating what I think George would have suggested
if he had written in the 1990's rather than the
1870's).
This procedure would have the effect of making the
sale price of a piece of land, not including the price of
buildings and other improvements on it, practically zero.
The cost of being a landholder would be, not the original
sale price, but the tax, equivalent to rent. A man who
chose to hold his "fair share," or 1/Nth of all the land,
would pay a land tax about equal to his dividend check,
and so would break even. By 1/Nth of the land is meant
land with a value equal to 1/Nth of the value of all the
land in the country.
Naturally, an acre in the business district of a great
city would be worth as much as many square miles in the
open country. Some would prefer to hold more than one
N'th of the land and pay for the privilege. Some would
prefer to hold less land, or no land at all, and get a
small annual check representing the dividend on their
inheritance from their father Adam.
Note that, at least for the able-bodied, this solves
the problem of poverty at a stroke. If the total land and
total labor of the world are enough to feed and clothe
the existing population, then 1/Nth of the land and 1/Nth
of the labor are enough to feed and clothe 1/Nth of the
population. A family of 4 occupying 4/Nths of the land
(which is what their dividend checks will enable them to
pay the tax on) will find that their labor applied to
that land is enough to enable them to feed and clothe
themselves. Of course, they may prefer to apply their
labor elsewhere more profitably, but the situation from
which we start is one in which everyone has his own plot
of ground from which to wrest a living by the strength of
his own back, and any deviation from this is the result
of voluntary exchanges agreed to by the parties directly
involved, who judge themselves to be better off as the
result of the exchanges.
Some readers may think this a very radical proposal.
In fact, it is extremely conservative, in the sense of
being in agreement with historic ideas about land
ownership as opposed to ownership of, say, tools or
vehicles or gold or domestic animals or other movables.
The laws of English-speaking countries uniformly
distinguish between real property (land) and personal
property (everything else). In this context, "real" is
not the opposite of "imaginary." It is a form of the word
"royal," and means that the ultimate owner of the land is
the king, as symbol of the people. Note that
English-derived law does not recognize "landowners." The
term is "landholders." The concept of eminent domain is
that the landholder may be forced to surrender his
landholdings to the government for a public purpose.
Historically, eminent domain does not apply to property
other than land, although complications arise when there
are buildings on the land that is being seized.
I will mention in passing that the proposals of Henry
George have attracted support from persons as diverse as
Felix Morley, Aldous
Huxley, Woodrow Wilson, Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, Leo Tolstoy, William F Buckley Jr, and Sun
Yat-sen. To the Five Nobel Prizes authorized by Alfred
Nobel himself there has been added a sixth, in Economics,
and the Henry George Foundation claims eight of the Economics
Laureates as supporters, in whole or in part, of the
proposals of Henry George (Paul Samuelson, 1970; Milton Friedman, 1976; Herbert A
Simon, 1978; James Tobin, 1981; Franco Modigliani, 1985;
James M Buchanan, 1986; Robert M Solow, 1987; William S Vickrey, 1996).
The immediate concrete proposal favored by most
Georgists today is that cities shall tax land within
their boundaries at a higher rate than they tax buildings
and other improvements on the land. (In case anyone is
about to ask, "How can we possibly distinguish between
the value of the land and the value of the buildings on
it?" let me assure you that real estate assessors do it
all the time. It is standard practice to make the two
assessments separately, and a parcel of land in the
business district of a large city very often has a
different owner from the building on it.) Many cities
have moved to a system of taxing land more heavily than
improvements, and most have been pleased with the
results, finding that landholders are more likely to use
their land productively -- to their own benefit and that
of the public -- if their taxes do not automatically go
up when they improve their land by constructing or
maintaining buildings on it.
An advantage of this proposal in the eyes of many is
that it is a Fabian proposal, "evolution, not
revolution," that it is incremental and reversible. If a
city or other jurisdiction does not like the results of a
two-level tax system, it can repeal the arrangement or
reduce the difference in levels with no great upheaval.
It is not like some other proposals of the form,
"Distribute all wealth justly, and make me absolute
dictator of the world so that I can supervise the
distribution, and if it doesn't work, I promise to
resign." The problem is that absolute dictators seldom
resign. ... read
the whole article
Fred E. Foldvary — The Ultimate Tax Reform: Public
Revenue from Land Rent
The concept of taxing land values for public finance
is ancient. The Bible declares “the profit of the
Earth is for all” (Ecclesiastes 5:9). Land rent
financed government in England during the Middle Ages.9
During the 1700s, some French economists proposed an
“impöt unique” or single tax on
land value. Calling their theory
“physiocracy” (the rule of natural law), they
outlined a model of economic development that used land
value taxes to finance public works, which increased the
value of the land (and thus increased taxes paid to the
treasury), resulting in an upward spiral of development
and prosperity. The principal physiocratic economist,
François Quesnay, wrote
Taxes ... should be laid directly on the net
product of landed property, and not on men’s
wages, or on produce, where they would increase the
cost of collection, operate to the detriment of trade,
and destroy every year a portion of the nation’s
wealth. [Emphasis in the original.]10
... read the whole
document
Bill Batt: The
Compatibility of Georgist Economics and Ecological
Economics
As with all nineteenth century moral philosophers,
Henry George subscribed to a belief in natural law. The
natural order of things as he saw it required that land
be held in usufruct and that rent from such should be
returned to society. The theory was inspired by his
deeply religious roots and grounded in his reading of the
prominent thinkers that predated him. The natural order
was also a moral order, and the failure to comply with
the order of nature and society as he saw it was a
perversion of justice. The fruits of the land belonged to
everyone, just as the fruits of one’s own labor
were uniquely one’s own. Since one owned
one’s body, one was entitled to keep the product of
one’s physical efforts. Society had no more right
to confiscate the earnings of one’s sweat and brow
than it ought to leave in the hands of rich landowners
the rent that was everyone’s inherent birthright to
be shared. There were just and unjust taxes, and the only
just tax was that which grew out of rent, of the unearned
increment that visited certain land sites as windfall
gains because of the efforts and investments by the
community. Income and excise taxes were unjust and
confiscatory — even theft, as especially were
tariffs. Taxing or collecting land rent alone was the
means of ending poverty and restoring progress. Indeed
many Georgists reject use of the word tax entirely,
preferring instead to talk instead about rent collection.
There is even a lapel button Georgists use that says
“Abolish all taxes; collect ground rent
instead.”
Georgist Economics: Moral
Premises
What distinguished Henry George’s views from
those of his adversaries in the last decade of his life
was his assertion that economics was necessarily a moral
science. Unlike those who became the founders of the
American Economics Association in 1885, most of whom were
transitional figures to what would become neoclassical
economics, the primary focus of George and his
disciplines was economic justice. This is not to say that
explanation was cast aside; indeed the subtitle of his
magnum opus, Progress and Poverty,
was An Inquiry into the Cause of
Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with
Increase of Wealth . . . The Remedy. Why, he
asked, in the midst of such boundless plenty is there
such abject poverty? He would dedicate his book, first
published in 1879, “to those who,
seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal
distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the
possibility of a higher social state and would strive for
its attainment.” He had known poverty first
hand when he was struggling to support his young family
and establish himself as a printer, a journalist and a
publisher. He could also see before him the fruits of
land and nature easily available to be harvested but for
its legal capture by monopoly titleholders. He wrote of
all this in some six books and countless other essays,
the focus always on the theme of economic
justice.
Along with Robert Ingersoll, he was likely the
most stimulating orator
of his age, a fiery moralist at a time during which there
were many others who might claim such a title. He
traveled widely, was a champion of labor, the landless,
and the urban poor, particularly influential in the
struggle over the Irish land question and in the
positions of the Liberal party in the early 20th century.
His admirers among the great of the time were myriad: Sun
Yat Sen, Leo Tolstoi, Winston Churchill, Theodore
Roosevelt, Charles Beard, Samuel Clemens, Robert Maynard
Hutchins, and John Dewey to
name a few. Forewarned in 1897 that running for mayor of
New York a second time and trying at the same time to
finish another authoritative statement of his philosophy
would kill him, the prophesy was fulfilled nonetheless
with his death four days before election day. In 1886 he
lost a rigged election31 when matched against a scion of
banking wealth Abram S. Hewitt, who was recruited by Seth
Low, President of Columbia University, but he beat the
third place finisher, Teddy Roosevelt. His funeral on the
streets of New York drew the largest crowd of mourners
ever assembled until that time, and until much later. No
one doubted Henry George’s passionate commitment to
justice.
31See “Capitalism
by Fraud,” in Gustavus Myers, History of Great
American Fortunes, New York: Random House Modern Library
Edition, 1936, pp. 356-358, as well as biographies of
George.
The heart of George’s economics was, in a
way, Biblical. As the son of a religious book publisher
born in Philadelphia, he had adequate opportunity to
witness the early growth of the American republic in a
unique way. On his own in San Francisco and responsible
for a wife and child at a young age, his first effort at
resolving the puzzles of injustice were a manuscript
printed in 1871. But only after additional exposure to
Ricardian rent theory was he able to refine his ideas
such that they could form the basis of his Progress and
Poverty eight years later. His Christian roots
led him to a deep commitment to the basic moral equality
of all people; his challenge was to find a way to ensure
that this equality was manifest in economic
fairness.
As noted earlier, the starting point of Georgist
philosophy is that nature belongs to owners only in
usufruct and not in freehold. Because any monetary wealth
that accrued to that nature stemmed directly from the
physical presence of people and was therefore social in
character, the resulting added increment of value that
constituted rent belonged in turn to the community that
created it. Nature would have no economic price without
people. Hence rent was the community’s entitlement
and not that of individuals, and the land rent that
accrued to parcels as a result of social investment
should be returned to — recaptured by — the
community. It was obvious to George that
the wealthiest people in the nation usually owed their
fortune not to the sweat of their brow or the
inventiveness of their minds. Rather their position was
due to their success as land speculators, to an increase
in rent on land they had captured title to, land
rightfully belonging to all. The earth and all its
product, he argued, was the common heritage of humanity,
a birthright of all people. ... read the whole
article
I want to tell you the story of Charles Avilla. A
while back I came across a book called Ownership, Early Christian Teachings.
Avilla was a divinity student in the Phillipines. One
of his professors had a great concern about poverty
conditions in the Phillipines, and was taking students
out to prisons where the cooks were the land rights
revolutionaries in the Phillipines. Because they kept
pushing for land reform for the people, they had ended
up in jail. So they were political prisoners who were
reading the Bible and were asking the question,
who did God give this earth to? Who
does it belong to? It isn't in
the Bible that so few should have so much and so many
have so little. In the theological world in this
upscale seminary he was trying to put this together
about poverty and what the biblical teachings were. He
had a thesis to write and he was thinking he would do
something about economic justice. One of his professors
thought there would be a wealth of information from the
church's early history, the first 300 years after
Jesus. So he actually went back to read the Latin and
Greek about land ownership and found a wealth of
information about the prophetic railings of the people
in that early time on the rights of the land.
Let me give you a few quotes from that early
period.
Nehemiah 5:11, "Restore, I pray you, to them this day
their lands, their vineyards, their olive yards, and
their houses."
Ezekiel 33:24, "The land is given us as an
inheritance."
Ecclesiastes 5:9, "The profit of the earth is for
all."
And Isaiah 5:8, "Woe unto them that join house to
house, that lay field to field til there be no place
..." Leviticus 25:23, "The land is mine, for you are
strangers and sojourners with me." ...
read the whole article
A University of Alabama School of Law Professor has
asked God's forgiveness for the years she lived in the
sin of ignorance about tax injustice. Susan Pace Hamill,
a tax expert, business consultant, and dedicated United
Methodist church goer, thought there was a misprint when
she first read that personal incomes as low as $4,600 for
a family of four were being taxed by the state, while
timber owners holding 71% of the land of Alabama were
paying less than $1 per acre in property taxes. Two hours
later she found out there had been no mistake and that
Alabama has the most regressive tax code in the country.
Her righteous rage spawned a tax crusade that has
reverberated onto the national scene. ...
While resoundingly condemning the current system (she
uses words like "horrific" and "monstrous injustice")
Hamill clearly articulates a tax reform approach which
shifts taxes off of low wage earners and onto large land
owners. Through a combination of her own reasoning,
caring heart, and inherent sense of justice and a
thorough investigation of Judeo-Christian ethics, Hamill
arrived at a tax policy approach which bears remarkable
similarities to the economic justice crusades of 19th
century reformer, Henry George.
Her appeal is to the 93 percent of Alabama residents who
call themselves Christians. Hamill challenges them to put
their faith into practice. Her message fell on many
already listening ears. The state's two largest
denominations, United Methodists and Southern Baptists,
had passed resolutions favoring tax reform in 2000. In
2001 the state's Episcopalians, Presbyterians and
Catholics approved similar calls. The Public Affairs
Research Council of Alabama and the Business Council of
Alabama had long clamored for tax change. In fact, tax
reform is now supported by most of the state's religious
organizations, according to Charles Durham, pastor of the
First Presbyterian Church in Tuscaloosa.
What makes Hamill's work so compelling is her deep grasp
of the Alabama tax code combined with her thorough
documentation of the scriptural bases for economic
justice. She quotes chapters and verses which proclaim
that the poor should not be oppressed and that society
should create conditions for their advance. Among her
favorites are Jesus' words in Matthew 25:45: "Whatever
you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not
do for me." Luke 16:19-31 is a parable of a rich man sent
to hell because of his indifference to the disadvantaged
and in Jeremiah 22:15-16, "He defended the cause of the
poor and needy, and so all went well."
While Hamill suspected she would be opposed by special
interest groups like the Alabama Farmers Federation which
represents big timber and agribusiness interests, she was
not prepared for the attacks and underhanded tactics of
the Alabama Christian Coalition under the leadership of
President John Giles. While Giles agrees that tax relief
to the less fortunate "is a noble thing" he says the care
of the poor is the duty of private charity not of
government and staunchly opposes tax increases. He tried
to damage the Hamill campaign by smearing her personal
integrity, pointing to her signing of a pro-choice
petition as evidence that she therefore could not be a
moral authority on tax reform. Opposing forces also
called her a "Yankee carpetbagger" detailing her work
history at two New York law firms. They said (wrongly so)
that her tax proposals would bring huge property
increases on the average home and business.
Bob Blalock, editorial page editor for The Birmingham
News, says that the "real question about legitimacy
should be aimed at the Christian Coalition. For whom does
it speak when it attacks Hamill? Christians, many of whom
would benefit from a fairer tax system, even one that
raised more money? Or powerful special-interest groups
(timber? agribusiness?) that want to protect their
obscene tax breaks?" Blalock says there is no way to know
because the law does not require the Christian Coalition
to disclose what individuals or groups fund it. "When an
organization places itself in the center of the debate
over tax reform, citizens deserve to know who's funding
its point of view." (3/14/03)
Hamill's conservative theology school responded to the
attacks by firmly backing her stance. Faculty at Beeson
Divinity School of Samford University in Birmingham
passed a unanimous resolution endorsing her efforts. "We
think what she has proposed is worthy support from the
Christian community and we think it is in keeping with
the evangelical community," said the school's dean,
Timothy George (Anniston Star, 3/11/03).
Frank Thielman, Presbyterian Professor of Divinity at
Beeson had this to say about their resolution:
"Personally, I hope it does encourage dramatic tax reform
that helps to relieve the burden of the poor. The reason
I'm hopeful is because of my commitment as a Christian
and my Christian vision. That is a vision that the poor
should be dealt with equitably and fairly and that is a
very biblical vision. It's because of my Christian
commitment and the Bible and the word of God that I hope
tax reform efforts succeed." (Anniston Star, 3/11/03) ...
read the whole article
Nic Tideman: The Political Economy of
the Gospels
The grand question of economic ethics, the question of
whether capitalism or socialism is the more appropriate
form of political economy, is another non-question from
the perspective of the Gospels. Everyone who wants to
live under socialism should be free to live under
socialism, and everyone who wants to live under
capitalism should be free to live under capitalism. In
whichever group we fall, we will want to insure that
those who want to organize their lives by different
principles of political economy have their share of land
and natural resources with which to do so.
A political economy based on the Gospels is a
political economy based on love. As the First Epistle of
John says, "There is no fear in love; but perfect love
casteth out fear."17 To
construct a political economy of the Gospels we must be
free of fear: free of fear that others may rob us; free
of fear that others may not contribute to the provision
of public goods or to provision for those who might
otherwise lack; free of fear that our incomes will be too
low or the prices we face too high; free of fear that if
we don't do something, someone will be exploited. Only
when love has replaced all fear in our hearts will we be
able to construct the political economy of the
Gospels.read the
whole article
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