The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner

Author:Robert L. Heilbroner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 1999-06-22T16:00:00+00:00

We need not spell out the whole emotionally charged argument; the crux of it lies in this passage. Henry George is outraged at the spectacle of men whose incomes—sometimes fabulous incomes—derive not from the services they have rendered the community, but merely from the fact that they have had the good fortune to hold advantageously situated soil.

Ricardo, of course, saw all this long before him. But at best, Ricardo had only claimed that the tendency of a growing society to enrich the holders of its land would redound to the misfortune of the capitalist. To Henry George, this was only the entering wedge. The injustice of rents not only robbed the capitalist of his honest profit but weighed on the shoulders of the workingman as well. More damaging yet, he found it to be the cause of those industrial “paroxysms,” as he called them, that from time to time shook society to its roots.

The argument was not too clearly delineated. Primarily it rested on the fact that since rent was assumed from the start to be a kind of social extortion, naturally it represented an unfair distribution of produce to landlords at the expense of workers and industrialists. And as for paroxysms—well, George was convinced that rent led inevitably to wild speculation in land values (as indeed it did on the West Coast) and just as inevitably to an eventual collapse which would bring the rest of the structure of prices tumbling down beside it.

Having discovered the true causes of poverty and the fundamental check to progress, it was simple for George to propose a remedy—a single massive tax. It would be a tax on land, a tax that would absorb all rents. And then, with the cancer removed from the body of society, the millenium could be allowed to come. The single tax would not only dispense with the need for all other kinds of taxes, but in abolishing rent it would “raise wages, increase the earnings of capital, extirpate pauperism, abolish poverty, give remunerative employment to whoever wishes it, afford free scope to human powers, purify government, and carry civilization to yet nobler heights.” It would be—there is no other word—the ultimate panacea.

It is an elusive thesis when we seek to evaluate it. Of course it is naive, and the equation of rent with sin could have occurred only to someone as messianic as George himself. Similarly, to put the blame for industrial depressions on land speculation is to blow up one small aspect of an expanding economy quite out of proportion to reality: land speculations can be troublesome, but severe depressions have taken place in countries where land values were anything but inflated.

So we need not linger here. But when we come to the central body of the thesis, we must pause. For while George’s mechanical diagnosis is superficial and faulty, his basic criticism of society is a moral and not a mechanistic one. Why, asks Henry George, should rent exist? Why should a man benefit merely

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