Henry George's political critics

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Jan, 2008  by Michael Hudson

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

Socialists and labor reformers echoed this view. In ah ongoing debate with the Georgist Joseph Fels in the London socialist weekly The New Age, socialists in 1912 asked what in the Single Tax was there "to prevent the capitalist class, of which Mr. Fels is such an amiable member, from intensifying their monopoly of Capital and Raw Material? Obviously nothing. The class of Rent, in fact, is abolished only to swell the classes of Interest and Profits." (13)

Yet the remarkable popularity of Progress and Poverty stemmed precisely from its juxtaposing the interest of labor and the public in general to that of the landlord. Writing more than six decades later in the United States, where wage levels had risen above subsistence levels, George gave wage earners a political interest in taxing land and related resource rents. The political twist that helped Progress and Poverty achieve such great popularity was to show that ground rent was paid out of wages as well as profits, at least in America's high-wage economy. As Patten pointed out, Ricardo juxtaposed "profits and wages, or profits and rent, but never rent and wages. If he had broken away from his concrete thinking enough to contrast wages and rent, he would have forestalled Henry George, since the latter writer has nothing new of theoretical importance except this contrast neglected by Ricardo and his followers." (14) George's shift of emphasis implied that workers and small businessmen as well as industrialists would benefit by basing the fiscal system on a rent tax.

George often supported labor. At a meeting at Cooper Union in New York on July 12, 1894, he declaimed against President Cleveland's decision to send federal troops to Chicago to break the Pullman strike. He also denounced the arrest of the socialist leader Victor Debs. But after his 1886 mayoral campaign dropped the labor coalition's planks of reforming workplace and housing conditions, George sought political support increasingly from capital, as if it were less narrowly class-interested than labor. He even went so far as to claim not to see a difference between labor unions and industrial monopolies, as if unions were on the same level as the company towns and trusts that imposed abusive working and housing conditions.

When confronted with criticisms of monopoly capital or finance capital, George replied that this was not what he meant by capital. His point of reference was small businessmen working with their own tools and savings. Claiming that to tax capital would discourage the incentive to invest in productive activity, he viewed capital as aiming to produce wealth, not to aggrandize itself by predatory, exploitative practices (apart from monopolies). He denounced privilege as threatening this middle-class vision, but socialists replied that special privilege and insider control was the essence of the capital they were talking about. They accused the Single Taxers of blaming landlords for what rightly should be blamed on capital. In a 1905 debate in Chicago between socialists and Single Taxers, Algernon Simons (editor of the International Socialist Review) disparaged Henry George Jr. for