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Comment
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2008 by Mark Perlman
Commentators are supposed to comment. Doing so involves either working "within the box"--that is, within the confines of the papers involved--or going "beyond the box"--that is, using the papers to extend the discussion beyond where the papers took it. But even before I turn to that exercise I want to commend both Robert V. Andelson, the editor of Critics of Henry George: An Appraisal of Their Strictures on "Progress" and Poverty" and Laurence Moss, the series editor. These two volumes, as volumes, should be, in my opinion, required reading as well as the basis of a required reactive essay for any student wanting to study the history of ideas. I will return to this point at the end of my comments on McCann's and Hudson's sharply focused papers.
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I
"Within the Box"
McCann is concerned with three questions about George's personal orientation: (1) When all was said, what did he favor with regard to the ownership of land? (2) For all of his statements and alliances, was George in favor of socialism? and (3) Where should George's ideas be placed in the spectrum that runs from extreme individualism to extreme communitarianism? Answers to these three queries will yield, McCann avers, a pretty good perception of George's social philosophy underlying his proposals.
McCann's contribution, a major one, is that the complexities (for some, the contradictions) in George's answers made his ideas seem murky or, at least, inadequate for a persuadable political program. To put McCann's point into the language he and I use, George's views had contradictory authority foundations, both seen originally as Lockean. Locke's principal contribution was the argument taken originally from the Psalms, that the Earth belonged to the Lord, and that man's right to that which was produced on the Earth was the result of man's labor. This nifty argument justified the American farmer-settlers (and those engaged in commerce dealing with their products) taking title to the land--the native Americans, according to the Lockean view, had never "improved the land," by which he meant that they had not used it by means of their own labor to produce anything of value. But Locke's argument was hardly produced in a vacuum. Whatever may have been the origin of land ownership in Britain, the laws in Locke's time relating to its tenancy were the most complicated set pertaining to any form of ownership; if anything, since then the complexity has increased.
To put the matter briefly: (1) George bought Locke's view but twisted it somewhat to adjust for nonfarming use of land. George embraced the Lockean system as his authority. (2) Where he differed was that Locke wrote in the service of the very wealthy Shaftsbury family interests, with little or almost no concern for questions about the unequal distribution of wealth. George was part of the egalitarian (populist-Progressive) movement of the latter third of the 19th and first two-thirds of the 20th century--a movement, as we academics learned last November, is now all but defunct. What George offered as a way to capture undeserved wealth was to tax the undeserved surplus, much as Cournot was to do with his duopoly model. (When the accompanying Cournot text is absorbed, Cournot's geometry made his ideas academically attractive, and professional economists tend toward medieval realism rather than medieval nominalism; they like realism's ideas rather than nominalist's facts.)
Professor Hudson is concerned with the incompatibility of George's political alliances, most of which he attributes to George's intellectual inflexibilities as well as to his strange capacity to choose to deal with the wrong group when there was a choice to be made. George focused his attack on the inequality of the distribution of wealth (and probably income), an idea underlying the commitment to socialism of its adherents, when he might have made a stronger alliance with the Midwestern farmers and Midwestern small-town populists whose hatred of the power of the railroads and similar large businesses (often in the form of trusts) had a much greater number of active voters. But they were largely propertied landowners (acres and acres of only slightly improved farm lands) and not sympathetic to land taxes of any form. Certainly not his crowd of choice.
George was a Knights of Labor man, when he should have been dealing with Samuel Gompers. Why? Because Gompers was both morally and intellectually capable of understanding why his unions, not involved in the Harvester strike itself, should protest the cruel and unusual sentences meted out to the Haymarket Riot criminals (some of whom were not actually on the scene); George was motivated too simple-mindedly to appreciate the political implications of his reticence.
I read Hudson's judgment focusing on George's self-identification as a prophet with so strong a belief in his message as to be unable to put it into a locally workable outcome. George should be compared to the prophet Jonah.
