Apathy, cupidity or conspiracy?

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Nov, 2005

THE PARADOX OF the co-existence of progress and poverty was the enigma that Henry George addressed. He propounded a seemingly logical and persuasive means of mitigating the paradox. A century later, extremes of wealth and poverty still co-exist. They have not been substantially mitigated by any alternative solutions. George's remedy attracted wide-ranging support in his time and has since been endorsed in principle by eminent people in many nations and across the political spectrum. The enigma now is why George's arguments have not prevailed.

Like re-visiting Henry George, exploring the enigma is a curiously unsatisfying experience. The trail is confused and tortuous. There must surely be an explanation. One expects to find evidence around the next corner. Yet it never quite materialises.

For the period from 1879 to 1979, the task of reviewing the opposition to George is made easier by Robert Andelson's Critics of Henry George, sub-titled A Centenary Appraisal of Their Strictures on Progress and Poverty. (1) In the course of 26 chapters Andelson and an international panel of contributors review the major critics of Progress and Poverty, grouped as "Nineteenth Century British and Continental Critics, Nineteenth Century American Critics, and Twentieth Century Critics." These reviews of major critics are prefaced by a scholarly introductory chapter in which Andelson summarises the views of a very wide range of other critics whose criticisms he did not select for examination in detail. Their views were either already substantially covered by those selected, or were primarily directed ad hominem--for example, by the then newly emerging economics discipline at George the self-educated political economist and social philosopher (who in turn amply reciprocated the hostility).

As an economist, George was indeed self-taught, as of course were all his predecessors extending back to Adam Smith. His status, however, cannot seriously be questioned. Half a century later, for example, the verdict of Joseph Schumpeter was that "he was a very orthodox economist and extremely conservative as to methods" in the English classical tradition. (2)

If they have the patience, readers may care to read Andelson and satisfy themselves about George's critics. The experience is depressing, and evokes decidedly unflattering impressions of the quality of academic debate. Very little of the criticism centres on the basic Georgist proposition. Instead, a very great deal is based on misconceptions, or is directed at peripheral issues that are not relevant to any present-day assessment of its validity and practicality.

Some misconceptions can be attributed to George's style, his inconsistent terminology and the sheer volume of his writing. For example, the misconception that he proposed the nationalisation of all land and its conversion to leasehold, referred to in the previous chapter. On the other hand, it does not require a close reading of Progress and Poverty to establish that George certainly did not propose that all men were equal and were entitled to equal shares of land (as assumed, for example, by T. H. Huxley). Nor did he propose that poverty should be remedied by an equal distribution of the aggregate national land rental revenue to all citizens. And it seems tendentious in the extreme to draw any particular conclusions from George's choice of agricultural land and labour as the most convenient exemplar of the relationship between wages and rent.

Provoked by some of George's gratuitous but incidental declarations and by exaggerations such as his implicit assumption that land monopolisation was the only cause of poverty, some of his critics erected diversionary straw men and expansively demolished them. Some have already been referred to. The Malthusian controversy, for example, and whether or not the conditions of labour in the 1880s were actually improving, and whether or not landowners' proportionate share of the proceeds of production had declined over time are irrelevant to any assessment of George's basic proposition. Irrelevant or not, it would seem that many such debates served as pegs upon which to hang instinctive hostility to a perceived challenge to the traditionally enshrined acceptance of landed wealth. Some critics indeed explicitly defended such a "natural" order of society, among them senior members of the Roman Catholic Church. Andelson cites Father Victor Cathrein, a Swiss-born Jesuit theologian, as "perhaps the most influential Continental European critic of Henry George." Cathrein's defence of private land ownership was subsequently echoed in Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum, to which George responded in an open letter (in 1881). But these exchanges are sterile and irrelevant today. Denial and denigration of the tribal concept of communal ownership belong to theology rather than history. Ironically, it can be argued that Leo XIII's denunciation of Henry George in Rerum Novarum contributed to the spread of Marxism as seemingly the only alternative to laissez-faire capitalism.