Digifesto

Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, first published in 1879, is dedicated

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

The book is best known as an articulation of the idea of a “Single Tax [on land]”, a circa 1900 populist movement to replace all taxes with a single tax on land value. This view influence many later land reform and taxation policies around the world; the modern name for this sort of policy is Land Value Taxation (LVT).

The gist of LVT is that the economic value of owning land comes both from the land itself and improvements built on top of it. The value of the underlying land over time is “unearned”–it does not require labor to maintain, it comes mainly from the artificial monopoly right over its use. This can be taxed and redistributed without distorting incentives in the economy.

Phillip Bess’s 2018 article provides an excellent summary of the economic arguments in favor of LVT. Michel Bauwen’s P2P Foundation article summaries where it has been successfully in place. Henry George was an American, but Georgism has been largely an export. General MacArthur was, it has been said, a Georgist, and this accounts for some of the land reform in Asian countries after World War II. Singapore, which owns and rents all of its land, is organized under roughly Georgist principles.

This policy is neither “left” nor “right”. Wikipedia has sprouted an article on geolibertarianism, a term that to me seems a bit sui generis. The 75th-anniversary edition of Progress and Poverty, published 1953, points out that one of the promises of communism is land reform, but it argues that this is a false promise. Rather, Georgist land reform is enlightened and compatible with market freedoms, etc.

I’ve recently dug up my copy of Progress and Poverty and begun to read it. I’m interested in mining it for ideas. What is most striking about it, to a contemporary reader, is the earnest piety of the author. Henry George was clearly a quite religious man, and wrote his lengthy and thorough political-economic analysis of land ownership out of a sincere belief that he was promoting a new world order which would preserve civilization from collapse under the social pressures of inequality.