Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3021

Letter from Leonard Read, of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, to Heath at 11 Waverly Place East, New York 3, New York, enclosing an item on Georgism that FEE Occasionally gave out when the subject arose.

August 28, 1953

 

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Heath:

 

      Thanks ever so much for your letter of the 22^nd and a copy of your correspondence with Henry Hazlitt. You make some excellent points.

 

      Enclosed is a memorandum entitled “Notes on the ‘Land Question’” which we sometimes send to Georgists who write to us.

 

      My best!

                                 Cordially,

 

(Signed) Leonard E. Read

LER:bf

Encl.

 

 

 

 

 

NOTES ON THE “LAND QUESTION”

Ivan R. Bierly

 

There are many facets, probably more than I now realize, of the questions that follow. Emphasis is given, by excluding most of the side issues, to what appears to be the more fundamental aspects of them.

 

(1)  If “access to the land” is of paramount importance to my life, how can I trust the evil, coercive power of government to let me live? To criticize “private property in land” as a monopoly right that is evil, and then to advocate “abolition of private property in land” in favor of the monopoly involved in “common property” (Progress & Poverty – p. 328-329) is, it seems to me, even accepting the thesis for the moment, the substitution of a greater for a lesser evil. I can see no way, no automatic means, of ever being assured of direct access to the land. In the instance of private property, I must (and can) deal with other persons; in the instance of common ownership, I must still deal with persons – not as individuals but then as representatives of government. Personally, I would rather take my chances on dealing with individual persons, as such.

 

Perhaps I have not studied George’s writings adequately, but at the moment it seems to me that he minimizes too much the indirect access to the land that is offered in an exchange economy. Also, it seems to me that he rather casually concludes that depressions are caused by private property in land. Are you acquainted with Benjamin Anderson’s book Economics of the Public Welfare –Financial & Economic History of the United States 1914-46 published by D. Van Nostrand?

 

(2)  How can any system devised and put into effect by man be presumed to be self-
perpetuating? It seems to me that this is the presumption, else the single tax program couldn’t be “the answer”. But assuming for the moment that it is “the answer,” so long as government is administered by man, what reason is there to suppose that it would continue to be the only tax? The 16th Amendment changed the situation in the United States a great deal. What’s to prevent another “16th Amendment” from having the same effects, even though the single tax were “the answer” and were previously put into effect? It seems to me that what man establishes he may also change. Thus the answer to our problem today seems to me to be a deeper one than any mechanistic proposal, as the single tax. Nothing short of rekindling of the desire for and an understanding of individual freedom can suffice – with this I’m sure you will agree. No system alone is adequate; and even then there would be the problem of passing on this vitalized understanding from generation to the next.

 

In fact, any system offered as an answer to all of our problems might be a stumbling block, in the sense that perception of the real problem of “under­standing” might be dulled the sooner, or never attempted.

 

(3)  Further, were I to endorse Henry George’s idea of “common ownership of land” on the basis that land rent is socially created, I can see no logical stopping point. Part of my personal income is derived from the fact that I live in a community where my services can be sold at a higher price than were I to live in some small, obscure place. Is this added income not a result of the greater demand of this particular community for such services as I have or wish to offer? If the idea is accepted that “ground rent” is to be taken because it is created by society, what about the increment of my personal-service income in this loca­tion compared with elsewhere?

 

It would seem to me that were I to accept this viewpoint, I would necessarily have to go the next step as George Bernard Shaw did after becoming acquainted with George’s writings. That is, the natural faculties and abilities of any individual person are also an endowment of nature; further, society rewards the more able members in proportion as they have the faculties to best serve it, and use them. Their choice of the extent of use of these faculties is a personal thing that they can control, but they can no more control the original endowment of faculties than you or I can.

 

Further, no matter how intellectually capable and willing a person might be, these qualities would have no value were he a Robinson Crusoe. But they do attain a value in an exchange economy, and, as you indicate with land, it is people who create value.

 

My point so far has simply been that if one sets out to tax away all values created by society, I don’t see how one can logically stop with land; it would seem to me that the same logic can be applied to justify that which I know you want most to avoid. Further, it is difficult for me to see in our exchange economy how anyone can fail to gain by the fact of his existence as a part of society simply through the act of producing for exchange. If there be an unearned increment for the land owner, is there not also for every other member of society?

 

(4)  The following paragraph is quoted from page 468 of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism by George Bernard Shaw, published in 1928 by the Garden City Publishing Company, Inc. in Garden City, New York, and is offered as evidence that George’s writings on land ownership were influential in encouraging Shaw and others to adopt Socialism as a good thing:

 

“Between Karl Marx and the Webbs came Henry George with his Progress and Poverty, which converted many to Land Nationalization. It was the work of a man who had seen that the conversion of an American village to a city of millionaires was also the conversion of a place where people could live and let live in tolerable comfort to an inferno of seething poverty and misery. Tolstoy was one of his notable converts. George’s omission to consider what the State should do with the national rent after it had taken it into the public treasury stopped him on the threshold of Socialism; but most of the young men whom he had led up to it went through (like myself) into the Fabian Society and other Socialist bodies. Progress and Poverty is still Ricardian in theory: indeed it is on its abstract side a repetition of De Quincey’s Logic of Political Economy; but whereas De Quincey, as a true-blue British Tory of a century ago, accepted the Capitalist unequal distribution of income, and the consequent division of society into rich gentry and poor proletarians, as a most natural and desirable arrangement, George, as an equally true-blue American republican, was revolted by it.”