Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
opposed to protectionism, subsidies, a centralizing political state,
and the corruption that follows in the train of paternalism as sickness
follows infection. In a pamphlet written in 1870, he expounded his
political faith thus:
Railroad subsidies, like protective duties, are condemned by the
economic principle that the development of industry should be
left free to take its natural direction. They are condemned by
the political principle that government should be reduced to its
minimum--that it becomes more corrupt and more tyrannical, and
less under the control of the people, with every extension of its
powers and duties.... They are condemned by the experience of the
whole country, which shows that they have invariably led to waste,
extravagance and rascality; that they inevitably become a source of
corruption and a means of plundering the people.[612]
Having thus indoctrinated himself in the Jeffersonian liberalism
with its foundations laid in natural rights and its conception of a
decentralized society, the following year, at the age of thirty-two,
he sat down to the serious elaboration of his views. _Our Land and
Land Policy, National and State_, was an explorative pamphlet that
went to the heart of the problem as he had come to understand it. The
kernel of the work is the question of the relation of land to labor,
of rent to wages; and the conclusion to which it led was the doctrine
of the social ownership of socially created values, which justice
requires shall return to society in the form of an equalized tax that
shall absorb the unearned increment. Around this fundamental doctrine
was grouped a considerable body of ideas that had been expounded by
earlier liberals. How much he borrowed and how much he arrived at
independently, cannot easily be determined; such diverse thinkers as
James Harrington, Locke, the Physiocrats, Tom Paine, Karl Marx, John
Stuart Mill, William Ellery Channing, might well have contributed to
this provocative document, if George had been acquainted with them.
Like Harrington was the assumption of economic determinism--that
ownership of the land implies the rulership of society. From the
school of Locke came the conception of natural rights, but interpreted
rather in terms of Tom Paine and of William Ellery Channing. From
Mill came the conception of unearned increment; from Marx the law of
concentration; and from the Physiocrats the conception of a natural
order and the doctrine of an _impôt unique_. And all this set in a
framework of American economic history, which reveals with shrewd
insight the disastrous tendency of the traditional policy of land
alienation in great blocks to middle-men, with the attendant rise of
rent.
How intimately he was related in his thinking to the French liberals of
the eighteenth century, may perhaps be sufficiently suggested in his
interpretation of the doctrine of natural rights--a doctrine the new
realistic school from Calhoun to Woolsey and Burgess was subjecting to
critical analysis. By uniting the individualism of Locke’s doctrine of
property with the Physiocratic doctrine of social well-being, he gave
a sharp turn to the conception that, like Jefferson’s, set it widely
apart from the exploitative interpretation preferred by the Hamiltonian
followers of Locke. The gist of his conception is thus set down:
Now the right of every human being to himself is the foundation
of the right of property. That which a man produces is rightfully
his own, to keep, to sell, to give or to bequeath, and upon this
sure title alone can ownership of anything rightfully rest. But man
has also another right, declared by the fact of his existence--the
right to the use of so much of the free gifts of nature as may be
necessary to supply all the wants of that existence, and which he
may use without interfering with the equal rights of anyone else;
and to this he has a title as against all the world.[613]
Much of Henry George is compressed within these few lines, that suggest
as well the diverse liaisons of his thought. In his conception of
the right of every man to himself he is in agreement with William
Ellery Channing, who used the argument in his attack on slavery, and
with Emerson, Parker, and the Transcendental radicals generally.
It is an interpretation of natural rights that sprang easily from
the Unitarian-Transcendental conception of the sacredness of the
individual, and that was given wide currency by the anti-slavery
propaganda. From his deduction that the right to property flows
from the right to self, came his theory of tax-equity that was to
play a major rôle in the formulation of his principle of taxation.
If society may not justly take from the individual what the
individual has created, it must seek its revenues elsewhere than in a
personal-property tax; and where should it look if not to those values
which society has created? The inalienable right of the individual to
what he has produced does not extend to the appropriation of wealth
he has not produced, and a sharp line is drawn between the rights
of the individual and the rights of society, between production and
exploitation. Herein lies the justification of the single-tax--a
principle derived by crossing Locke with the New England school.
From the classical economists Henry George got little. He had a quiet
contempt for them he was never at pains to conceal. He was convinced
that they had distorted the whole science of economics. As the earlier
Tories with their sacred _arcana imperii_ had done with political
government, they had involved economics in abstract theory, removing
it from the comprehension of the common man. At the best they had
dehumanized it to the status of a dismal science, with their postulate
of an economic man and their pessimistic outlook. At the worst they had
shaped it into a potent weapon for the exploiting class, who gravely
invoked economic law--which none understood--to justify class policies
of state. In an address delivered at the University of California,
Henry George paid his respects to the classical school in these words:
The name of political economy has been constantly invoked against
every effort of the working classes to increase their wages
or decrease their hours of labour.... Take the best and most
extensively circulated textbooks. While they insist upon freedom
for capital, while they justify on the ground of utility the
selfish greed that seeks to pile fortune on fortune, and the
niggard spirit that steels the heart to the wail of distress, what
sign of substantial promise do they hold out to the working man
save that he should refrain from rearing children?...[614]
For political economy thus degraded from its high place and become
the slut of private interest, Henry George proposed to do what Tom
Paine had done for political theory a hundred years before--he would
transfer it from the closet to the market-place by exposing the
shabby _arcana imperii_ and bringing it within the comprehension
of common men. He would bring home to the popular intelligence a
realization of the dynamics of economic law and its bearing upon
social well-being, that men might plot a fairer course for society.
This was the deeper purpose of _Progress and Poverty_--to humanize
and democratize political economy, that it might serve social ends
rather than class exploitation. _The Rights of Man_ and _Progress and
Poverty_ may be reckoned complementary works, applying to related
fields the spirit released to the modern world by the great thinkers
of Revolutionary France. The foundations on which they both rest is
the eighteenth-century conception of natural law, all-comprehensive,
beneficent, free, enshrined in the common heart of humanity, and
conducting to the ultimate of social justice.
As a necessary preliminary to his purpose, Henry George was forced to
clear the ground of old growths. Before he could declare the truth he
must uproot certain of the Malthusian and Ricardian heresies. He must
substitute a sociological interpretation, based on historical reality
in western civilization, for a set of economic abstractions, based on
the political and economic accidents of England in post-Napoleonic
days. The Manchester school, it must be remembered, was an embodiment
of the aspirations of the rising middle class; it was a philosophical
attack upon the vexatious restrictions laid upon capitalism by
government in the hands of the landed aristocracy. It conceived of
economic principles as of concern only to the owning classes, and
its theory took a special and narrow form from the current struggle
between the landed and capitalistic interests. In a Parliamentary
debate over the corn laws in 1814, Alexander Baring, the banker,
assumed that the working classes had no interest at stake. To argue
that they were affected, he said, was “altogether ridiculous; whether
wheat was 130s. or 80s., the laborer could only expect dry bread in
the one case and dry bread in the other.”[615] In Francis Wayland’s
_Elements of Political Economy_, published in 1837, a similar narrow
view of the field of economics was expressed. That an adequate
political economy must be social, that it must be something very much
more than a merchant’s _vade mecum_, or handbook of profit rules, Henry
George grasped as clearly as Ruskin; and he attacked certain of the
Manchester principles with the ardor of a social prophet. Of these
the classical wage-fund theory seemed to him the most vicious, and
he was at vast pains to prove that wages are drawn from the produce
of labor and not from a preëxistent capital-fund. Having established
this to his satisfaction, he turned to consider the economic effects
of monopolistic expropriation of natural resources, and discovered the
explanation of the augmenting poverty of civilization in the shutting
out of labor from the sources of subsistence, that is in land monopoly.
The argument is based on the Ricardian theory of rent. Though
George rejected the classical wage-fund theory, he accepted without
qualification the classical rent-theory, and discovered the kernel of
his philosophy in the doctrine of social fertility. If rent is the
difference between the income-value of a given piece of land and that
of the least valuable in the neighborhood, it measures the difference
between the yields per acre on the richest and the leanest soil with
a like outlay of labor and capital. So in an urban community rent
arises from what may be called social fertility--that is, from a
monopoly-value in a given neighborhood. Such monopoly-value arises from
strategic location; the desirability of a given tract for dwelling,
factory, or shop. The number of persons daily passing will determine
the rental value for shop purposes; the the accessibility to docks,
railways, raw material, power, markets, labor-surplus, will determine
its rental value for factory purposes. In every such case, however,
it is society and not the individual that augments rent, and this
unearned increment increases with the growth of the community. From
every advance of civilization it is the landlord who profits. He is
a social parasite, the nether millstone between which and material
progress the landless laborer is ground.
In every direction, the direct tendency of advancing civilization
is to increase the power of human labour to satisfy human
desires--to extirpate poverty and to banish want and the fear
of want.... But Labour cannot reap the benefits which advancing
civilization thus brings, because they are intercepted. Land being
necessary to labour, and being reduced to private ownership, every
increase in the productive power of labour but increases rent--the