The Key to Henry George

Robert Clancy

[Reprinted from Fragments, July-September, 1967]

ON BEING asked to write about Henry George, I tried to consider what could be regarded as the most essential thing about his teaching.

Usually, an association test will yield "Henry George-single tax." And it is quite true that his writings, speeches, and activities hinged around the single tax - the taxation of land values, or the community collection of the rent of land.

But this is no casual proposal - it is not even essentially a fiscal reform - rather, it is the outcome of a lengthy economic analysis, the key to which is the law of rent, or George's correlation of the law of rent with the law of wages.

The social abuse that one can refer to most directly in speaking of George is land value taxation. Here is certainly a key point.

But we need to get even more basic in finding the key to George, and that is the whole analysis as an attempt to solve the problem of poverty. After all, he entitled his work Progress and Poverty. Surely that's what George is all about.

The question of taxes and public revenue is becoming a more painful and pressing problem as time goes on, and if we select this as our focal point, we would certainly be hitting at one of the sorest problems of modern times. Yet we know that the single tax is primarily a way of solving poverty, and secondarily a way of raising revenue.

No less than single tax. we may associate George with the land question. In many parts of the world today, the land question is coming more and more to the front, and George did point out that the tenure of land is the central fact of history.

In these days of more and more governmental involvement in the economy as a way of coping with economic problems, George's solution to the economic problem becomes more significant, since it involves more freedom, not less; less government, not more. George himself referred to Liberty as "the central truth" in one of the most inspiring passages in Progress and Poverty.

Yet, elsewhere, he referred to justice as still more basic than Liberty.

The concept of natural law may also be taken as the key to George. He begins his inquiry by referring to the law that man seeks to satisfy his desires with the least exertion; he goes on to the laws of distribution; and he concludes with the law of human progress.

Then, he equates all these concepts:

"Liberty means Justice, and Justice is the natural law -- the law of health and symmetry and strength, of fraternity and cooperation."

So, perhaps, that is the key to George, as revealed in another phrase: "The laws of the universe are harmonious." All these truths dovetail into one another, and it may be that George's central message is in showing us the way to a healthy economy, to the solution of the land question; and to the problem of depressions. It points the way to justice, liberty and human progress, and equates the Good Society with the dignity of the individual human being.