Georgists and the Race Issue

Steven Cord

[Reprinted from the Henry George News, May, 1965]

HOW do Georgists stand in the fight for equal rights for Negroes? An inquiring stranger might correctly infer that we oppose race discrimination because of our interest in natural rights, but he would also be entitled to feel that we are not much interested in the problem because we don't concern ourselves with it.

Some Georgists I know think we should talk only about land value taxation, although George himself spoke and wrote often about liberty, equality and even the rights of ethnic minorities. Admittedly, land value taxation might always be our central concern, but we narrow down our audience unnecessarily if we talk only about LVT and disregard current issues and the fight for human rights.

Others think that once we have land value taxation, race discrimination will fade away, and until we get LVT nothing can be done on the race issue. George himself never maintained that LVT was a panacea; he said liberty was, full well realizing that liberty was much more than an economic matter. LVT and race discrimination can indeed co-exist; Johannesburg and other cities in the Union of South Africa are proof enough of that.

Others argue that we should concern ourselves about economic issues only, but I don't know by what logic we should ignore the voting rights issue. Besides, what could be more economic than equal job or housing rights? Doesn't school segregation have its economic overtones? It makes no sense to tell Negroes that if this large automobile manufacturing concern or that telephone monopoly won't hire them they should start manufacturing their own cars or establishing their own telephone service. Such advice ignores economic realities.

Still other Georgists - a minority, probably - objected to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the grounds that it was a violation of the right of private property. A restaurant owner, they maintain, ought to be able to use his property and his labor to serve whomever he wishes. I can understand this point of view, but I disagree with it because the government has the undoubted right to regulate unsocial uses of property; hence, we have gun licenses and traffic laws.

Negroes in the small town where I live have to travel thirty miles to get a haircut and until recently eighteen miles for a restaurant meal. Their community is too small to support a barber shop or restaurant. Does anyone say that if they don't like living in my town they should go elsewhere? Are they not saying that these Negroes have no equal right to live on the land my home town occupies? Their argument falls to pieces, for every civil rights question is also a land question.

There is another argument against race segregation. To distinguish among people on grounds of individual ability makes sense; it accords with the concepts of liberty and equality. But to separate people on the irrational grounds of skin color can only result in race hatred. Is this the kind of society we want to live in?

To fail to protest against racial injustice is, in effect, to condone it. The civil rights movement is capable of taking great strides toward the goal of liberty and equality for all, but it has a dangerous potential, too: in using extra-legal methods to combat unjust laws and governmental actions it can encourage a general disrespect for law and order. Georgists should speak out and show that civil rights and land rights point in the same direction.