Education Finance Reform
Requires Education Reform

David Giesen

[Reprinted from Quicksilver, Winter, 2006]

Georgists hold fast to the conviction that gifts of nature are gifts to all. What's more, Georgists husband the notion that wherever privilege, especially privilege in owning land, is plowed up and overturned, the fuller potentialities of individuals and of society as a whole will manifest.

That conviction and that deed (the deliberate dissolution of privilege) hang like the sun in the sky, imparting light and heat to the world. Yet, like the sun, that conviction and that deed will not long stand being looked at, though for vastly different reasons.

To gaze at the sun without some protective measure would, of course, result in blindness, while to gaze at the idea of commonwealth and to seriously contemplate public policy that secured gift of nature commonwealth to all, would at once reveal a great truth and unseat fear, that great tyrant of human experience.

Fear of economic scarcity is the chief villain robbing humanity of personal and social happiness. The prospect of hunger, of poverty, of poverty-induced humiliation divides the population.

We see this fear color-coded in the "blue state-red state" divide. We see this fear rhetorically coded in laissez-faire-versus-socialism cant. And we see this fear education-coded in vouchers-versus-mediocrity education finance reform spiels. It is the education-coded form of scarcity fear that I wish to explore on this page.

I am now engaged in researching the most fundamental and volatile issues in the education finance reform debate. What I have learned is that across the United States, from Left Coast San Francisco to Libertarian Kansas City, Kansas, educators, education administrators and public finance analysts of every stripe agree there is an education funding crisis. Most say public schools need more money. A sizable minority assert that extending choice through vouchers would bring down the cost of education. But however vociferous the arguments rage, and they do rage, I can count on the fingers of a horse the number of politicians, policy wonks and school administrators who are in favor of raising the property tax as a revenue-getting device. Oh, there are those who in the noisy moment of an art opening, wine glass in hand, will acknowledge that the property tax needs adjustment, but they'll add there's no political will for change and so ifs a moot point.

Ask these same men and women if they'll speak to the public on the topic, however, and their blood runs cold. Now were the matter at hand something other than education this might be dismissed as a function of prudent electoral calculation: what number of votes could be won at the cost of countless hours of expostulation and determined argumentation? Few.

But the matter at hand is education. What is at stake is nothing less than intellectual integrity, cultural virtue, and the health of society.

Georgists make a straightforward declaration, namely that what realtors mean by "location, location, location" is a community generated value. The desirability of one place compared with another geographic location has to do with natural setting and with the sum total , of community added value.

The natural setting value of location is, comparatively speaking, a static consideration. A hillside view is generally preferable to a low place setting with highly limited views. That preferability will continue across time, generation to generation.

In contrast to the static, essentially unchanging desirability of a location based upon natural setting, is the dynamic quality of private and public features of a geographic location. So, for instance, as new, appealing businesses and neighbors move into a community, and as bus lines and well-maintained streets serve the area, and as quality schools open or are supported, we expect land values to rise as interest in living in such a neighborhood rises. Yet land prices will fall when public services and infrastructure decline and as businesses and dependable, engaged residents move away.

Land values are a gestalt. They are an expression of the sum total of community added value rather than a reflection of isolated individual effort. Improvements to my house will raise the desirability of my house in comparison with other houses, but improvements made to my house will, in and of themselves, have next to no effect upon community land values.

Georgists argue, therefore, that inasmuch as land values are a function of the quality of community, land values, owing to community, belong to community.

It is an egregious abuse of the human faculty of rational thought to attribute and surrender community-created value to private parties. The pertinence of concepts and of levels of thought (Bloom's taxonomy) become meaningless if concepts, language and action cease interacting in a rational fashion. If land has value owing to community but that value is given to private parties, we have an analog to the illogic of taking away from me what I have made and giving it to you. There is no intellectual honesty in this disregard of causal relationships.

Further, the privatization of community-created value is, practically and spiritually, a denial of there being community. This is cultural suicide. Though it offend some in sounding crass, if we will not take society's measure in terms of rent of "location, location, location," then the social programs of community must either be starved or be paid for from revenues derived from the production of goods and services. A tax on the production of goods and services will distort production -as producers seek to avoid the tax. Rather than producing to meet market demands, producers will engage in activity that delivers the highest return after taxes. The virtue of satisfying market demands will be compromised by, where tax burdens vary, the temptation of higher returns in less than optimum market production.

(In contrast, community collection of land rent will not distort the production of land because land is not produced. And, as a complement, the degree of community collection of land rent is the degree to which taxes on production of goods and services can be eliminated.)

A culture which, even if' only nominally, penalizes production while rewarding private speculation in community-generated land values, advances an ideal of getting something for nothing. This ideal is a sure sign of privilege, moral decrepitude, and insipid productive vigor.

All this, the intellectual dishonesty of disregard of causal economic relationships and the contempt for rewarding production while simultaneously encouraging unearned income through land speculation, may strike some as mere moral posturing or as intellectual diddling; however, Georgists assert there is a demonstrable link between the privatization of community-generated land rent and the incidence of poverty and all the unpleasantness that feeds on poverty.

Crime, the prostitution of one's talents and person, and the dismal detour of one's spiritual ambitions into labor that merely feeds the body all follow on the heels of poverty. Georgism details the connection between privatized rising land values and poverty. Poor social health, measured in poverty, crime, blasted human potential, and violence should be tangible enough to shock even complacent citizens into getting a political and economic education.

Sadly, that education is neither sought by educators nor embedded in current curriculum. Are poverty and crime not acute enough? Frankly, we don't know; but here at the Henry George School, equipped with the research tools of a library and the internet, we find no evidence that anywhere in the world is poverty acute enough to have driven "tipping point" numbers of citizens into a careful enough survey of economics to distinguish the community-generated market value of land as a commonwealth.

. The mission of the Henry George School is to provide an education that secures to society a profound understanding of and commitment to the commonwealth in publicly-created economic values. (This education simultaneously elucidates the wholeness of individuals in being fully capable of meeting their own economic needs.)

Without a refreshed curriculum that edifies the public and informs youths regarding commonwealth economics, Education, Inc. -- and by that I mean public education as it now exists -- will forever be unable to identify either its just funding source or its sufficient funding levels. I make this declaration in the light of the observation that a people who cannot discern the dynamic relationship between community activities and community land values, and who will not stop feeding private speculation in community-generated land values, evidently doesn't adequately understand human beings as socioeconomic creatures.

Such a people know the magic which coveting that which you haven't earned can effect, namely the Gollum-like holding on to land values even in the face of reason. Ironically, it is this greed which foists onto sales taxes and income taxes and bond financing the funding of public education. The result, of course, is a balking, by producers, at these levies upon their calorie-consuming labor. It is a bitter pill to swallow, isn't it, that if you work you will be taxed for having worked? Kindergartners know this is a stupid schema. Take away their art work and they'll holler. But grown-ups who call for higher taxes on earnings have fallen under the spell of a dark magic. They cannot tell what is "ours."

Still, with a commitment to publishing the truth about the relationship between community and commonwealth land values, there can even now be effected political changes which would counter the tendency towards land value greed. In the words of Asian, the great God-like force in the Narnian stories recently turned film, "There is a deeper magic that existed before the world was." This deeper magic Georgists recognize as the truth which instructs us to treat the earth as the equal birthright of all people.

Public education today has too little of this deeper magic. Its advocates whine for more funding and simultaneously ignore the great and proper source of funding. I know of no school board that presents its youth with the lessons and parables that inspire an understanding of birthright in land and inculcate a devotion to commonwealth in land values.

Nowhere is this obliviousness respecting what I here mean by the deeper magic more tragic than in San Francisco.

School closures are imminent. If the closures are deferred by a raiding of funding for other social programs, the circumstances driving the closures will simply reappear next year.

But all the while, running like a huge, silent subterranean river, the sky high land values of San Francisco pass on to the slant-drilled wells of land owners who suck up the land rent and disappear, in full view of everyone, into the glamorous fantasy life of Lotto winners.

Scarcity and the fear born of scarcity are, in reality, a denial of commonwealth. I posit that there will be no hale education finance reform until there is commonwealth education reform.