What Should Georgists Do
To Achieve Success?

Hugh T.A. McGahan

[Reprinted from the International Union Newsletter, February, 1970]

I agree with Fred Auld (International Union Newsletter, No.8). N). Never was the world more in need of the remedy we can offer, but never were we so ineffective in the counsels of government. If the proposals of the Valuer-General of New Zealand now before our Parliament becomes law, unimproved values legislation as we know it will disappear from our Statute Book. That's where we have arrived after 80 years of preaching!

The problem before us is to couch our remedy for the world's economic and social ills in a language the ordinary people, the people who make and break governments, can understand. Convince the ordinary man and his wife that our remedy has something for them and we won't need to split straws about what "rent" means. Convince the ordinary man that we have the answer to his ever-continuing battle with rising prices and we won't need to worry about the so-called intellectuals.

We should never forget that Henry George wrote Progress and Poverty to find out why it was that in spite of increasing productive power wages tended to give but a bare living. It was not to make half-baked political economists. And the problem that George concerned himself with is our problem today. Far too many of our citizens live too close to the breadline for us to be complacent.

Another blunder has been to talk about the "land question." We are not concerned with land at all. What concerns us is the public revenue and its collection. Therefore, we should concentrate on the taxation system and its reform.

The truth is that our governments don't know their business; we single-taxers must teach, them. Gertainly no one else can. The government, our agent, virtually gives to the site-holder a gift of the value of those community services that governments are established to carry out. But these community services cost money, and to get the money necessary to pay for them governments resort to the taxing of goods. Taxing of goods must| make the goods dearer. Worse still, the amount imposed on goods represents a gift to a non-producing section of the community.

All this is well illustrated in English history. Our modern system of taxation dates from the imposition of the excise on beer and other liquors by the Long Parliament in 1643. The old feudal dues had certainly become oppressive, but the remedy was not their abolition but changing to some form more suited to the altered circumstances, as George pointed out in Progress and Poverty, Book VII, Chapter 4. Historians generally agree that the landowners of the time relieved themselves of their financial responsibilities to the State and transferred them to the wage-earners.

Disraeli wrote his book Sybil (1842) after two centuries' experience with the system of taxing commodities in order to make a gift to the site-owners on the "Golden Mile" in our cities and towns. He said that "the principle of the system (the Dutch system of finance) was to mortgage industry to protect property. …It has made debt a national habit and has made credit the ruling power … a mortgaged aristocracy, a gambling foreign commerce, and a home trade founded on morbid competition and a degraded people. Here too was brought forth that monstrous conception which even patrician Borne never equalled in its most ruthless period --. the mortgaging of industry to protect property." Like a good politician, Disraeli did nothing to correct the evil when he had the opportunity.

In our unimproved values legislation we have the answer for finding the revenue necessary to maintain the State without increasing the price of goods. Let us proclaim that from the housetops. Surely we couldn't achieve less than we have after 80 years of trying to make half-baked economists of well-meaning searchers after a better system of wealth distribution.