The Real Enemy:

A Critique of Georgist Political Strategy

E. P. Middleton

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

Ashley Mitchell raises, in International Union Newsletter, No. 9, important questions which demand answers. I will attempt to provide one.

The failure of Georgists to make real progress, in my opinion, is due to the fact that we have accepted a formula for change which is back to front. We have been working on the assumption that once land value taxation is in operation all the rest of the recognizable evils in the body economic will disappear. Instead, we should be attacking the economic theories of the present rulers of our society and working to eliminate the effects of these theories, so that we shall have cleared the ground fear acceptance of the proposition that the State's proper revenue is the economic rent.

Land Value Taxation as now imposed, already a failure in Australia, has no hope of achieving the Just Society which is the Georgasts; true raison d'etre. Its advocates are wasting their time, like a tribe of white ants attacking a fortress of steel. (White ants would have more sense; they know when they're beaten!)

The great enemy in the path of acceptance of the Georgist economic philosophy is inflation. Until we can demonstrate how to eliminate this, the major evil of modern society, we shall continue to be ignored by those to whom we should be able to look for leadership and action. Georgists must study economics -- not the London School of Economics brand, though we have got to be able to expose its fallacies in its own terminology -- but through bur own master of economics, Henry George, as set out in his Science of Political Economy - and forget about land value taxation, the distortion of his remedy, for which distortion, I admit, George himself is partly responsible. We must expose the economic planners for the pragmatic amateurs they are, and the barrenness of their ever-changing theories. We must show the people that the taxation system under which they have lived and suffered so long, is a gigantic conspiracy to defraud. We will not convince the ordinary taxpayer that he is going to derive any worthwhile benefit from land value taxation ("just another tax?") even if applied 100% overnight, which we know to be a pipe-dream. We must strive to show how he can rid himself of the appalling burden of taxation and the cost of over-government.

The real enemy is Socialism by default, which in Britain is already self-exposed in all its horror and only needs a few good minds like that of Enoch Powell (without his unfortunate racial bias) to bring about its destruction.

To me, it is sad beyond words that the entire Georgist movement is, bogged down, in a worthless struggle to implant at the level of local government a minor tax reform, while the whole structure of society is in danger of crumbling into chaos the final end of which is a despotism of either right or left -- it won't matter much which, once we're, in it.

Let us change direction while there is still time. It could pay exciting dividends.