Government Administration versus Reform

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, March-April 1937]

Joseph Dana Miller was during this period Editor of Land and Freedom. Many of the editorials published were unsigned. It is therefore possible that Miller was not the author of this article, although the content is thought to be consistent with his own perspectives as Editor.

It is unfortunate perhaps that the President's proposal for Supreme Court changes shifts general interest from the economic aspects of Mr. Roosevelt's programme to a subject that is almost exclusively governmental. It is easy to see, or should be to the thoughtful, that political democracy rests upon economic equality. In the mass of experiments emanating from the booby hatch of the administration there comes the need of so modifying the fundamentals of our government as to make possible their imposition at the hands of a dictatorial power. It follows as the day follows the night. And it does not matter one bit that the ends sought by this experimentation seek to remove abuses of which we as a people are quite conscious.

We are among those who believe that the founding fathers fashioned wisely. There is not an evil in our economic life that cannot be remedied by the orderly processes that have been duly provided. These may seem a little slow at times, but all orderly processes are slow. Mr. Roosevelt, however, is in a desperate hurry. He has cause to be in a hurry, since what he aims at is a revolution, a change of government so remorseless as to call for a hew set up of labor and capital, new relations of government to industry, a condition in which all men are wards of the state. He does not openly avow this, it is true. He may not, probably is not, conscious of all this. He is being hurried along by forces he is largely powerless to control.

There is but one alternative to democracy, and that is dictatorship, either communistic or fascist in character. The only choice is between freedom and dictatorship. For the want of a little elementary knowledge we are loosing our grasp on democracy and subtly changing he character of our government.

The evils that the administration contends against are not to be remedied by experimentation, regimentation, laws governing wages and obstructions to the natural flow of capital, but by freedom. What do we mean by freedom? Here is a nation practically illimitable in natural resources. Here are idle men barred from access to these resources. Timidly and hesitatingly this great fact is ignored.

Lincoln saw it, Thomas Jefferson saw it. So too did Tolstoy, Carlyle, Herbert Spencer. Above all Henry George saw it and worked out a plan for its orderly solution.

In the face of what is so obvious Plans and Planners come and go. But all are on their way out. It is the nature of error to play a very subordinate part in this great drama, so the Townsend Plan, the Douglass Credit scheme, the Technocrats, figure in their one night engagements and disappear. But as Mr. Connor D. Ross has said in his work on The Sphere of Individualism, "Truth has all the time there is." The eternal years of God are hers. And in its majestic march the knights of error clash against its impenetrable steel and soon cease to be.

The attractive figure of the President with his persuasive personality is traveling fast into the limbo of forgotten things. His star now hastens to its setting. And all because he has failed to recognize the obvious. That obvious thing is man's relation to the earth, the necessity of freeing the natural resources so that Labor may be free to apply itself to the land. "A plan like this will be worked out some day," said Lincoln, sensing with prophetic insight the advent of the man who worked it out. "And it will be opposed by the senseless enemies of mankind everywhere," he added, for he knew men as few in history have known them. Had Mr. Roosevelt realized that production, not restriction, brings prosperity his whole programme would have been reversed.

Where are those who seem perplexed and disheartened at what appears to be the slow progress of the Henry George movement. They assign a multitude of reasons, none of which are valid, such as the supposed inadequacy of the name Single Tax, the errors of Ricardo's law of Rent from which Mr. George deduced the Law of Wages his chief great discovery supposed discrepancies in Progress and Poverty, and many other causes.

As a matter of fact the progress of the cause has not been slow. Henry George departed this life forty years ago. No man has left so marked an impress upon succeeding generations. No American has so influenced legislation in his own and foreign lands. There is hardly a city in the United States that has not in operation reforms in tax administration which owe their adoption to forces set in motion by Henry George or his followers, separation of land and improvements, tax maps, and modification of century-old abuses in assessments. Improvements in our election machinery are to be traced directly to him in the adoption of what was called by Henry George a generation and more ago, "The Australian Ballot System." The habit of assessors to appraise vacant land at a lower rate than improved land at one time universal is well on its way out. These reforms are all tagged with the name of Henry George. No man has influenced progress in anything like the same measure.

Of this, the clever young men who are writing today are in blissful ignorance. Most of them are more or less under the spell of Karl Marx. This is true of the Roosevelt administration with its patchwork planning which may be likened to a child's game of blocks. The scattered pieces are presumed to fit in somewhere and the children are having a fine time. But government is not like that. It is not a game of piecing together the scattered blocks in grooves where they fit. It is a human problem where men and women act voluntarily in accordance with their interests and desires and involuntarily in accordance with the natural laws of association.

It is not to be expected that the planners will understand this. There is something eternally fascinating in the attempts to remake the facts of life, to reconstruct the relations of land, capital and labor in obedience to fanciful theories of social rebuilding more nearly to the heart's desire. Men enamoured of their subtleties write learned books in which these simplicities are lost in mere wordiness.

It matters not to these writers if instead of repairing -- the leaks they destroy what is good and sound in the vain attempt to remodel the edifice, as if men and women were pawns or puppets to be moved artificially across the stage and set in their proper relation with the state as the chief Prompter.

The trend is both silly and tragic. It is tragic when in the process of trying to make it work it lodged a poor little tailor, Jacob Maged, in a felon's cell for pressing a suit of clothes for 35 cents instead of 40 cents; that it ruined the garage business of Harry Sly because he would not pay an unjust fine, that it bankrupted the Schechters because it took their all to defend themselves from unjust and iniquitous charges, more political than legal. The legislation that made all this possible, along with crop reduction, the plowing down of cotton and the killing of little pigs, was handed to the legislators, not prepared by them. And because they cannot continue this crazy carnival of queer experiments the Supreme Court is to be shorn of its power. There is no other reason for the action. All other justifications are hokum. The powers in control do not care a penny whether the Supreme Court justices are incapacitated or senile at seventy the politicians are economically senile, most of them, long before that.

The planners are not the people; they are a little group in Washington who use the people as pawns in their planning. Deluded by a spurious humanitarianism the people look with growing unconcern on the constant drain of wealth from overburdened tax payers to meet these various forms of "hand outs" which have become so necessary, but under which slave-mindedness has grown and initiative on the part of the masses, either in thinking or acting, is in danger of being permanently lost.

Humanity is not a tabula rasa on which is to be written new rules ranging from juvenilia to senilia for its governance. But the thurmaturgists at Washington proceed with their experimentation and give us glimpses like that of Kubla Khan of vanishing pillars and fountains that fade away.

The story is told of a German scientist who was writing a natural history. When he came to describe a camel he was at a loss; he had never seen a camel and he evolved one out of his own brain. Whether the animal bore any resemblance to the natural camel the story does not say.

In much the same way the Planners draw upon their - imaginations for their pattern of mankind. But man is an animal subject to laws that were here before the Planners arrived. Among these laws are those which relate man to the land and are known as the laws of political economy. It is a subject easily mastered. There is the same ideal exactness and perfection in economic reasoning that pertains to mathematics, which is one of the few forms of purely demonstrative reasoning.