Are the Georgists Liberal, Radical, Or Conservative?

Richard Noyes

[Reprinted from the Henry George News, December, 1952]

Richard Noyes was at the time a journalist (Keene Sentinel) and is editor and proprietor of the Ledger, published in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Political science is a great deal like fog, land it is hard to tell in a fog which way the wind is blowing.

There are a few wise men walking around in political science on stilts, so their head is out where they can see the horizon, but all too few. The rest of us grab their coattails and walk along behind. The trouble is those few men, like anyone else, begin to totter and either get down off their stilts to avoid a bad bruise or stay up there until they fall off and get it.

Henry George had his head out of the fog. We have had a hold on his coattails. Some of us are still holding them and some of us have let go. We are headed in his direction. We are groping ahead on a pogo stick, getting our head out every once in awhile, and trying otherwise not to wander around in a circle.

Now, the good of knowing in this fog which way the wind is blowing is that sometime if it blows long enough in the right direction it will clear up the fog and take the dampness out of our political science so we can all trot down to the sea and pick pearls.

There has been a dramatic windshift in American political science. It has swung around from left toward the right here, as it did in England a few years ago, and as it seems to be doing elsewhere.

A Finger to the Wind

It is time to wet a finger and hold it up to find out which side gets chilly to find out if the wind is with us. History, we think, has slipped around behind Henry George so his land equity principal, once a radically new idea, is now on the conservative side.

Henry George's ultimate struggle is not with Malthus and the big railroads, as it sometimes seems to be, but with Marx and the social planners who do not understand whit it is about people that is equal or significant.

The valley down which we are groping will lead us some day to freedom and equality. Man, we are convinced, is wiser than his intellect and his purpose is to live his life.

Man seeks not just to save himself, but to create himself.

George knew that and his land equity principal was simply an extension of political equality. He wanted to end poverty not so mankind would last longer, but so mankind would flourish.

The planners, on the other hand, George's real antagonists, have gone off in a circle and are headed back up the valley again. They want to make people be free, not to make them free, and there is all the difference in the world.

They think they are progressives simply because they are in motion; we think they are reactionary because they are tobogganing backward.

They have led the flock now for some number of years, have preceded it at least. They have made it popular to pass out land which is an accidental boost for us. They had begun to admire George, to pronounce his name out loud in public even, but they failed to understand him.

George Bernard Shaw is an example. He read George, failed to see beyond his nose, said to himself "if a little is good a lot ought to be better" and turned to Marx.

The farther the flock went in that direction, the farther it was getting up the foggy valley. We have seen at the top of a recent pogo stick bounce when our head was out for a moment, a landmark to show you what we mean.

It is four or five hundred years back up the valley. It is the Inca Nation of the Andes Mountains in South America.

The Inca Nation -- so called because its hereditary leader was the Inca who heard somewhere he was descended from the sun and believed it was one of history's all time great promoters of welfare.

It was long on planners. It was a better example of Marxism than can be found today, in spite of being handicapped by coming so long before Marx.

It flourished momentarily, spread like a brush fire on a hot day with an old woman hitting it with a broom, and gave its leaders the same titillating misconception the new-dealers have had for so long.

It spread out, in several centuries, to include much of South America and to embrace, fondly and firmly, about six million people. It was what is called a "benevolent despotism" and by the early part of the sixteenth century it had become the most benevolent and the most despodismal civilizaton on the face of the earth … benevolent because everything the Inca and his egg-heads did was reportedly for the good of the people and despodismal because the end result was to suck the soul out of its population and leave the shell filled with thin mountain air.

It was more than a civilization. It was a bird's nest, high up in the valleys of the Andes, safe from any intruder, nestled in massive walls of stone so well built they still stand sheltering weeds and insects.

Associations Were Warm

It surrounded individuals and kept them so warm one could not tell where he left off and the next fellow began.

There was no poverty and no hunger, either for food or for land, and very little appetite. There was enough welfare to go around. The excess was stored up in tremendous stone forts and temples and gold plated parlors for the Inca and the royal family which was particularly welfared.

The Inca and his royal associates were such heavy thinkers it took dozens of attendants just to carry them around.

There were, through the centuries, nearly sixty Incas, each of them the oldest son of a brother and sister. They were fond of people, devoted to them, no addicted to them. They seemed to fear nothing but loneliness. They suffocated themselves with wives, and maintained reservoirs of vestal virgins probably in case of a bad flu epidemic in the royal household.

The Incas spent so much time thinking about heredity and family trees that they worked out the purebred llama, the potato, the yam, the tomato, quinine and the concubine.

The Big Finale

Finally in the early part of the sixteenth century, at the time of the death of Inca Huayna Capac, the empire was the most magnificent in the western world and the burial of Huanya Capac was the biggest thing this side of the Azores.

The nation took the week off, not for the fun of it quite, but because they had to. They lost themselves in drinking chicha, a kind of corn liquor. Some lost themselves so completely they have not been found to this day. They chewed coca leaves, to get over their sorrow at the Inca's death and their own birth. Coca leaves, it should be pointed out, were an earlier source of dope addiction than some of the drugs which have gone over big during the latter days of our recent wave of welfare.

It was in 1532, seven years after the funeral and four centuries before the good neighbor policy, that Pizarro, the Spaniard, climbed awkwardly in his clanking armor up into the Andes, shot off a few firearms, rode his horse crazily back and forth across the plaza at Caxamalco several times and frightened the magnificent Incan empire so badly that it stood shivering in its nightshirt, caught cold and died.

It is considered one of the great riddles of history. A handful of men, stumbling on horseback along a narrow precipice high over the roaring Urumbamba River, wandering blindly into the heart of an 'impregnable" empire of six million landed, welfared and sleepy souls, lost and bewildered . . . but talking big.

We consider it no riddle at all. It is a simple case of free men against a welfare state.