How I Came to Embrace the Principles
Embraced by Henry George

Karl Williams

[Reprinted from Progress, May-June, 2004]

IT'S TIME TO continue our series of personal journeys relating the different paths by which we arrive at Geoism. In fact, it's time for your EDITOR, Karl Williams, to pull on the boots and tell my tale. To "see the cat" is to experience a sort of revelation, in the manner of when a kid sees the hidden cat in those activity book drawings of a tree or bush. After you see the cat, the Geoist paradigm just seems so obvious.

For too many years the cat remained camouflaged, but when she magically materialised my aimless life was totally transformed. Since then, I've almost cuddled that little pussy to death -- but I jump ahead.

Call me ungrateful, but all the privileged mainstream educational opportunities I've had have been, to me, almost worthless in terms of understanding how the world goes round. My time at an elite Jesuit college (which I loathed) was followed by me wasting 3 years studying expensive means of poisoning people (i.e. conventional medicine) at Melbourne University, but I was young and stupid, and was really only doing it for the money and prestige. After bombing out spectacularly, I casually switched over to Monash to do an economics degree for no good reason other than I wasn't yet ready for the 5-day-drag.

Yes, these were the heady days of the 1970's (I was born in 1955 and left home at 18), and Hippydom had me in its thrall. The neoclassical economics I was (supposed to be) studying seemed like palpable garbage, but then my solution to the world's woes was to legalise cannabis. Bleary-eyed from smoking dope rather than attending lectures (everyone could choof openly at Monash in those days), I barely scraped through my degree, having crammed for exams and copied half my essays.

With the ink still not dry on my exam papers, I hit the infamous Hippy Trail -- the overland trek through South-East Asia to Nepal and India. Fuelled by a wide selection of substances not normally available over the counter, I had all sorts of wild experiences en route to India, and that lucky star which continues to shine on me somehow kept me from getting thrown into some fleapit of an Asian jail (not for a lengthy period, at least).

After about a year of misadventures, I finally made it to India. All those feral experiences led me to proudly think that I knew it all ... and was set to take a mighty tumble, at the end of which I realised I knew practically nothing.

It was the yogic trip which had me spellbound -- how could these yogis get off through meditation into really high states without chemicals? My wanderings and conversations led me inevitably to delve into the Big Questions and my immersion in yogic philosophy and practices.

Meanwhile, back on the physical plane, I'd embarked on an ever-madder journey. In my utter naivety and misplaced sense of idealism, I'd made my own Gandhian-style renunciation by discarding my backpack and few possessions, tramping and sleeping in the humblest of conditions, and throwing just about all my money into a temple (good old Mum was to later send me more!). Various escapades included being thrown in jail, almost being killed in a riot (which I caused), being a prisoner for a fortnight in a Muslim village, and ending up destitute at the door of the Salvation Army in Calcutta (how the proud get their come-uppance!). But the most insane thing was the epilogue: a few weeks later, I found myself sitting in the main Melbourne offices of Coopers & Lybrand, beginning 6 years of working as an auditor with a mega-firm of international chartered accountants. Now, that's real adventures in consciousness!

I share this background to set up how Pussy appeared out of the mist. Those experiences in India had totally shaken up my world view. I'd had zero interest in economics and had gone to India basically because of its cheap hashish, and ironically left without any of those vices (I've not taken alcohol, other drugs, tobacco or meat since then).

In the manner of an undercover agent in that super-straight beancounting world, I was desperately saving in order to be able to retire completely after 7 years and return to India indefinitely. Again, those plans would completely unravel. While my auditing colleagues would munch on their McDonald's over lunch, I'd slip off to a park to quietly read more about Tibetan mysticism and the like.

My searching broadened out thanks to the all-embracing spirit that was imbued in me by the Theosophical Society, and that led to me investigating an extraordinary intentional community called Findhorn, which was cooperating with nature spirits to develop an amazing tropical garden in northern Scotland. It was at a 1981 gathering of Findhom folk in Melbourne that I met a dear old lady, Lorna Staub, who invited me for afternoon tea one Saturday to discuss Findhorn further.

It was there that I met her husband, Roland, who wasn't interested in this weirdo nature trip one bit, but instead was babbling on about some economist called Henry George. He seemed like an utter crank and, besides, I'd done an economics degree and had never heard of Henry George, but he kept bailing me up and prattling on. The economic system he was totally unable to explain made no sense at all, but to placate the guy I agreed to have a look at the magazine he recommended I read (you're looking at it, dear reader).

Over the course of the next year, reading the magazine and other promotional material, I came to slowly appreciate some of aspects of Georgean economics, but only in a disjointed manner. I once ventured into the offices in Hardware Lane and was greeted with much friendliness, but was deterred by the strange culty atmosphere and how it seemed like some sort of old men's club. One old guy (who's now deceased and shall remain nameless) cornered me and raved on about how Henry George had got it wrong but he himself had the economic key, but I shouldn't listen to the other people here because of the (loony, to me) conspiracy afoot. I fled.

But the seed had put down root, and I had to know more. There was a book which the Henry George League (as it was known then, which seemed to act more as a warning than a welcome) had elevated to the status of a bible. Thus I was led to read Progress and Poverty.

I must admit that much of the content of that book didn't really register, but it was nevertheless a personal turning point. After wading through the turgid anti-Malthusian arguments at the beginning, suddenly the whole tone of the book took a quantum leap. The blazing idealism -- nay, the utter goodness -- of Henry George filled my heart and nurtured my soul, and when his rousing prose reached a crescendo in the final chapters I knew that I was on to something. I still hadn't got it, but I had no choice but to press on.

I'm an inquisitive guy by nature (and a troublemaker if I don't like what I see), so didn't hesitate to rock up to a few of the Henry George League's social gigs. The crowd there was a bit eccentric, but I should complain about this? The distinct impression I received was that here was an old-fashioned, noble but out-of-touch organisation that was barely surviving, almost resigned to be some sort Keeper of the Flame. But some fascinating conversations were rapidly filling in the pieces of the puzzle, and -- to mix metaphors -- the bloodhound was hot on the trail.

It was dear old Geoff Forster who especially impressed me then, and so I admitted to him that Progress and Poverty hadn't really done it for me. His response was to recommend one of Henry George's shorter and more accessible works, Social Problems. The cat was purring louder.

Social Problems doesn't deal much with economics per se, but more with irrefutable (to me) principles of justice. Yet the clarity of those philosophical principles unlocked the secrets to those economic theories I hadn't understood. All that timeless wisdom embodying universal principles of what people deserve to share and what rightly belongs to them ..... it all came cascading down in a wholistic revelation. I experienced a form of rapturous amazement that the harmony of natural laws extended to economics. The cat appeared out of the jumble of lines and squiggles. and suddenly I knew what this culty Henry George League was all about.

Over the subsequent twenty-odd years I've continued to read the Georgean classics, but they've only filled in the details of the big picture that had already unexpectedly revealed itself. I'm a bit of an amateur historian, and it was fascinating to read the bizarre account of how such a mighty and widespread coalition of organisations declined almost into obscurity. Two books stand out here, which I can unreservedly recommend. That mighty and very readable economist, Mason Gaffney, has written an immensely-powerful account of how that bastard son. neoclassical economics, usurped its parent -- any Doubting Thomas simply MUST read The Corruption of Economics. And the late, great Robert Andelson edited a compilation of the 24 most notable opponents of Georgean economics, with compelling rebuttals -- Critics of Henry George is an essential reference hook.

The reality of The Corruption of Economics was brought home to me in the 1990s when I returned to Monash University to do masters degree and then to work as a teaching academic in the field of I.T. I was determined to give economics students the chance to study an alternative to band-aid socialism and "natural resource confiscation capitalism" (a.k.a. neoclassical economics). I knocked on the door of every single lecturer, reader and professor in the department of economics, and tried to charm my way into a conversation which eventually led to Georgean economics. When I'd outworn my welcome, I would ask them, "Do you drive here every day? .... Do you have a cassette player in your car?.... Good! Here 's a 60 minute recording I 've made which will explain things better. "This gave me the excuse to return later and put my foot in the door on the pretext of reclaiming my cassette.

That whole exercise was a noble failure in the sense that not one of those 25 academics put Georgean economics on their curriculum, but valuable in that it gave me an intimate insight into how and why the academic world has generally sold out in order to preserve its corrupted careers. Come the revolution, they'll be the first to be put to work cleaning the latrines.

While I have little but derision for my formal education, I'm really grateful for my immersion in the University of Life - 6-1/2 years of backpacking through about 70 countries. When the cat has revealed herself to you, the keys to understanding economic, social and environmental problems of all sorts are yours. Despite the widely varying cultural and historical circumstances in each country, if the system of taxation and land tenure defies what I see as being natural laws, then needless poverty and inequality can only result. I view what George and so many other great minds have rediscovered as being natural laws because they apply through time (as history bears out) and space (and so apply in any country -- or galaxy, for that matter).

Why am I so consumed by The Cause? Bryan Kavanagh said it all one night, "Everything else is a waste of lime!"

So I'm enjoying my long semi retirement in my little house up next to Sherbrooke Forest, living a low cost and low-impact lifestyle. The recent resurgence in the fortunes of The Cause have filled me with great hope that a belter world is a real possibility. I 've long been a Green and an anti-consumerist, and am slowly being drawn more and more into Greens affairs. Hey, the Greens and the geoists should be natural allies for a thousand reasons -- if only more Greens would see that LVT is the logical and O-So-Necessary extension of their emerging undcrslanding of eco-taxes? My long-term goal is to see the Greens rise to political power (for all sorts of reasons besides economic), but also to make sure that they can discern that precious creature in the tree waving her seductive fluffy tail.