Land Value Taxation, Public Policy
and the Behavioral Sciences

Frank Goble

[A paper delivered at the 1987 Council of Georgist Organizations conference
held at Point Lomas College, San Diego, California, July]

FRANK GOBLE retired at 46 from a successful business career to found the non-profit Thomas Jefferson Research Center. He is the author of four books: The Third Force; The Psychology of Abraham Maslow; Excellence In Leadership; Beyond Failure: How to Cure a Neurotic Society and The Case For Character Education.

It is my conviction, based on a 25 year multi-disciplinary study of the behavioral sciences, that Georgists would be more effective if they had a better understanding of the Behavioral Sciences and their enormous influence on public policy in world societies.

America's Founding Fathers, the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, received an education very different from today's modern, secularized, specialized education. Their education was far more rigorous and generalized, and placed heavy emphasis on history, philosophy and religion.

Although their religious viewpoints differed, the Founders all believed in a purposeful, rational, God-created universe.

Thomas Paine spoke for most of the Founders when he said: "When we survey the work of creation … we see unerring order and universal harmony reigning throughout the whole. No part contradicts another. ...God is the power of first cause, nature is the law, and matter is the subject acted upon."

The Founding Fathers' ideas about government, economics, law, ethics, and education started with this fundamental conviction about enduring Laws of Nature.

Natural Law was mentioned explicitly in the Declaration of Independence: "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them..."

Henry George was not merely an economist, he was a social philosopher. To understand his ideas about economics, it is essential to understand his underlying philosophical premise - Natural Law. He explained it thus: "Human laws are made by man, and share in all his weaknesses and frailties. ...Natural Laws, on the other hand, belong to the natural order of things; to that order in which and by which not only man himself but all that is, exists....Man can no more resist or swerve a Natural Law than he can build a world. They are acknowledged not only by men in all times and places, but also by all animate and all inanimate things....So far as we can see, either by observation or by reason, they know not change or the shadow of turning, but are the same - yesterday, today, tomorrow; for they are expressions, not of the mutable will of man, but of the immutable will of God." (The Science of Political Economy, pg. 60)

Henry George spent little time explaining or defending the concept of Natural Law. Why should he be concerned about defending a premise which had been advanced by some of the greatest minds in history and was the basis upon which the Founding Fathers built the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution?

Without an understanding and acceptance of Natural Law, however, the whole Georgist philosophy is weakened, if not shattered. From the concept of Natural Law came Mr. George's concept of justice and his most basic premise about human nature. "The fundamental principle of human action" he wrote, " - the law that is to political economy what the law of gravitation is to physics - is that men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion." (Progress and Poverty, pg. 204) If there is, as Henry George claimed, a Law of Least Effort (Adam Smith based his concept of capitalism on that same assumption) then a basic premise of socialism - that men will work whether they are paid in proportion to their efforts or not - is contrary to Natural Law.

The gradual abandonment of the Natural Law concept started more than 100 years ago. It was then that the approach to human problems began to shift from theologians and philosophers to the behavioral scientists. Excited by scientific success in solving complex technical problems, scholars set out to use the same scientific methods to solve human problems.

Charles Darwin provided an attractive theoretical base for the scientific approach to human behavior. Not only were his observations detailed and empirical, but they also furnished an entirely materialistic explanation for the genesis of man. Darwin's historic Origin of the Species (1859) shook men's faith, not only in God and institutionalized religion, but in the concept of Natural Law as well. His theory of accidental evolution challenged the belief in an orderly, purposeful universe. "I cannot look at the universe as a result of blind chance," Darwin wrote, "yet I can see no evidence of beneficent design or indeed of design of any kind in the details."

Darwinian Materialism provided the theoretical base for Marxism, Fabian Socialism, Freudianism, Behaviorism and other "scientific" theories of behavior.

The practical lessons of history, philosophy and religion were ignored - labeled "unscientific." The resulting ideas about man and society are profoundly different from those of Henry George and the American Founders. The new point of view - perhaps the most descriptive label is "value-free behavioral science" - that has gained almost a monopoly in American universities and, to a large extent, universities around the world, is that the universe is accidental and purposeless and human beings are the result of an accidental evolutionary process. Human nature is constantly changing and there are no enduring ethical principles.

The problem for Georgists, therefore, is not merely to convince people of the merits of land-value taxation. The problem is much greater than this. It is to convince people that the abandonment of Natural Law in our institutions of higher education has been an incredible blunder. At this point loyal Georgists may throw up their hands in despair because if we have been unable to convince people of the merits of land-value taxation, how are we going to overcome current intellectual trends in the behavioral sciences?

This is the age of science and Georgists must recognize that any public policy that is to receive widespread intellectual acceptance must be couched in scientific terms.

Fortunately, Georgists would not be alone in challenging value-free behavioral science. Distinguished scholars from many disciplines are finding major flaws in present day orthodox behavioral science.

The work of Dr. Abraham Maslow, for example, gives influential new scientific support for Natural Law theory. Dr. Maslow started a chain reaction back in 1954 with his publication of Motivation and Personality. His work was a polite, yet devastating, indictment of orthodox scientific explanations of human behavior. "I became interested in certain psychological problems," said Maslow, "and found that they could not be answered or managed well by the classical scientific structure of the time (the Behavioristic, Positivistic, "scientific1, value-free, mechanomorphic psychology)." Maslow pointed out that from the beginning behavioral scientists had tended to study people with psychological problems, statistical averages, or rats and pigeons. He suggested that a more logical approach to the study of human behavior was the study of the healthiest psychological specimens available.

From his study of healthy humans, Maslow discovered the scientific basis for a science of values (Natural Law). He found that his healthy specimens, he called them self-actualized people, regardless of their race, creed or color, were in general agreement regarding basic values. He concluded this was true because the entire human species had innate and apparently unchanging basic psychological needs (instincts).

Dr. Maslow's ideas are explained in my book The Third Force. Abraham Maslow was not an obscure scientist. He became president of the American Psychological Association. His books and lectures have been published in 12 languages and his fame continues to increase even since his untimely death in 1970.

Scientific evidence for the Law of Least Effort was developed by a Harvard scientist, George Kingley Zipf. His book entitled Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort, was published in 1949 (Hafner Publishing Company). "It is the expressed purpose of this book," he wrote, "to establish the principle of least effort as the primary principle that governs our entire individual and collective behavior of all sorts, including the behavior of our language and preconception....In other words, by means of the accepted methods of the exact sciences, we have established an orderliness, or Natural Law, that governs human behavior. Moreover, the variety of our observations, extends from the minutiae of phonetic and semantic behavior to the gross distributions of human populations, goods, services, and wealth , is sufficient, I believe, to give pause to the superficial opinion that the observed orderliness in these fundamental matters has nothing to do with the practical affairs of everyday life."

Unfortunately, perhaps because of the antagonism in professional circles towards anything that smacks of Natural Law, and also because of uncoordinated specialization in the behavioral disciplines, Dr. Zipf's remarkable studies have, for the most part, remained unknown and unnoticed.

There are other scientific studies which refute Darwinian Materialism and can be used to support the Natural Law theory. There are, for example, the in-depth studies of Drs. Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, Harvard criminologists. Their study of delinquents carried out over a period of several decades, showed rather conclusively that it was not the physical environment or poverty which caused delinquency, but rather the attitudes that the children acquired from their parents and teachers.

Recent studies of child training by Stanley Coopersmith, Dorothy Briggs, John Gilmore and Dr. Richard H. Blum show rather conclusively that the permissive value-free child training which stems from orthodox behavioral science theories has been a tremendous failure in developing responsible children.

In Psychiatry, the work of Dr. William Glasser is outstanding. In his book, Reality Therapy (1965), Glasser wrote, "Toward the end of my psychiatric training I found myself in the uncomfortable position of doubting much that I had been taught." Glasser set out to develop a new approach'. His answers bear a remarkable resemblance to those of Maslow. People who need psychiatric treatment have not been able to satisfy their basic human needs for relatedness and respect. To satisfy these needs, they must learn to be realistic, learn the difference between right and wrong behavior. "Irresponsible people," he writes, "always seeking to gain happiness without assuming responsibility, find only brief periods of joy, but not the deep-seated satisfaction which accompanies responsible behavior."

Dr. Robert Sperry's split-brain research has received worldwide attention and a 1981 Nobel Prize. His recent book is Science and Moral Priority (1985). His thesis is that the materialistic theories that have dominated in the social and behavioral sciences for many years are seriously flawed, and that a synthesis of science with moral values is now feasible and scientifically sound. Human values, he points out, have tremendous power to mold world conditions - "human values stand out as a universal determinant of all human decisions and actions.

"Until very recently," he says, "science has been dominated in Western and Communist worlds alike by the belief that man and his behavior, along with everything else, can be fully accounted for in terms that are strictly material without resorting to any kind of non-physical force or agent."

This point of view caused scientists to disregard thoughts, hopes, feelings, ideals, and anything spiritual or religious. "...The whole idea of genetic inheritance of behavior patterns came to be forcibly renounced. The term "instinct ' became highly discredited in professional circles ... Science tells us free will is just an illusion..."

Those familiar with the work of Abraham Maslow and other Third Force psychologists will quickly see the similarity between Third Force theory and Sperry's criticism of value-free science. What is significant is that Dr. Sperry's Nobel Prize was for his work in physiology - one of the "hard" sciences.

"The new interpretation," he says, "involves a direct break with long established materialistic and behavioristic thinking that has dominated neuroscience for many decades."

I could go on and list many additional examples showing a growing revolt against value-free behavioral science. Evidence from the fields of management and criminology is most impressive.

The point of all this is that if land value taxation is to achieve widespread intellectual (academic) acceptance it needs to be supported by a sound scientific theory of behavior. The factual evidence for such a theory now exists.

RECOMMENDED READING LIST

Goble, Frank THE THIRD FORCE; The Psychology of Abraham Maslow -Available from the Thomas Jefferson Research Center, 1143 N. Lake Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91104.

Goble, Frank. BEYOND FAILURE; How to Cure a Neurotic Society -Available from the Thomas Jefferson Research Center, 1143 N. Lake Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91104.

Zipf, George K. HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND THE PRINCIPAL OF LEAST EFFORT - Hafner Publishing Co. New York, 1949 (This book may be out of print but all Georgists should be aware of it.)

Glasser, William REALITY THERAPY - Harper & Row, New York, 1965

Coopersmith, Stanley. THE ANTECEDENTS OF SELF ESTEEM - W. F, Freeman, San Francisco, 1967

Sperry, Roger. SCIENCE AND MORAL PRIORITY - Praeger Publishers, New York, 1985