Marketing Georgist Ideas to the Public

Edward J. Dodson

[Reprinted from GroundSwell, November/December 1989]

Why do so few people outside our movement appreciate the importance of land markets to the overall health of the economy?

That question grows out of current news events reported in this issue.

What holds them back, I believe, is a two-fold problem detailed in what follows: a society characterized by widespread privilege, its citizens no longer familiar with the founding principles, or with the history of how those principles have been gradually eroded.

Society today, there is evidence to believe, is dominated by privilege, much of it transformed by licenses and titleholdings into claims on production. Many of us have spent the better part of our adult lives explaining the injustice of such privilege; and, in doing so, we focus primarily on titleholdings to nature (without appropriate compensation to the rest of humankind) as the mother of all privileges.

The power of privilege is deeply entrenched and institutionally supported. In the United States privilege has become so widespread that people have vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

Privilege can be traced to long before the founding of the nation; and, Jeffersonian rhetoric aside, the motivation of all but a few who forged the new state and federal governments was to preserve what privilege they enjoyed and open the door for more.

That has been the pattern in these United States from earliest days. Thus, as the reach of government and other favored institutions has grown, so has the spirit of privilege come to dominate society.

Government at all levels today either directly employs, regulates or provides funding to private and quasi-government groups of all stripes and purposes.

And thus to the other fold of our problem: our schools have not escaped from This influence.

In their own quest for status and power, our universities have (with notable exceptions) abandoned the objective of providing a liberal education through quality teaching. Undergraduates are increasingly left to the mercy of teaching assistants or graduate students. Research and publication -- not demonstrated teaching ability -- bring tenure and status to the professor. The result is a large number of narrowly-trained and poorly educated college graduates, as evidenced in a recent survey of college seniors by the Gallup organization. Assuming that the results of this survey are fairly representative of those who graduated from college since the explosion in attendance that began in the 60s, we get some idea of the educational challenge we face; when --

* 23% thought that the phrase "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" appears in the U.S. Constitution.

* 58% could not identify Plato as the author of The Republic.

* 54% had no idea what the Federalist Papers were or who wrote them.

High schools have been criticized for failing to send to the colleges and universities students well-versed in fundamentals. Businesses are more and more forced to spend resources on remedial education programs for employees at all levels, and we are slowly coming to grips with adult illiteracy as a national crisis. One problem is that the development of language skills, both written and oral, is ignored. Teachers complain of demands on them to perform administrative responsibilities that prevent the use of essays and compositions in the classroom. At the college level, large class size and absence of professorial involvement have made the multiple choice test the standard. In certain programs at prestigious Ivy League or other major universi- ties, students are receiving undergraduate degrees without ever submitting a written paper or taking a course with a tenured professor. The real question today is: What, in fact, is learned by most students during their four years of college?

Greater local autonomy and the use of a voucher system to fund education have been put forth again and again as means of making public education both responsive to the needs of students and competitive in approach to the providing of a liberal education. A similar program is needed for higher education as well, one that replaces tenure for professors with a contract-based system rewarding them based on their ability to attract students to their classes and not for how many articles they publish in obscure journals.

For our own part, through the programs of the Henry George Schools, we are beginning to acknowledge the problem and are doing our best to overcome these obstacles. Harry Pollard's program, Classical Analysis, is one approach that has already demonstrated its effectiveness in developing in students their inherent powers of logical thought. Reaching teachers sufficiently open to new methods and able to transfer power from instructing to learning is something Harry cannot do alone; he needs the support of other Georgists who are willing to put the time and energy in getting this program into their local schools. More recently, Stan Rubenstein and George Collins have spearheaded the video series in American History, which is gaining widespread acceptance by high school social studies teachers. In New York and Philadelphia we are working on our curriculum to take into account the difficulty many students have in understanding the issues and principles raised by George in his writings.

Few of our students today are equipped with even a modest understanding of history, geography, or political philosophy when they enroll in our programs. Therefore, our success in reaching even the thinking person now depends on our ability to place our ideas in context. I suspect that Bob Clancy would concur that his more recent experience with correspondence students of the Henry George Institute supports my conclusions, but I invite him to share his views with GroundSwell readers. I sincerely hope others will respond as well.

Unfortunately, despite the fact a significant number of Georgists have impressive credentials, we are rarely in the forefront of the public dialogue. Both Walt Rybeck and Steve Cord have worked tirelessly to change this. Walt has most recently focused his attention on the crisis in housing affordability that plagues many regions of the United States, and Steve continues to spread success stories of site value taxation to financially-troubled cities. In the best tradition of the Centers they have founded, I recommend to them that they solicit the participation of other Georgists who can serve as senior fellows, attached to the Center for Public Dialogue or the Center for the Study of Economics. As senior fellows, their papers might be written and delivered at conferences or public meetings, testimony given at hearings in national or state capitols.

Above and beyond everything else, we need to compete in the technical environment of economic forecasting. The opportunity is enormous; business would pay almost any price for reliable information about the future.