Tendency as Principle:
Resurrection of Henry George's
Closed System of Political Economy
PART ONE

Edward J. Dodson

[1992]

ABSTRACT

Ireland and England. The memory of repeated English invasions, occupation and oppression beginning in the twelfth century lingers on, especially among the Celtic-Irish living in Northern Ireland. Recognition by Great Britain of Irish independence and sovereignty finally came in 1937; and, in 1949 the twelve year old Republic of Eire broke from the British Commonwealth to embark on its journey of self-determination. To what extent are its successes, its failures, its continuing problems as a society attributable to its long period of foreign occupation? Do the tools of political economy, as crystallized by the writing of the nineteenth century social philosopher and political economist Henry George, provide a decisive framework for historical analysis of these questions? These are the subjects of this paper.

A distinction often attributed to the American[1] experience is that ours is a nation governed by law rather than by men, implying that the fabric of our society derives from adherence to certain principles codified under a written constitution and against which both legislative enactments and governmental actions can be judged for legitimacy. Integral to this process is widespread recognition that inherently just individual actions might at a particular point in time or place be treated as illegal and, conversely, that actions considered legal might not be just. On the surface, this seems a unique and strong safeguard against prolonged tyranny. In reality, the system is quite fragile and is subjected to repeated attacks by subversive interests. Manmade laws can be and are changed as a result of shifting political compromises, rather than by the strict application of principle. One can only hope that the general direction of change in toward a greater degree of justice. Because human beings are what we are, neither written laws nor the constitutions from which such laws arise can be considered inherently just even when adopted by consensus under the democratic process. There is, obviously, a stronger likelihood that laws passed with the consent of the majority will protect human rights. History reveals, however, that the majority is also quite capable of passing laws that create privilege for themselves at the expense of liberty.

An essential focus for those seeking to resolve questions of justice has been the historical development of socio-political arrangements and the interplay of three powerful forces associated with human behavior: cooperation, competition and conflict. Survival of our species has always required that individuals cooperative with one another -- particularly in the areas of food gathering, the passing on of environmental management knowledge, childrearing and protection from external threats. These same survival-oriented activities also nurtured competitive behavior patterns, while socialization served to moderate more violent behavior that tended to generate conflict.

As human population increased and groups moved outward from their original savannah habitat, competition for and conflict over survival resources became inevitable. Moreover, within each separate group both internal and environmental demands stimulated the development of sophisticated relationship patterns that served as forerunners of more formalized socio-political arrangements and institutions. Knowledge of the environment was passed on from generation to generation so that a high degree of prestige and influence came to those who were able to relate past to present and, to some degree, predict the future. Those who first hunted, then protected the group from external threat, eventually came to dominate others in their group and were able to reduce the demands on themselves to actually labor by capturing and enslaving members of other tribal groups.

What history reveals is a tendency on the part of knowledge-keepers and warrior-protectors to use their superior intellectual or physical powers to become surplus takers. One result, of course, is that the course of human civilization has been characterized by an almost continuous bloodletting between those who have labored to produce from nature those material goods required for survival (and comfort) and those willing to use coercive measures to obtain what had been produced by others. On an even grander scale, conflicts between groups of surplus takers have erupted into prolonged warfare the objectives being territorial conquest, domination and even annihilation. That this historical pattern has been repeated again and again throughout history, across and between societies, caught the attention of an obscure and self-educated American journalist named Henry George in the second half of the nineteenth century. He then devoted the remainder of his life to the search for answers to the question of why so much extreme poverty seemed to accompany the advance of civilization.

The methodology adopted by Henry George for his analysis was that of the political economist -- holistic and based on an equal appreciation for deductively and inductively-acquired knowledge. In his role as newspaper editor he became immersed in the issues of the day. He was deeply concerned over the survival of republicanism as expounded on by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and others of the founding era. By debating the effects of protectionist tariffs he became, in the process, a staunch advocate for free trade. Then, while acting as managing editor of the San Francisco Times, he authored an article entitled "What the Railroad Will Bring Us" published in the October 1868 edition of the Overland Monthly. With this essay, George took an important step upward from journalistic advocacy into the realm of ideas. His conclusions were to eventually shake the foundations of long-established institutions, of political economy itself as a scientific endeavor, and stimulate a growing interest among reform-minded individuals in changing the socio-political systems in the United States and elsewhere around the globe. George had no doubts that he was involved in a quest for truth, and he was not afraid to challenge conventional wisdoms when the evidence directed him to do so. After examining the impact of the railroads on the citizens of California, he set down his conclusions in a direct and unflinching manner:

For years the high rate of interest and the high rate of wages prevailing in California have been special subjects for the lamentations of a certain school of local political economists, who could not see that high wages and high interest were indications that the natural wealth of the country was not yet monopolised, that great opportunities were open to all -- who did not know that these were evidences of social health. ...

But however this be, it is certain that the tendency of the new era -- of the more dense population and more thorough development of the wealth of the State -- will be to a reduction both of the rate of interest and the rate of wages, particularly the latter. ...

The truth is, that the completion of the railroad and the consequent great increase of business and population, will not be a benefit to all of us, but only to a portion. As a general rule ... those who have, it will make wealthier; for those who have not, it will make it more difficult to get. Those who have lands, mines, established businesses, special abilities of certain kinds, will become richer for it and find increased opportunities; those who have only their own labour will become poorer, and find it harder to get ahead -- first because it will take more capital to buy land or get into business; and second, because as competition reduces the wages of labour, this capital will be harder for them to obtain.[2]

Eleven years later this embryonic analysis would form the heart of George's treatise in political economy, to which he gave the title Progress and Poverty. During the intervening period he continued apace his quest for truth. His thirst for information and understanding brought him into contact with the writings of those who had paved the way. He tested the validity of the logic and observations made by his predecessors and contemporaries against historical records and his own observations. The breadth of his exploration included all and more that a classical education demanded. He became versed in the philosophies of the Enlightenment as well as those of ancient Greece and Rome. In the process he read Macaulay, Gibbon, Carlyle, Blackstone, Smith, Ricardo, Malthus and countless others. Then, at a time when political economy as a scientific discipline was being segmented into specialized areas of concentration, George set about to solidify its theoretical foundation as a holistic science. The product of his effort arose as he analyzed and corrected the inconsistencies of his predecessors and contemporaries. He would accomplish his task building upon what he identified as the most fundamental and consistent pattern of behavior we, as human beings, exhibit:

The only way man has of satisfying his desires is by action.

Now action, if continued long enough in one line to become really exertion, a conscious putting forth of effort, produces in the consciousness a feeling of reluctance or weariness. This comes from something deeper than the exhaustion of energy in what we call physical labor; for whoever has tried it knows that one may lie on his back in the most comfortable position and by mere dint of sustained thinking, without consciously moving a muscle, tire himself as truly as by sawing wood; and that the mere clash and conflict of involuntary or undirected thought or feeling, or its continuance in one direction, will soon bring extreme weariness.

But whatever be its ultimate cause, the fact is that labor, the attempt of the conscious will to realize its material desire, is always, when continued for a little while, in itself hard and irksome. And whether from this fact alone, or from this fact, conjoined with or based upon something intuitive to our perceptions, the further fact, testified to both by observation of our own feelings and actions and by observation of the acts of others, is that men always seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion.

This, of course, does not mean that they always succeed in doing so, any more than the physical law that motion tends to persist in a straight line means that moving bodies always take that line. But it does mean the mental analogue of the physical law that motion seeks the line of least resistance -- that in seeking to gratify their desires men will always seek the way which under existing physical, social and personal conditions seems to them to involve the least expenditure of exertion.

Whether it proceed from experience of the irksomeness of labor and the desire to avoid it, or further back than that, have its source in some innate principle of the human constitution, this disposition of men to seek the satisfaction of their desires with the minimum of exertion is so universal and unfailing that it constitutes one of those invariable sequences that we denominate laws of nature, and from which we may safely reason. It is this law of nature that is the fundamental law of political economy -- the central law from which its deductions and explanations may with certainty be drawn, and, indeed, by which alone they become possible. It holds the same place in the sphere of political economy that the law of gravitation does in physics. Without it there could be no recognition of order, and all would be chaos.[3]

Guided by this first principle, George recognized in history a pattern of behavior related to the socio-political use of knowledge and warfare skills as instruments of tyranny and despotism. These were outward signs of a more subtle process by which those who could attempted to monopolize control over both nature and the products of human labor. George reasoned that seeing to the implementation and preservation of just socio-political arrangements would require some form of positive intervention by those who desired justice. Justice meant the protection of fundamental human rights, a primary right being that what was produced by the individual (either directly, or indirectly by the application of stored labor in the form of capital goods) belonged to the individual. Recognition under positive law that production belonged to the producer also established the basis for a system of rights in property.

George went on to make a case that to society as a whole belonged that which individuals did not and could not produce (i.e., what nature freely provided for human exploitation). When circumstances arose under which nature came to have an exchange value, a price, this value George demonstrated was societally-created and thus belonged to society as a whole and not to individuals or groups. The willingness of individuals to exchange property for access to nature depended in large measure, George observed, on whether the opportunity existed to freely access areas of nature that were more or less equal in their potential productivity. Population size and density were also key ingredients to the demand side of the equation; in terms of supply, almost as significant as what nature provided was the degree to which manmade laws sanctioned the private appropriation of and titleholdings to large areas of nature by the few without compensation to the whole. Land held out of use meant that nature was being monopolized and equality of opportunity diminished. These were characteristics of the market that George described by refining and expanding the laws of distribution, particularly the law of rent, as earlier developed by Ricardo:

No matter what are its capabilities, land can yield no rent and have no value until some one is willing to give labor or the results of labor for the privilege of using it; and what any one will thus give depends not upon the capacity of the land, but upon its capacity as compared with that of land that can be had for nothing.[4]

George could have gone even further by explaining that when the supply of land offered by absentee landlords to tenant farmers was far less than the need, many individuals would agree to a ground rent that could not possibly be met out of production and still provide any kind of subsistence living. Another pioneering observer, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, was quick to recognize that George's observations were supported by the actual settlement by European-Americans of the North American continent.[5] Despite the vastness and sparse population in North America, many new arrivals to the frontier experienced great difficulty gaining access to land because so much had already fallen into the hands of the railroads and land companies whose principals often included members of the Congress or the Executive branch of government. What George described were the dynamics within which those who gained legal control over access to nature were in a position to demand an ever greater share of production.

Although his own country proved to be the perfect laboratory from which to observe the advance of rent, George also needed to prove that the same dynamics were at work in societies where nature had long ago come under private or government control and the majority of citizens worked not the land but the machinery (i.e., capital goods) of industrial society. He examined ancient Rome, Asian civilizations and modern Europe. What he found was the presence in all societies of the same processes, proceeding slowly during some periods in history and under varying socio-political arrangements, more rapidly once titles to nature were privatized and accompanied by the introduction of high taxation imposed by the centralizing State. Identifying consistent historical patterns was only the beginning of his work, however. He was determined to show that political economy could meet the rigorous standards of scientific investigation. What he attempted was nothing less than to construct the theory that would describe a closed system of wealth production and distribution.

PRODUCING, KEEPING AND USING WEALTH

Classical political economy identified land (i.e., nature), labor and capital as the three factors of production. The application of labor to land generated production. If what was produced met certain criteria, George reasoned, then the political economist could consider production as wealth. For something to be included in the measurement of how much wealth existed in any society, that something had to be material, had to be produced from nature by labor (increasingly with the assistance of capital goods) and had to have a proven exchange value in the marketplace. Such items of wealth might be consumed or saved or used as capital goods in the creation of additional or new forms of wealth -- all part of a closed system from which wealth does not escape and within which land, as the first factor, is not wealth but the source of wealth. Others had made similar but less clear and often contradictory distinctions prior to Henry George, but George took great pains to define his terms with specificity and to use them with unerring consistency in his presentation.

One difference between George's treatise and that of Ricardo or Smith was his integration of moral philosophy with his scientific investigations. He instinctively felt there was a natural order to the universe and to human behavior within the constraints imposed by nature. What he concluded, however, was that natural behavior was neither inherently just nor unjust. The challenge given to humankind was to evaluate for ourselves whether specific behavior was just (and should be nurtured) or unjust (and be prevented or prohibited). By the combined operation of our socio-political arrangements and institutions as well as informal social mores and traditions, the mechanism of sanctioning or preventing behavior was established. George then prepared a two-fold case that, in terms of political economy, demonstrated that because nature existed prior to and independent of humankind, including the exchange value of nature in any calculation of aggregate wealth invalidated the results. And, in terms of moral philosophy, demonstrated that titleholdings were by their nature privileges that almost always gave to recipients the ability to demand from others a share in production. Such privileges were the economic forms of licence declared by John Locke to fall beyond the natural limits of individual liberty. To George the legitimate societal response was straightforward; the exchange value that became attached to titleholdings or the annual rental value the market placed on access to nature belonged to society and should be collected by government. Once collected, the consensus decision-making processes of constitutional democracy would direct how this fund would be used -- either to develop public infrastructure, to be distributed to all citizens equally as a social dividend or some combination thereof.

George presented evidence to support his observation that where socio-political arrangements sanctioned the monopolization and hoarding of land by the few, not only would production be thwarted but the landowners' claims against production (imputed for land they improved themselves as well as that leased to others) would increase as aggregate demand for land intensified. Although George stated this in the form of a fundamental principle, or law, he made clear that this was a law of tendency subject to numerous externalities. What substantiated his research was that this process had occurred even in North America, where landownership was much more widespread than in most other countries, but which had seen an end to the frontier and the availability of free land. George concluded that humankind seemed to be involved in a race with itself, with ingenuity and the drive for ever greater productivity constantly challenged by an equally powerful tendency toward concentrated control over nature, a process that distributed a rapidly rising rent fund to private titleholders.

What history shows is that as a share of total wealth in existence at any point in time, the portion claimed by non-producers might be high or low.In general, however, the more established the hierarchical socio-political structure and the greater the excess wealth produced over what is necessary to sustain producers at some minimal level, the greater in absolute terms will be the amount of rent taken (understanding, as well, that the introduction of slavery, characterized by maximum coercion, placed few demands on the slaveholders to restrain their takings). During humankind's earliest efforts at production, wealth came as the direct result of daily efforts -- by foraging and hunting. Little wealth was accumulated or changed in form until knowledge improved labor skills and tools were crafted to aid in increasing production to levels above mere subsistence. More recent feudal arrangements were replaced by private titles and commercial agriculture, pushing peasant farmers from the land and into villages or larger urban complexes. Here, employment for the propertyless took the form of money[6] wage labor, and the owners of capital goods were almost always aided by a supply of willing workers far in excess of that required to meet the needs of the factories. As a consequence, wages tended to hover at or just above subsistence level except for the more skilled or supervisory workers. Looking at this problem of too few jobs to accommodate too many workers, Henry George (after considerable analysis of the factual information available) rejected the population thesis put forth by Thomas Malthus and looked for the reasons why the job market did not expand sufficiently to maintain a full employment economy.

George argued that those who owned most of the existing capital goods (e.g., machinery, factories, tools, etc.) would under non-coercive conditions have a legitimate claim to a portion of production in return for the utilization of their property. To induce capital to be offered and yet not discourage labor, the negotiated return to capital would approximate the wealth produced above that which labor could produce on its own. Individuals would come to work for capitalists only when there were advantages -- direct or indirect -- over working on their own. One might still choose to call the wealth earned by capitalists wages; however, for purposes of clarity, George yielded to convention and used the term interest to distinguish the wealth yielded by capital from the wages produced by labor. If this described a just distribution of wealth between labor and capital, something was wrong in the real world, where many owners of capital seemed to be on the receiving end of a far greater share than what interest represented. Why this occurred was a question to which Henry George gave serious attention.

Before coming to conclusions about what was a just distribution of wealth, George first examined how wealth was naturally distributed. This required an historical examination into how human groups functioned under settled conditions as well as in more highly structured societies. Once this evidence was gathered and a wide range of contemporary arrangements examined, George looked for commonalities that suggested the existence of underlying principles, or laws, at work. The next challenge was to identify and look closely at human socio-political arrangements and institutions to learn whether and how the natural distribution of wealth was altered. What George found was that under conditions where individuals or small groups migrated and settled on land not previously occupied, whatever individuals produced they retained for private consumption or disposal. As population increased and the availability of land capable of supporting the individual at nearly the same level of well-being came under full cultivation, the newly-born or newly-arrived were faced with a choice. They could engage in production on land less fertile or less well-located; or, they could negotiate with an individual who controlled land of higher quality and agree to turn over a portion of what was produced in return for permission to use the better land. Here was the appearance of the landlord (someone rewarded solely on the basis of being a titleholder) as distinct from the producer, and the differentiation in language between wages as the return to labor and rent as the return to the landlord.

This distribution of wealth was, in effect, natural, but it generally required some means of enforcement. The earliest arrivals realized that in order to protect their holdings from encroachment they needed to come together, to form a government and establish rules of behavior respecting landed property and wealth. From this point on, observed George, individuals recognized the power inherent in the control of land and attempted to gain control over far more land than they could themselves cultivate. At some point, a small number of landlords received sufficient rent from others so that they no longer had to labor at all in order to live well. As new methods of cultivation and new forms of capital goods were invented, the productivity of each individual's labor tended to increase. The total quantity of wealth in existence expanded, which not only returned more wealth to those who used their own labor and capital goods but also tended to increase that portion of wealth individuals were willing to give up to landlords in return for the use of land. Applying the moral principle that the earth is the birthright of all individuals, equally, George concluded that natural distribution leads to injustice. Rent represented not the wealth to be claimed by those who controlled nature but a societal fund that expanded as population increased, generating a higher and higher level of aggregate demand for access to nature. Survival required that individuals have either a direct or indirect access to nature; the sharing of rent among all citizens facilitated indirect access and countered the diminution in equality of opportunity that resulted as uncultivated (or unclaimed) land disappeared. To correct the injustice, George proposed the following remedy:

There is but one way to remove an evil -- and that is, to remove its cause. Poverty deepens as wealth increases, and wages are forced down while productive power grows, because land, which is the source of all wealth and the field of all labor, is monopolized. To extirpate poverty, to make wages what justice commands they should be, the full earnings of the laborer, we must therefore substitute for the individual ownership of land a common ownership. Nothing else will go to the cause of the evil -- in nothing else is there the slightest hope. ...[7]

I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The first would be unjust; the second, needless. Let the individuals who now hold it still retain, if they want to, possession of what they are pleased to call THEIR land. Let them continue to call it THEIR land. Let them buy and sell, and bequeath and devise it. We may safely leave them the shell, if we take the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent.[8]

In order to implement this reform -- by which a just distribution of wealth would result -- George proposed to use the existing taxing powers of the State. Independent and objective agents would be needed to monitor activity in the land market to determine what the current rental value of unimproved land was, whether the highest and best use was for agriculture, commerce, housing, mining, forestry or (in the case of land covered by water) aquaculture. In our own era this process is greatly facilitated by the use of computers fed daily with the details of the leasing, purchase or sale of land. Even in George's time, however, the ability existed to track market activity and the exchange value of land. What did not exist was the will to do so or an acknowledged understanding of the distribution consequences of failing to do so. Others joined with George, including a number of prominent political economists, to raise public awareness and gain legislative reform. Their effort gained popular strength and momentum, but they were generally unable to overcome the power of entrenched privilege. With important, but isolated, exceptions the landed have retained an intensely privileged position to this day.

George did not stop with his conclusion that justice required the collection and distribution of rent. He reasoned that what individuals produce is, unlike rent, legitimate private property. Therefore, when the State taxed income derived from productive activity or the value of assets produced from nature this was really an unjust confiscation. Consistent with the moral principles he espoused, George called for the abolition of all taxation save that on the rental value of land as the ultimate objective activist reforms. Although he viewed as secondary the harm created by other forms of artificially-created property, such as monopolistic licenses, tariffs, quotas or other restraints on trade, George recognized that such licenses yielded an unearned income for the recipient that also had nothing to do with the value of anything produced or service provided. Thus, George applied the same logic to licenses as to titles in nature, concluding that government should auction off whatever licenses were (by democratic consensus) deemed necessary, limiting the duration of the license to a brief duration, after which new auctions would be held.

The actual real world struggle by Henry George on behalf of individual liberty and just socio-political arrangements began in earnest almost immediately after the publication in 1879 of his treatise, Progress and Poverty. George's journalistic background and his apparently radical-reformist ideas soon had him immersed in the reform politics of Great Britain and, in particular, in the midst of the Irish nationalist struggle for self-determination and control of their homeland. The influence of George's ideas on the direction of reform politics in Britain and on its intellectual foundation proved to be deeper and longer lasting than that achieved in George's own country, the United States. After several lecture tours throughout the British Isles, he also found receptive audiences in Australia and New Zealand, and eventually in Denmark and Russia. After George's death, Leo Tolstoy and other Russians tried, without success, to convince Tsar Nicholas II to adopt a program of land reform based on the proposals of Henry George; Tolstoy even wrote a novel, Resurrection,[9] in an effort to popularize George's ideas. In the German-held colony of Tsing-tao on the Chinese coast, George's proposal was implemented by the civil administrator, Dr. Ludwig Schrameier, and was later incorporated into the nationalist program of Dr. Sun Yat-sen.

As already admitted, Henry George had a powerful but fleeting influence on events of his day. He, rather than Karl Marx, made a positive contribution to the reform movement that grew in opposition to the Social-Darwinist attitudes that had been used to justify a marriage between global industrial landlordism and expansion of empire by means of the military State. On the other hand, a new generation of university-trained economists was ascending into positions of importance as advisers to businesses and governments interested in the challenge of how to maximize scarce resources. These individuals shared little of the reformer's zeal that had moved George. If political at all, they were cautious incrementalists not inclined to seriously question the legitimacy of their nation's institutional structure. Among the Fabian Socialists, however, George had more of an effect; his overall proposals were rejected by anxious Fabians as being too incrementalist and as an unwarranted protection of the interests of the industrial landlords, many of whom had long exploited the propertyless workers. Perhaps the most candid analysis of why reformers drifted toward Socialism and did not embrace the cooperative individualism espoused by George is provided by George Bernard Shaw in a book written in 1945, Everybody's Political What's What?:

The difference between buying an umbrella from its maker and leasing land from someone who found it readymade was no secret among the political economists. Revolting peasants could only sing "When Adam delved and Eve span Where was then the gentle man?" But educated French Physiocrats went into the matter scientifically. French reformers before the Revolution ... were proposing the abolition of taxes on commodities, and the substitution of a single tax on land as a means of nationalizing rent. This proposal was laughed out of countenance by Voltaire, who pointed out that it would leave the rent of capital untouched, and that whilst the landlord would starve the banker would be richer than ever. The proposal was, however, revived a century later with extraordinary eloquence by the American Henry George, whose volume entitled Progress and Poverty had a wide circulation, and incidentally drew my attention to the subject. But by that time the land question had developed into a capital question of such magnitude that Voltaire's criticism was stronger than ever; for it was evident that if the State confiscated rent without being prepared to employ it instantly as capital in industry, production would cease and the country be starved. Consequently a movement had begun, called Socialism, advocating the organization of industry by the State for the benefit of the whole people. When this alternative to Capitalism appeared, the official economists became much less candid on the subject of rent.[10]

The question naturally arises, who was more correct? Shaw or George, the Socialists or the cooperative individualists? Something of an answer can be found by an examination of what actually occurred during twentieth century. In one important sense, human societies have been brought closer together by more effective international agreements, by a transnational movement advancing human rights and environmental responsibility and by advances in telecommunications and the widespread access to knowledge provided by personal computers. The State has remained the primary arbiter in the balance between private activity and public interests; and, within the social democracies and even most oligarchical regimes, private claims to the ownership of nature (and to the exchange value of nature) have continued to be sanctioned by positive law. Henry George identified as fundamental the principles by which wealth came to be produced and distributed and showed these dynamics to be at work in every society, whether in what today's political economists and historians describe as the core or the periphery of nation-state power. The cultural and other differences between societies he concluded were differences of degree and not of kind, pushing or pulling a society toward or away from cooperative individualism. Socialists, even those committed to representative government and democratic principles, did not believe it possible to control the exploitative tendencies of industrial landlords and so sought to nationalize the ownership of both nature and capital goods. Nearly a century of booms and busts, of widespread exploitation of a different kind in societies dominated by strong central governments and minimal private property, has taught us that the necessary role for government must be to maximize individual initiative and liberty, while regulating or preventing the exercise of license by some at the expense of others. That, in effect, is the essence of cooperative individualism as espoused by Henry George.

During the modern era no people has been more involved in the struggle between core and periphery nations for global hegemony than the English. And, during most of this period, the people who inhabited the neighboring territory of Ireland have been placed in a dependent, submissive position to English rule. If Henry George is correct in his presentation of political economy, these two societies have much more in common than might appear on the surface. Each people has followed a distinct path in the establishment of socio-political arrangements and institutions; yet, these are externalities that alter, to a greater or lesser degree, the operation of the principles directing the production and distribution of wealth. Keeping these principles in mind, an examination of the history of Ireland should reveal a great deal about the degree to which the laws of Ireland have promoted a just distribution of wealth, equality of opportunity and human rights.