My Vision for a Georgist Future

Harry Pollard

[Reprinted from an online posting, 17 April 2009]

Fact is I've been debating Objectivists for a long time. I must tell you my favorite gambit against the Randians sometime. I have carried the good fight to them often. As for the anarchists, they come in 57 varieties (that should take you back to your youth) some of whom even believe in collecting Rent.

About 50 years ago, I was walking along Yonge St. in Toronto with two delightful ladies -- Strethel Walton, School Director is Montreal, and Margaret Bateman - former Director in New York. They were full of a new book they had read called Atlas Shrugged by someone called Ayn Rand. Of course I read it and found it interesting as it ground away essentially on one note (I didn't read John Galt's speech).

I also found the Fountainhead interesting if a trifle potty. It was a good read. But back to business.

You seem to take the position that we should have the State whether we need it or not and in spite of its record of persistent folly.

I take the position that the government is our servant, obedient to our wishes and existing to carry out jobs that we need as a community. Thus, they will set up a valuation department to measure Rent and perhaps another to collect it. They will handle the infrastructure of our city because that is sensibly a community job. (Anarchists will, less sensibly, differ.)

I just went to my Kaiser hospital to get some blood work -- a distance of perhaps 10 to 15 miles. I hate to think of the damage done to my transmission by the continual parade of gaping potholes and ill-filled tar bumps. I understand the damage to our vehicles from these rotten roads is in the many billions every year.

One shudders at the serious failures of the State with regard to bridge, dam, levee, safety. It will probably take another bridge collapse to get them to debate it, let alone do anything. Probably, Northern California will have to disappear underwater before the levees are dealt with.

I would say that as managers, most jurisdictions fail.

Of course we must vote to prove we are part of it all. Yet, most Representatives enjoy gerrymandered security. National elections are repeats, with a few dozen seats open for real contests. It takes a Bush term or a "Contract with America" to stir the electorate into knocking off a few incumbents. In California, Democrats have gerrymandered themselves into a permanent majority. Republicans don't care, for the process guarantees them incumbent certainty too.

Georgists are firmly against privilege (taking from one to give to another), yet it is the State that passes privilege legislation (you'll recall that 80% of the Federal Budget is transfer payment).

So, my conclusion is that the State is doing very well at our expense, while failing in its first duty, management -- taking care of community needs.

In a Georgist economy, I think the full collection of Rent by the community will make unnecessary the vast paraphernalia of Statism.

That Rent collection plus removal of the 101 other privileges (we don't tax them, we obliterate them) will lead to a free society that works. The free society can't work without a solution to the land problem. The free market can't work properly without a satisfactory land policy.

In the InterStudent Program (another 1,100 18 year olds will graduate from our economics course this year) we have a page with a large triangle showing economic philosophies and practice. Henry is at the top with a Jeffersonian quote. The Feudal system is at the bottom.

Underneath is a note that the modern philosophy that would lead us back to the feudal system is libertarianism. I must admit I chuckled when I put that in.

But, back to reality - a school near San Francisco has 640 students doing InterStudent. Their printing center has closed because of Budget constraints. Each student uses more than 100 sheets of paper in lesson sheets, tests, and suchlike - but they can't print them and copying is restricted.

We'll handle it, but this is the real world - perhaps a place that Yisroel has left.