| The Georgist position is that capital is entitled to the returns on capital, labor is entitled to the returns on labor. Both of these are "legitimate" because labor would not give any gains to capital if they could produce more without it. Labor employs capital (or chooses to be employed by capitalists) because it increases the productivity of labor - it grows the pie even if they don't get the entirety of it while employing capital. Labor's legitimate claim to its own fruit is self-evident to most people. The fruits of labor that are not accounted for in a quid pro quo transaction with capital are those that go to land, for which there can be no quid pro quo transaction because you must occupy (and labor upon) land. If there were infinite land available, labor could simply move to that land and produce what they themselves can produce from nature with no gains going to capital because they need not employ capital to survive. If there were infinite land available, the only people who would choose to employ capital (or be employed by a capitalist, same thing) are those who believe the bigger pie is worth the smaller slice. However we do not live in a world of infinite land, and so that calculus happens^ but it is coerced by the necessity to live and work on land owned by neither labor nor capital. Given that capitalists don't work directly on land and are generally "more efficient" (this is why capital is valuable, aka this efficiency is what capital is), the world becomes separated into those above the "rent line" and those below the "rent line," and there are far more capitalists above than below and far more laborers below than above. This creates tension between labor and capital, but neither of them are getting what they produce, but that's not because capital is stealing from labor - rather land is stealing from both, just capital has greater capacity to be stolen from before descending into poverty. In any case: * Not every point of an ideology is mutually exclusive of every point of every competitive ideology. * Georgism is not about socializing land nor centralizing control. It is explicitly not about that. It is about socializing the gains on land produced by external factors (nearby public and private investment, technological improvements, etc) * You mention Georgism tends to be politically unstable. Could you point to some historical examples you have in mind? |
> When I was thus swept into the Great Socialist revival of 1883, I found that five-sixths of those who were swept in with me had been converted by Henry George. This fact would have been more widely acknowledged had it not been that it was not possible for us to stop where Henry George had stopped. America, in spite of all its horrors of rampant Capitalism and industrial oppression, was, nevertheless, still a place for the individualist and the hustler. Every American who came over to London was amazed at the apathy, the cynical acceptance of poverty and servitude as inevitable, the cunning shuffling along with as little work as possible, that seemed to the visitor to explain our poverty, and moved him to say, "Serve us right!" If he had no money, he joyfully started hustling himself, and was only slowly starved and skinned into realizing that the net had been drawn close in England, the opportunities so exhaustively monopolized, the crowd so dense, that his hustling was only a means of sweating himself for the benefit of the owners of England, and that the English workman, with his wonderfully cultivated art of sparing "himself and extracting a bit of ransom here and a bit of charity there, had the true science of the situation. Henry George had no idea of this. He saw only the monstrous absurdity of the private appropriation of rent; and he believed that if you took that burden off the poor man's back, he could help himself out as easily as a pioneer on a pre-empted clearing. But the moment he took an Englishman to that point, the Englishman saw at once that the remedy was not so simple as that, and that the argument carried us much further, even to the point of total industrial reconstruction. Thus, George actually felt bound to attack the Socialism he himself had created; and the moment the antagonism was declared, and to be a Henry Georgite meant to be an anti-Socialist, some of the Socialists whom he had converted became ashamed of their origin, and concealed it; while others, including myself, had to fight hard against the Single Tax propaganda.
https://progressingamerica.blogspot.com/2017/03/george-berna...
My view of Georgism is not about a "single tax," but rather that land rents must be socialized, and in doing so, this will end up socializing land itself. Modern day Georgists (there are dozens!) are active in creating things like community land trusts. The idea really is to socialize land, the tax movement was just the policy instrument of the time. It's still a good policy instrument, I believe, towards ending private land ownership, and may do all of it.
It's politically unstable, because once you make landlords of all your people, unless they have the insight and the shared politics of needing to socialize land, you get tax revolts. Seeing massive tax increases, without seeing your imputed rent, turns the proletariat into the bourgeois. It's how California ended up with Prop 13. And landlord brain sets in quickly even for homeowners without properties they rent. Which is not to say that it couldn't potentially be politically stable, it's just that if the socialist movement of the 1800s didn't do it, it's going to probably be far harder now, when people are far more ignorant of the economic forces, and more focused on short term material gains (which absolutely must be made too).