I would put those politicians as much more of the inheritors of the wave of thinkers that came after Henry George. The American progressive movement gets a lot more varied in the early twentieth century. The Georgist elements get squeezed out, and movements emerge around public utilities regulation, antitrust, minimum wages, and raising income taxes. There is a New Deal infrastructure that followed all of that, of which Georgist thinking is not really a big part.
If you take the land element out of it, George would be seen as extraordinarily economically right-wing now. He doesn’t want any taxes other than on land. They call it the single tax because he doesn’t think you have to tax anything else. He’s a devout free trader.
The special dynamics of land mean that landlords are often the primary beneficiaries of public investment.
That side, where he deliberately tried to appeal to industrialists, to big business, is what differentiates him from contemporary progressives. He said to the capitalists: “You guys are doing something innovative. If you weren’t being innovative, you wouldn’t survive. And this guy, the landlord, gets his huge cut of it. Why should this be the case?”
He essentially tried to frame really big business capitalism and the downtrodden urban workers as actually all on the same side against the landlord. On the other hand, Bernie, Mamdani, that group of politicians, very much identifies the class of oligarchs and big business as the enemy. But for the most part, those people’s wealth is not from land. That’s the interesting distinction. I think it’s actually very difficult to find anyone who you’d put down as an inheritor of Henry George’s sort of ideas today in politics. That electoral coalition proved to be very difficult to carry.
Auteur: Mike Bird
