Thanks for the tips and if we plan a stop in whitefish, will give you a heads up. We'll probably hop off the train and catch another a couple of days later. Break up the trip and see your beautiful neck of the woods.
There is a lot to chew on in this chapter. I am still ruminating and will read through it again. In general, it gives voice to thoughts and feelings I've harbored for some time but could not articulate. I love when that happens.
It is difficult to single out any line in particular, but this short paragraph caught my eye:
"The equal right of [human beings] to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air--it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some [humans] have a right to be in this world and others no right."
Which leads me to this, an all-too-common phenomenon in many of our growing cities here in the Northwest:
"It is the continuous increase of rent--the price that labor is compelled to pay for the use of the land, which strips the many of the wealth they justly earn, to pile it up in the hands of the few, who do nothing [but accumulate and speculate] to earn it."
Both of the foregoing George quotations can be aptly followed by this description of justice by Thomas Paine: "To preserve the benefits of what is called civilized life, and to remedy at the same time the evil which it has produced, ought to be considered as one of the first objects of reformed legislation." Okay, but how shall we define these evils, as they exist in 2023, so that they can be remedied with legislation advanced by the current House of Representatives? (Sufferin' Succotash! I just now saw a drove of pigs fly by my window!)
But there is a very important question that has burned inside of me for years, and that is, who speaks for the land? As much as I agree with George's argument, as far as I can tell everything he states is still based upon the assumption that all of nature exists merely for the benefit of human beings, a premise I passionately disagree with and one that lies at the very root of our current inharmonious relationship with Planet Earth.
This is great stuff. Very important. I love the Thomas Paine line you quoted. Interesting to note that Paine's, "Agrarian Justice," appears on the Social Security Administration website under, "Social Insurance History." Well played, SSA. Well played indeed.
The quote I pulled from Paine was from a longer academic article diving into his views on property rights and ownership, which I was really fascinated by. I'd never read much Paine. He even had a proposal that was essentially Universal Basic Income, as far as I could tell. I didn't know that about the SSA!
I think Lee, in answer here, phrased it really well. I get a lot out of George's book, but no, there's nothing there that acknowledges any right to land or ecology other than humans'. But there's nothing in his ideas that keeps enactors from including it as an integral part.
Just last night I was reading "Planet," the first book in an anthology series called Kinship from the Center for Humans and Nature: https://humansandnature.org/kinship/
and the very first essay felt like it answered your question and desire right in the center. It was by a geology professor who wrote exquisitely about teaching her students to think of themselves as Earthlings, as intimately part of Earth, unable to ever truly disconnect themselves from it, but the way she wrote about it was somehow new and a different perspective because she focused so much on geological timeframes.
And then I was reading a book by Abdullah Öcalan, a Kurdish freedom leader who's serving a long-term sentence in a Turkish prison, and he was writing about the development of "civilization" based on extraction (women and food/seeds were his focus) and capitalism, and how it required societies and cultures to be forced to accept that humans are separate from nature. It's not an idea that's new to me but somehow the way he wrote about it brought it home forcefully, somehow made me think about how violent that initial psychological separation has to be, in order to inflict violence on the rest of life. It made me think of Descartes, and the things he did--not good things--to prove that animals didn't have feelings, and other ideas he had about how different humans were from the rest of nature and life.
Tell me if those pigs fly again and bear any fruit!
I was going to say that Henry George was ahead of his time, but that's not true. He was off on a tangent to both his time and ours, when land speculation is just as prevalent. But he was also a man of his time in many ways and unprepared to give the nonhuman a seat at the table. At the same time there is nothing in Georgist thought that precludes doing so. I proposed combining the ideas in an essay I wrote for Mountain Journal several months ago.
I have to agree. It would be a bit much to expect that George would suggest something so radically opposed to the zeitgeist of his time. But he WAS progressive for his day and he DID lay some wonderful conceptual stepping stones for the rest of us.
You put it better than I could, I think, and definitely accurately: He was unprepared to give the nonhuman a seat at the table. But there is nothing in his actual ideas that preclude doing so.
Off and on. I've tried to branch out because there's so much in a sense of belonging on land and with land that I like to read from different perspectives! But Berry is so foundational, and I love his poetry.
The Unsettling of America is one of the most significant books I've ever read. His new one is a bit of a trudge. I return to the poems from time to time, too.
I can't find any evidence that Berry read Henry George.
Yes! That is precisely the book I had in mind. I've not read many of Berry's poems, but I do love The Peace of Wild Things. I refer to it every now and then for mental health purposes and as a reminder.
I believe that part of the problem is that our (humans in general) way of thinking, and our worldview (kind of the same thing?), have become captured by the language and logic of science, economics, and technology, to the point that we have become too left-brain dominant and functionally incapable of fully appreciating the essentiality of, and our interconnectedness with, the non-human natural world. If "language is the house of being", as Martin Heidegger wrote in his Letter on Humanism, then we need to find a new house in which to dwell. We need to reimagine who we are and how we fit into the whole.
I am gaining new insights and learning so much from this thread (and others posted by Antonia). Thank you to everyone.
I just read the following last night, in Abdullah Öcalan's book "The Sociology of Freedom" -- something must be in the air!
He wrote, "The process of turning science into capital and merging it with power was, at the same time, the alienation of science from the society. . . . The field of science, which is sacred to society as a whole, has drifted as far away as possible from serving society."
I'm not sure I'd heard this phrased quite this way before, the acknowledgment that science originally (and still does in many ways; I'm thinking of a lot of freshwater ecologists and wildlife biologists I know) really did serve life's needs, people's needs, but was co-opted and corrupted in a lot of ways. Which connects with your point about language. It's easy to co-opt something if you can find the right words. Like, "jobs vs. the environment." I think a lot about how deeply that's penetrated people's fixed ideas about what is possible.
No, wait, I did read it! I forgot the title led to the subject. Will read again, though. And probably reshare some of these in the future. They're important ideas that more people should be talking about.
Henry George was in vogue off and on for a century after the 1879 publication of his Progress and Poverty, and is again (or still is) in some circles, as Antonia Malchik reminds us in the attached piece.
The perennial issues of land commodification and ownership she and George examine are particularly noticeable during times of major social change, as they were during the Great Depressions of the 1890s and 1930s and the post-WW II era of the 1960s-80s.
Her Substack essay caught my attention especially because for the past few days here at my humble in the high desert I've been engaged with a slew of infrastructure repairs — water, heat, power — not untypical for offgrid home owners but seldom hitting so all at the same time.
Among the Diggers and other back-to-the-landers in the 60s and 70s, the notion of landownership being an injustice had a lot of resonance. Not only that the whole country was ripped off from Native Americans (under the age-old method of acquisition Malchik calls 'I took it; now it’s mine') but because, as George made very clear, in the modern world (from, say, the 15thC), the ownership of land has always meant a takeover by the money powers of the commons, our shared natural world, a spiraling up of economic goods adding to the increasing wealth and power of those who already have it.
Over a century ago, George (like his predecessor Prud'hon and near contemporary Kropotkin) pretty much predicted the obscene wealth of today's one percent (obscene, from the Latin obscēnus, obscaenus (“inauspicious; ominous; disgusting, filthy; offensive, repulsive; indecent, lewd, obscene”) compared to the rest of us. That obvious upwards spiral to unprecedented heights (can we call it a screw-up?) in an acquisition-based society and the related cultural-ecological-medical-political-military mess the world is in are more than enough to make George seem worth looking at again.
One noticeable result of that mess and its distended economic structure, maybe especially here in the less densely populated, low-rent Southwest, is increasing emigration not only of refugees from climatic and political crises in the global south, but from North American metropoli: an exurban diaspora that spreads late 20thC urban sprawl into further reaches of the no longer so wild — though maybe still a little wooly — west. In effect, making back-to-the-landers of my generation look like some kind of pioneers, pathfinders and harbingers of today's more massive digitally-tooled migrations.
And all this, to bring it back to George, calls into question the notions of property rights as well as property in general, especially in relation to the commons of land, water and air.
Of course, we all have our sense of ownership, our setting of boundaries from up-close personal space to more inclusive home and homestead. We all recognize and conform in some ways to ancient extended-family circles of community (clan, tribe, nation, etc.). And to some extent, regardless of our ethnic and national heritages, we all share some version of the Us-Them distinction so embedded in Indo-European linguistic and social history, the distinction between those within and those without those circles. We all decide in some way, this is mine (or ours), this is not yours.
The past two days have brought that dialectic home to me in a very unusual way. Yesterday morning, I found two Barn Owls inside the 30x60 passive solar greenhouse attached to the south-facing side of my abode. After letting them out an open door and not finding any sign of nest, eggs or nestlings in the spot they seemed to be drawn to (it’s right on the cusp of spring breeding season here), I found and covered up a hole in the polycarbonate roof that evidently had been torn off in last week's windstorm, which seemed likely to be where they got in.
Telling them that though they were welcome to the mice, they were not welcome to move in, not even to roost during the day, the house rules, my rules, I explained, were 'No snakes, and no other critters larger than a mouse or songbird.'
In the midst of my mulling over the Georgist idea (is that a word? Georgian is too ambiguous) that our interest here is not proprietary but in stewardship; and the newcomer (settler/colonist) inclination to say, 'I'm here, now close the gate'; that investment of cash (or even, as George emphasizes, blood, sweat and tears) does not justify a claim to possession; and the whole boondoggle about who got here first; the owls (magnificent birds I've always felt kind of blessed to have living in the barn), who clearly have ancestral priors, brought to mind some memories from events that took place fifteen years before I moved here.
I suspect it was not a coincidence that I moved to Alhambra, an eastern suburb in the sprawling suburbia known as Los Angeles, only a few days before the Watts uprising broke out on the other side of the LA basin. We could smell the smoke when the wind blew in off the Pacific.
One of the stories in the news for several days (a story made familiar later in other urban blow-ups) was about small businesses with Jewish owners — pawnshops in particular — being looted and/or burned out. Prominent among reported rationales of the looters was that the shopowners didn't live there, were aliens or carpetbaggers of a sort, and the money they made there didn't go back into Watts but was spent somewhere else. Raw ethnic-racial prejudice, for sure, but something else too, something to consider along with our definitions of community, ownership and property rights, human rights and the rights of nature, civil rights in relation to civility, and the rest.
Postscript:
At least one of the owls was in the greenhouse again after dark tonight and convinced again to go out the opened door. Tomorrow maybe I'll find how it got in, and if it's dtill inside, tell it again the house rules as I shoo it out.
Thank you so much for sharing this, Michael. It's given me a lot of thought. (And economists who study and promote George's ideas are called Georgists, so I guess it is a word!) Not to mention that I work as a copy editor, so love delving into the varied and changing meanings of words.
One thing that stuck out was your mention of the migration of people to somewhere less populated. As the corner of Montana where I live has had a huge influx of people moving in, I hear more and more people talking about moving to the eastern part of the state, which is much more sparsely populated. Which I understand. My mother grew up over there, and the open feeling and lack of people is a big draw--I feel it, too! But it feels like just perpetuating the same issues over and over.
But then you also have billionaires buying up ranches hundreds of thousands of acres and the kind of impact that has on everyone's access to land.
The link to the Watts riots is really fascinating because I wrote a piece a while back about riots that started with the rebellions triggered by enclosures of the commons in the 1400s. (No need for you to read it but this is the reference: https://humansandnature.org/reclaiming-the-ancient-roots-of-ecological-citizenship/) One of the things that didn't make it into that or another piece on riots and psychology was an interview I did with a researcher in Britain who talked about businesses that were attacked during a riot in London, and which ones were attacked and why. I'd have to look up the notes again, but your observations about community and ownership are definitely related.
I hope to find out what happens with the barn owls! And thank you again for sharing this.
A common focus on enhancing our relationship with this earths health would help us get beyond the competitive accumulation of money and the abstraction of lands ownership and title.
This is so rich! Your comment about whether you “own” your phone reminded me of an idea from “sustainability” (in quotes because I loathe the word, but it is a useful shorthand) is that so much of what we’re forced to purchase, we could instead lease the use of. Really anything currently considered disposable and even some “durable goods” like washing machines etc. We don’t want to “own” rare earth minerals and motors and batteries and nylon carpet but we do want their services. When our lease period is up, we return the thing to its manufacturer. This also closes the material loop - products designed for disassembly can be plowed back into the stream for new things.
There has also been a movement toward closed system in manufacturing in Europe for a long time, where manufacturers have to build extraction and waste into their manufacturing prices and systems. Like take responsibility for the waste. I'm not sure where they are on that, or how it might apply to something like, say energy (all that natural gas being piped from Russia ...)
It's crazy to have so much pollution and waste in all the manufacturing streams. I live in the town I graduated high school in, and drive by the county dump all the time. It's a growing hill, but when I was a teenager it was a pit.
If we returned things to the manufacturer, they would have far more incentive and interest in making things more repairable, and ultimately fully recyclable for cradle to cradle sustainability. I'm currently dealing with the need to replace a printer sold in a 2009 because it's no longer possible to get parts for it. 2009 really isn't that long ago and I should be able to keep this printer running because most of it still works. But no.
The European Union is doing a much better job at this than we are here in the States. This is mostly a function of our political system. Our system is structured in a way that privileges short-term interests, and the administrative agencies that are supposed to regulate certain economic activities have mostly been captured by the very industries these agencies were instituted to keep an eye on. At this point it is such a tangled web, and many citizens are so ignorant and so distracted by corporate propaganda (consumerism) and the media circus, that it is difficult to see a path forward. But we must continue to find ways to educate our friends and neighbors. That's the key.
I lived in Vienna, Austria, in 1998-99, and even then everyone brought their own bags or baskets to the grocery store. You could buy a plastic one, but they were thick and very reusable and cost something like 50 cents! Which is not something people are just going to throw away. And still, to this day, in the U.S. I get sighs and weird looks for using cloth bags in the grocery store ...
We had so little garbage there. Usually none to a handful each week. Everything was returnable, recyclable, or compostable. (Granted, I didn't have kids then, but still!)
I remember many years ago (like, maybe 30+??) reading Worldwatch Magazine. I don't know if I have details right but there was something about Germany requiring product manufacturers to be responsible for packaging disposal cost, which resulted in having a lot more "bare" products with none of the shrink-wrapped excess so common in US stores. I don't know if this is true but it definitely appeals. We go to a food co-op where we can bring our own containers and tell them the tare weight, reuse plastic and paper bags for produce at the farmers' market, I've shifted away from products that come in plastic to ones that come in glass--whatever I can do but this isn't a problem individuals can solve through consumer choice. It requires regulation.
That's really interesting about Germany. I lived in Austria about 25 years ago and we had almost zero trash. There was next to no packaging on anything. All glass was returnable or recyclable, and it was against the law, if I remember, to put things in the trash that could be returned or recycled.
Dealing with single-use plastics has been a bugbear of mine for a long time and I swear it's only gotten worse!
Printers and their parts are the bane of my work life. I currently have one that says it's photosensitive something is reaching the end of its life? I looked it up and it says replace the drum, so at least I can do that but those are still a huge piece of plastic and something in the landfill. Cory Doctorow wrote a piece about printers in Medium some time ago, and how they're working on making the code proprietary in a way that forces us to replace them even earlier.
Any idea where Europe is on this? I thought they were working on closing the waste loop. But I look around just my own home, the things I use on a regular basis, and it feels overwhelming.
Continuing: Why have you never heard of Henry George or the system he proposed? Because it is a much bigger threat to capitalism than Marxism. Marxism makes a great foil against which to tout capitalism. They are both rooted in the idea of dominion. If its not the capitalists, its the workers. And Marxists, though they cover it up these days, have always accepted violence as a means of gaining dominion. So, we were all taught a binary formulation which does indeed make capitalism seem more reasonable. And we're distracted from any other view. The Georgist fomulation is hard to refute (unearned rents undeniably exist) but itr can be ignored if people are well enough distracted. Thus, the "Red Scare" that has taken so many forms over the years.
I'd have to go look this up again, but George's Single Tax was HUGELY popular at the turn of the 19th century. A lot of people ran on it and it had enormous popular support. The masters of capital pulled out all the stops to make sure it never happened, and seemed to have gone to enormous effort to bury the possibility of future generations learn about him at all. (Also, in a different Threadable circle I saw a quote from the creators of the Dawes Act, in which they said that they didn't like the collective land ownership model of Native Nations because "that's Henry George's model and is communist." I'm trying to find the reference because it definitely got my attention!)
That's interesting about the Dawes Act. My friend Sam Western is coming out with a book about the creation of the constitutions of the Dakotas, MT, and WY. The Georgist idea came up in some of those proceedings but was summarily dismissed. If I recall correctly, George himself ran for Mayor of New York City and lost at about that same time (1890).
George never read Marx, though timewise he could have. I think he was familiar with other socialist thinkers, but I believe that one of the troubling things about him to the "masters of capital" is that his ideas originated entirely in the American experience. No blaming bad influences from Europe. Progress and Poverty came rignt out of gold rush San Francisco.
The other troubling thing about George is that he actually believed what we are taught about the American "work ethic.' But if you are a master of capital (especially a white master of capital) that's for other people (starting with the slaves, of course). Everyone knows that we have always looked to technology to replace labor, but think about how gambling is suddenly totally out in the open almost everywhere. And what is land speculation but a gamble (and not always a good one in the short run)? The masters of capital are having an increasingly hard time convincing the rest of us that work is the best way to make money.
And he proposed the Single Tax precisely because he realized that there was no going back to any sort of collectivist understanding of land ownership in the America he inhabited. It was a way of correcting the moral wrong he felt that did not require others to share his morality.
I found the reference. The quote I saw was in "An Indigenous People's History of the United States," and I tracked it down to a speech that Henry Dawes gave to the Lake Mohonk Conference in 1885: "The head chief told us that there was not a family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own. There was not a pauper in that nation, and the nation did not own a dollar. It built its own capitol, and it built its schools and its hospitals. Yet the defect of the system was apparent. They have got as far as they can go because they own their land in common. It is Henry George's system, and under that there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbour’s. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilisation. Til this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress."
(It's quoted in full in "An American Indian Development Finance Institution
A Compendium of Papers Submitted to the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs of the United States Senate," 1986, which was on Google Books.)
It's interesting that a lot of people focus on his writing about the land given to railroads, which I think is an important example of what he talks about but isn't the central point. Reading about him was the first time I imagined what the inequality must have looked like in San Francisco at that time. Butte, too, I imagine, shortly after.
What is land speculation but a gamble?! It's true. And as you point out, the gamble is on the community's labor creating value for your land.
I'm really glad you said that about his Single Tax, too. I was thinking about that after I posted this piece, that he really believed that land should not be individually owned, but this seemed to be his way of accepting that he didn't think we could go back.
Yes, that Samuel Western. The University of Kansas recently agreed to publish it so it will be a while before we see it between covers. You should find his Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the River.
It’s almost as if these “alternatives” stem from the same mistaken mindset -- that humans are somehow a separate case from the rest of creation, and therefore our purpose -- and right -- is to dominate and subjugate. The only thing to argue over is which system to use. Which ignores millennia of a different understanding: that humans are *part* of the natural world and exist in right relationship to all of it. I find it fascinating that many (most? All?) indigenous people needed no words for “nature” or “environment,” because we are all part of a single whole.
I think you're right here. This is what I keep running into over and over, this idea of separation from nature and how deeply it's dictated the dominant culture and systems for centuries. It sounds like a simple idea but the more you dig into it the more of a huge, violent psychological rupture it truly appears -- one that made all the other ruptures possible.
There is a lot to Progress & Poverty, which has inspired so many and yet had so little practical impact.
My angle (and not just mine) on Georgist economics revolves around the recognition that those who own land very often create no value at all using that land. They capture the value created by orhers, by society at large. This is why location is the root of property value. Georgist (and other) economists call this "unearned rents." Imagine two potato fields with identical soils and the same irrigation source. They are owned by the same family and, thus, farmed the same way for at least a generation. Yet one is worth ten times the other. The difference: the more valuable field is located on the edge of a city. The less valuable is about 10 miles out. Ask yourself how the owners "earned" any of what they will collect when they sell the field to a developer. They worked no harder on that field than the other, brought no more knowledge to its cultivation. The work they put in was - if they were prudent - repaid annually after every harvest. They, with the assistance of the developer, are only capturing value, not created it. Why should they benefit? Well, in American society, they need no reason save the mere fact of ownership. They will even pass all of the risks involved on to the developer (and despite the bad rap they get, developers generally do add some value). And yet, we talk about the American "work ethic." The cat is out of the bag these days with the proliferation of gambling in every form. We Americans would greatly prefer to become wealthy with no work at all! So, George says, let us correct the inequities (and inefficiencies) in the land market by taxing away unearned rents. In a Georgist regime the potato field is developed only when there is a clear need (no speculation) probably incrementally as demand requires, and the entire community benefits when the unearned rents come into the local government coffers, as well as from the reduced cost of housing on the parcel. Once you've thought this through you will be befuddled by why we don't do it that way, or at least you will until you acceot that the pursuit of individual power (and wealth = power = wealth) is the underlying value our society pursues, even when we know better.
This is a great explanation, Lee, thank you! I was first introduced to Henry George through Erik Freyfogle's "The Land We Share," in which he had a chapter positing a neighborhood in which you buy a house, and then describing all the things that are built or developed around that house that increase the value of your property. It was a great way to demonstrate the idea that the increase in value is created largely by the surrounding community, with or without input from the property owner.
This made so much sense to me because the town I live in has a tremendous amount of volunteer energy that goes to a lot of intangible work, but also a lot of visible infrastructure, like bike and pedestrian trails, trees, and probably the biggest one -- voting for a municipal tax increase in order to buy our watershed and put it into a conservation easement, which a small family-owned timber company had offered to sell to the town at a discount. That tax is a resort tax and is meant to capture some of the value of our influxes of seasonal tourists, but we pay it, too.
Anyway, those activities increase the value of everyone's property who owns here, whether they live here full-time or only spend a couple weeks a year. So it only seems right that the community also benefits from that increase in value.
Thank you for a great introduction to Henry George. Until now, I had only read a brief selection from Thomas Paine regarding property distribution. I had no idea there was an entire world of thought on this! It's such a basic and important idea and it's a subject that virtually nobody I know is talking about. Things are really cooking up in terms of housing affordability . I make a pretty good living but I can't afford to bring my mother down to Miami from Atlanta where she would like to live out her elder years. Rents are insane! Then I think about people who make less than I do and it's a disaster.
Again in the Miami market I would have had to borrow into the millions to buy a property on which to run an animal hospital. I ended up buying a mobile surgical unit after looking at six different properties. Wealthy foreign investors had bought these places and now try to sell them to me in a flip adding hundreds of thousands for the pleasure of living in debt! These folks will do nothing productive with the property but Jack up the price. I thought at least we could make some massive taxes on this practice in order to benefit the local community. This could also disincentivize this flipping. If I was able to afford these places I would be employing a dozen folks and providing a valuable service the community.
Thanks for shedding light and such an important topic! Count my subscription changed to paid!
Thank so much for reading and subscribing and these great thoughts! I really feel for you being in that market. I live in a tourist town in northwest Montana where the housing prices have just gone insane the last couple years, and several less expensive apartment buildings have been bought by investment companies who then of course jack up the rent, though some of them evict people entirely in order to replace the building with something more high-end. It's got to be hard to be trying to run a business, especially one that you know needs space and equipment and accessibility like an animal hospital.
My understanding is that George's idea of a Land Value Tax, which separated the value of land itself from any improvements on it, was implemented in some cities in Pennsylvania for nearly a century, and helped keep housing affordable. His idea was that a house or factory or whatever should be taxed separately from the land, and that the land taxes should go to the community itself, as well as whatever profit was made if the property were sold. Again, only from the value of the land. His reasoning for that was that when property values increase, it's really the community itself that contributes to that increase.
I really enjoy your writing and insights. As a side note.. this spring I'm taking my mom on a trip for her 80th Birthday. We are likely to take the empire builder Amtrak train which goes right through Montana! If there's a stop in your town, we'd love to take you for a coffee and a stroll :-) as of right now we're considering taking a night or two at glacier national Park. Cheers and see you on the next sub stack :-)
Oh how fun! And I live in Whitefish, so you will definitely be here, especially if you're going to Glacier :) Whitefish is one of their longer 15-minute stops. I used to take that train to and from college in St. Paul every break. Feel free to email me: amalchik@gmail.com
(Check the weather for Glacier as you get closer to the time. The snow doesn't melt from the higher elevations often until late June, which means the big Going-to-the-Sun Road doesn't open to cars as early as you'd think. But it's still beautiful even if you can't get all the way to the top. I hope your mom enjoys it!)
Thanks for the tips and if we plan a stop in whitefish, will give you a heads up. We'll probably hop off the train and catch another a couple of days later. Break up the trip and see your beautiful neck of the woods.
Sounds like a great time :)
There is a lot to chew on in this chapter. I am still ruminating and will read through it again. In general, it gives voice to thoughts and feelings I've harbored for some time but could not articulate. I love when that happens.
It is difficult to single out any line in particular, but this short paragraph caught my eye:
"The equal right of [human beings] to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air--it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some [humans] have a right to be in this world and others no right."
Which leads me to this, an all-too-common phenomenon in many of our growing cities here in the Northwest:
"It is the continuous increase of rent--the price that labor is compelled to pay for the use of the land, which strips the many of the wealth they justly earn, to pile it up in the hands of the few, who do nothing [but accumulate and speculate] to earn it."
Both of the foregoing George quotations can be aptly followed by this description of justice by Thomas Paine: "To preserve the benefits of what is called civilized life, and to remedy at the same time the evil which it has produced, ought to be considered as one of the first objects of reformed legislation." Okay, but how shall we define these evils, as they exist in 2023, so that they can be remedied with legislation advanced by the current House of Representatives? (Sufferin' Succotash! I just now saw a drove of pigs fly by my window!)
But there is a very important question that has burned inside of me for years, and that is, who speaks for the land? As much as I agree with George's argument, as far as I can tell everything he states is still based upon the assumption that all of nature exists merely for the benefit of human beings, a premise I passionately disagree with and one that lies at the very root of our current inharmonious relationship with Planet Earth.
This is great stuff. Very important. I love the Thomas Paine line you quoted. Interesting to note that Paine's, "Agrarian Justice," appears on the Social Security Administration website under, "Social Insurance History." Well played, SSA. Well played indeed.
The quote I pulled from Paine was from a longer academic article diving into his views on property rights and ownership, which I was really fascinated by. I'd never read much Paine. He even had a proposal that was essentially Universal Basic Income, as far as I could tell. I didn't know that about the SSA!
I think Lee, in answer here, phrased it really well. I get a lot out of George's book, but no, there's nothing there that acknowledges any right to land or ecology other than humans'. But there's nothing in his ideas that keeps enactors from including it as an integral part.
Just last night I was reading "Planet," the first book in an anthology series called Kinship from the Center for Humans and Nature: https://humansandnature.org/kinship/
and the very first essay felt like it answered your question and desire right in the center. It was by a geology professor who wrote exquisitely about teaching her students to think of themselves as Earthlings, as intimately part of Earth, unable to ever truly disconnect themselves from it, but the way she wrote about it was somehow new and a different perspective because she focused so much on geological timeframes.
And then I was reading a book by Abdullah Öcalan, a Kurdish freedom leader who's serving a long-term sentence in a Turkish prison, and he was writing about the development of "civilization" based on extraction (women and food/seeds were his focus) and capitalism, and how it required societies and cultures to be forced to accept that humans are separate from nature. It's not an idea that's new to me but somehow the way he wrote about it brought it home forcefully, somehow made me think about how violent that initial psychological separation has to be, in order to inflict violence on the rest of life. It made me think of Descartes, and the things he did--not good things--to prove that animals didn't have feelings, and other ideas he had about how different humans were from the rest of nature and life.
Tell me if those pigs fly again and bear any fruit!
I was going to say that Henry George was ahead of his time, but that's not true. He was off on a tangent to both his time and ours, when land speculation is just as prevalent. But he was also a man of his time in many ways and unprepared to give the nonhuman a seat at the table. At the same time there is nothing in Georgist thought that precludes doing so. I proposed combining the ideas in an essay I wrote for Mountain Journal several months ago.
I have to agree. It would be a bit much to expect that George would suggest something so radically opposed to the zeitgeist of his time. But he WAS progressive for his day and he DID lay some wonderful conceptual stepping stones for the rest of us.
Well put!
Kenneth, I think you would like the essay Lee mentioned here (Lee, I assume you're talking about this one? https://mountainjournal.org/the-failures-and-limits-of-collaborative-conservation
or this one, which is also highly relevant to Kenneth's comments: https://mountainjournal.org/is-opposition-to-planning-and-zoning-around-yellowstone-destroying-character-of-towns-and-nature)
You put it better than I could, I think, and definitely accurately: He was unprepared to give the nonhuman a seat at the table. But there is nothing in his actual ideas that preclude doing so.
Great stuff. Thank you so much. Have you ever read Wendell Berry?
Off and on. I've tried to branch out because there's so much in a sense of belonging on land and with land that I like to read from different perspectives! But Berry is so foundational, and I love his poetry.
The Unsettling of America is one of the most significant books I've ever read. His new one is a bit of a trudge. I return to the poems from time to time, too.
I can't find any evidence that Berry read Henry George.
Yes! That is precisely the book I had in mind. I've not read many of Berry's poems, but I do love The Peace of Wild Things. I refer to it every now and then for mental health purposes and as a reminder.
I believe that part of the problem is that our (humans in general) way of thinking, and our worldview (kind of the same thing?), have become captured by the language and logic of science, economics, and technology, to the point that we have become too left-brain dominant and functionally incapable of fully appreciating the essentiality of, and our interconnectedness with, the non-human natural world. If "language is the house of being", as Martin Heidegger wrote in his Letter on Humanism, then we need to find a new house in which to dwell. We need to reimagine who we are and how we fit into the whole.
I am gaining new insights and learning so much from this thread (and others posted by Antonia). Thank you to everyone.
I just read the following last night, in Abdullah Öcalan's book "The Sociology of Freedom" -- something must be in the air!
He wrote, "The process of turning science into capital and merging it with power was, at the same time, the alienation of science from the society. . . . The field of science, which is sacred to society as a whole, has drifted as far away as possible from serving society."
I'm not sure I'd heard this phrased quite this way before, the acknowledgment that science originally (and still does in many ways; I'm thinking of a lot of freshwater ecologists and wildlife biologists I know) really did serve life's needs, people's needs, but was co-opted and corrupted in a lot of ways. Which connects with your point about language. It's easy to co-opt something if you can find the right words. Like, "jobs vs. the environment." I think a lot about how deeply that's penetrated people's fixed ideas about what is possible.
Good words. My favorite of the poems is "The Unseeable Animal."
Actually, its another essay in that "series" where the LVT and giving the wild a seat at the table appear in the same place. https://mountainjournal.org/four-bold-ideas-to-save-the-most-famous-wild-ecosystem-in-america.
Thank you! I seem to have missed that one.
No, wait, I did read it! I forgot the title led to the subject. Will read again, though. And probably reshare some of these in the future. They're important ideas that more people should be talking about.
Antonia: Thanks for the Henry George post.
I sent this to my mail list yesterday
Henry George was in vogue off and on for a century after the 1879 publication of his Progress and Poverty, and is again (or still is) in some circles, as Antonia Malchik reminds us in the attached piece.
The perennial issues of land commodification and ownership she and George examine are particularly noticeable during times of major social change, as they were during the Great Depressions of the 1890s and 1930s and the post-WW II era of the 1960s-80s.
Her Substack essay caught my attention especially because for the past few days here at my humble in the high desert I've been engaged with a slew of infrastructure repairs — water, heat, power — not untypical for offgrid home owners but seldom hitting so all at the same time.
Among the Diggers and other back-to-the-landers in the 60s and 70s, the notion of landownership being an injustice had a lot of resonance. Not only that the whole country was ripped off from Native Americans (under the age-old method of acquisition Malchik calls 'I took it; now it’s mine') but because, as George made very clear, in the modern world (from, say, the 15thC), the ownership of land has always meant a takeover by the money powers of the commons, our shared natural world, a spiraling up of economic goods adding to the increasing wealth and power of those who already have it.
Over a century ago, George (like his predecessor Prud'hon and near contemporary Kropotkin) pretty much predicted the obscene wealth of today's one percent (obscene, from the Latin obscēnus, obscaenus (“inauspicious; ominous; disgusting, filthy; offensive, repulsive; indecent, lewd, obscene”) compared to the rest of us. That obvious upwards spiral to unprecedented heights (can we call it a screw-up?) in an acquisition-based society and the related cultural-ecological-medical-political-military mess the world is in are more than enough to make George seem worth looking at again.
One noticeable result of that mess and its distended economic structure, maybe especially here in the less densely populated, low-rent Southwest, is increasing emigration not only of refugees from climatic and political crises in the global south, but from North American metropoli: an exurban diaspora that spreads late 20thC urban sprawl into further reaches of the no longer so wild — though maybe still a little wooly — west. In effect, making back-to-the-landers of my generation look like some kind of pioneers, pathfinders and harbingers of today's more massive digitally-tooled migrations.
And all this, to bring it back to George, calls into question the notions of property rights as well as property in general, especially in relation to the commons of land, water and air.
Of course, we all have our sense of ownership, our setting of boundaries from up-close personal space to more inclusive home and homestead. We all recognize and conform in some ways to ancient extended-family circles of community (clan, tribe, nation, etc.). And to some extent, regardless of our ethnic and national heritages, we all share some version of the Us-Them distinction so embedded in Indo-European linguistic and social history, the distinction between those within and those without those circles. We all decide in some way, this is mine (or ours), this is not yours.
The past two days have brought that dialectic home to me in a very unusual way. Yesterday morning, I found two Barn Owls inside the 30x60 passive solar greenhouse attached to the south-facing side of my abode. After letting them out an open door and not finding any sign of nest, eggs or nestlings in the spot they seemed to be drawn to (it’s right on the cusp of spring breeding season here), I found and covered up a hole in the polycarbonate roof that evidently had been torn off in last week's windstorm, which seemed likely to be where they got in.
Telling them that though they were welcome to the mice, they were not welcome to move in, not even to roost during the day, the house rules, my rules, I explained, were 'No snakes, and no other critters larger than a mouse or songbird.'
In the midst of my mulling over the Georgist idea (is that a word? Georgian is too ambiguous) that our interest here is not proprietary but in stewardship; and the newcomer (settler/colonist) inclination to say, 'I'm here, now close the gate'; that investment of cash (or even, as George emphasizes, blood, sweat and tears) does not justify a claim to possession; and the whole boondoggle about who got here first; the owls (magnificent birds I've always felt kind of blessed to have living in the barn), who clearly have ancestral priors, brought to mind some memories from events that took place fifteen years before I moved here.
I suspect it was not a coincidence that I moved to Alhambra, an eastern suburb in the sprawling suburbia known as Los Angeles, only a few days before the Watts uprising broke out on the other side of the LA basin. We could smell the smoke when the wind blew in off the Pacific.
One of the stories in the news for several days (a story made familiar later in other urban blow-ups) was about small businesses with Jewish owners — pawnshops in particular — being looted and/or burned out. Prominent among reported rationales of the looters was that the shopowners didn't live there, were aliens or carpetbaggers of a sort, and the money they made there didn't go back into Watts but was spent somewhere else. Raw ethnic-racial prejudice, for sure, but something else too, something to consider along with our definitions of community, ownership and property rights, human rights and the rights of nature, civil rights in relation to civility, and the rest.
Postscript:
At least one of the owls was in the greenhouse again after dark tonight and convinced again to go out the opened door. Tomorrow maybe I'll find how it got in, and if it's dtill inside, tell it again the house rules as I shoo it out.
Michael Gregory
Thank you so much for sharing this, Michael. It's given me a lot of thought. (And economists who study and promote George's ideas are called Georgists, so I guess it is a word!) Not to mention that I work as a copy editor, so love delving into the varied and changing meanings of words.
One thing that stuck out was your mention of the migration of people to somewhere less populated. As the corner of Montana where I live has had a huge influx of people moving in, I hear more and more people talking about moving to the eastern part of the state, which is much more sparsely populated. Which I understand. My mother grew up over there, and the open feeling and lack of people is a big draw--I feel it, too! But it feels like just perpetuating the same issues over and over.
But then you also have billionaires buying up ranches hundreds of thousands of acres and the kind of impact that has on everyone's access to land.
The link to the Watts riots is really fascinating because I wrote a piece a while back about riots that started with the rebellions triggered by enclosures of the commons in the 1400s. (No need for you to read it but this is the reference: https://humansandnature.org/reclaiming-the-ancient-roots-of-ecological-citizenship/) One of the things that didn't make it into that or another piece on riots and psychology was an interview I did with a researcher in Britain who talked about businesses that were attacked during a riot in London, and which ones were attacked and why. I'd have to look up the notes again, but your observations about community and ownership are definitely related.
I hope to find out what happens with the barn owls! And thank you again for sharing this.
A common focus on enhancing our relationship with this earths health would help us get beyond the competitive accumulation of money and the abstraction of lands ownership and title.
YES. Competition and accumulation are such huge factors. What we feel we need, where we feel haunted by scarcity ...
This is so rich! Your comment about whether you “own” your phone reminded me of an idea from “sustainability” (in quotes because I loathe the word, but it is a useful shorthand) is that so much of what we’re forced to purchase, we could instead lease the use of. Really anything currently considered disposable and even some “durable goods” like washing machines etc. We don’t want to “own” rare earth minerals and motors and batteries and nylon carpet but we do want their services. When our lease period is up, we return the thing to its manufacturer. This also closes the material loop - products designed for disassembly can be plowed back into the stream for new things.
There has also been a movement toward closed system in manufacturing in Europe for a long time, where manufacturers have to build extraction and waste into their manufacturing prices and systems. Like take responsibility for the waste. I'm not sure where they are on that, or how it might apply to something like, say energy (all that natural gas being piped from Russia ...)
It's crazy to have so much pollution and waste in all the manufacturing streams. I live in the town I graduated high school in, and drive by the county dump all the time. It's a growing hill, but when I was a teenager it was a pit.
If we returned things to the manufacturer, they would have far more incentive and interest in making things more repairable, and ultimately fully recyclable for cradle to cradle sustainability. I'm currently dealing with the need to replace a printer sold in a 2009 because it's no longer possible to get parts for it. 2009 really isn't that long ago and I should be able to keep this printer running because most of it still works. But no.
The European Union is doing a much better job at this than we are here in the States. This is mostly a function of our political system. Our system is structured in a way that privileges short-term interests, and the administrative agencies that are supposed to regulate certain economic activities have mostly been captured by the very industries these agencies were instituted to keep an eye on. At this point it is such a tangled web, and many citizens are so ignorant and so distracted by corporate propaganda (consumerism) and the media circus, that it is difficult to see a path forward. But we must continue to find ways to educate our friends and neighbors. That's the key.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/circular-economy/news/brussels-targets-greenwashing-planned-obsolescence-in-new-eu-consumer-rules/
https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/plastics/single-use-plastics/eu-restrictions-certain-single-use-plastics_en
I lived in Vienna, Austria, in 1998-99, and even then everyone brought their own bags or baskets to the grocery store. You could buy a plastic one, but they were thick and very reusable and cost something like 50 cents! Which is not something people are just going to throw away. And still, to this day, in the U.S. I get sighs and weird looks for using cloth bags in the grocery store ...
We had so little garbage there. Usually none to a handful each week. Everything was returnable, recyclable, or compostable. (Granted, I didn't have kids then, but still!)
I remember many years ago (like, maybe 30+??) reading Worldwatch Magazine. I don't know if I have details right but there was something about Germany requiring product manufacturers to be responsible for packaging disposal cost, which resulted in having a lot more "bare" products with none of the shrink-wrapped excess so common in US stores. I don't know if this is true but it definitely appeals. We go to a food co-op where we can bring our own containers and tell them the tare weight, reuse plastic and paper bags for produce at the farmers' market, I've shifted away from products that come in plastic to ones that come in glass--whatever I can do but this isn't a problem individuals can solve through consumer choice. It requires regulation.
That's really interesting about Germany. I lived in Austria about 25 years ago and we had almost zero trash. There was next to no packaging on anything. All glass was returnable or recyclable, and it was against the law, if I remember, to put things in the trash that could be returned or recycled.
Dealing with single-use plastics has been a bugbear of mine for a long time and I swear it's only gotten worse!
Printers and their parts are the bane of my work life. I currently have one that says it's photosensitive something is reaching the end of its life? I looked it up and it says replace the drum, so at least I can do that but those are still a huge piece of plastic and something in the landfill. Cory Doctorow wrote a piece about printers in Medium some time ago, and how they're working on making the code proprietary in a way that forces us to replace them even earlier.
Any idea where Europe is on this? I thought they were working on closing the waste loop. But I look around just my own home, the things I use on a regular basis, and it feels overwhelming.
Continuing: Why have you never heard of Henry George or the system he proposed? Because it is a much bigger threat to capitalism than Marxism. Marxism makes a great foil against which to tout capitalism. They are both rooted in the idea of dominion. If its not the capitalists, its the workers. And Marxists, though they cover it up these days, have always accepted violence as a means of gaining dominion. So, we were all taught a binary formulation which does indeed make capitalism seem more reasonable. And we're distracted from any other view. The Georgist fomulation is hard to refute (unearned rents undeniably exist) but itr can be ignored if people are well enough distracted. Thus, the "Red Scare" that has taken so many forms over the years.
I'd have to go look this up again, but George's Single Tax was HUGELY popular at the turn of the 19th century. A lot of people ran on it and it had enormous popular support. The masters of capital pulled out all the stops to make sure it never happened, and seemed to have gone to enormous effort to bury the possibility of future generations learn about him at all. (Also, in a different Threadable circle I saw a quote from the creators of the Dawes Act, in which they said that they didn't like the collective land ownership model of Native Nations because "that's Henry George's model and is communist." I'm trying to find the reference because it definitely got my attention!)
That's interesting about the Dawes Act. My friend Sam Western is coming out with a book about the creation of the constitutions of the Dakotas, MT, and WY. The Georgist idea came up in some of those proceedings but was summarily dismissed. If I recall correctly, George himself ran for Mayor of New York City and lost at about that same time (1890).
George never read Marx, though timewise he could have. I think he was familiar with other socialist thinkers, but I believe that one of the troubling things about him to the "masters of capital" is that his ideas originated entirely in the American experience. No blaming bad influences from Europe. Progress and Poverty came rignt out of gold rush San Francisco.
The other troubling thing about George is that he actually believed what we are taught about the American "work ethic.' But if you are a master of capital (especially a white master of capital) that's for other people (starting with the slaves, of course). Everyone knows that we have always looked to technology to replace labor, but think about how gambling is suddenly totally out in the open almost everywhere. And what is land speculation but a gamble (and not always a good one in the short run)? The masters of capital are having an increasingly hard time convincing the rest of us that work is the best way to make money.
And he proposed the Single Tax precisely because he realized that there was no going back to any sort of collectivist understanding of land ownership in the America he inhabited. It was a way of correcting the moral wrong he felt that did not require others to share his morality.
I found the reference. The quote I saw was in "An Indigenous People's History of the United States," and I tracked it down to a speech that Henry Dawes gave to the Lake Mohonk Conference in 1885: "The head chief told us that there was not a family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own. There was not a pauper in that nation, and the nation did not own a dollar. It built its own capitol, and it built its schools and its hospitals. Yet the defect of the system was apparent. They have got as far as they can go because they own their land in common. It is Henry George's system, and under that there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbour’s. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilisation. Til this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress."
(It's quoted in full in "An American Indian Development Finance Institution
A Compendium of Papers Submitted to the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs of the United States Senate," 1986, which was on Google Books.)
Doesn't get much plainer than that, eh? Selfishness is at the bottom of civilization.
Kind of says it all.
It's interesting that a lot of people focus on his writing about the land given to railroads, which I think is an important example of what he talks about but isn't the central point. Reading about him was the first time I imagined what the inequality must have looked like in San Francisco at that time. Butte, too, I imagine, shortly after.
What is land speculation but a gamble?! It's true. And as you point out, the gamble is on the community's labor creating value for your land.
I'm really glad you said that about his Single Tax, too. I was thinking about that after I posted this piece, that he really believed that land should not be individually owned, but this seemed to be his way of accepting that he didn't think we could go back.
I'm intrigued by your friend Sam Western's book. This Sam Western? http://samuelwestern.com
Yes, that Samuel Western. The University of Kansas recently agreed to publish it so it will be a while before we see it between covers. You should find his Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the River.
I just glanced at the description. Looks intriguing.
I wish this group would stop adding great books to my TBR pile!
It’s almost as if these “alternatives” stem from the same mistaken mindset -- that humans are somehow a separate case from the rest of creation, and therefore our purpose -- and right -- is to dominate and subjugate. The only thing to argue over is which system to use. Which ignores millennia of a different understanding: that humans are *part* of the natural world and exist in right relationship to all of it. I find it fascinating that many (most? All?) indigenous people needed no words for “nature” or “environment,” because we are all part of a single whole.
I think you're right here. This is what I keep running into over and over, this idea of separation from nature and how deeply it's dictated the dominant culture and systems for centuries. It sounds like a simple idea but the more you dig into it the more of a huge, violent psychological rupture it truly appears -- one that made all the other ruptures possible.
There is a lot to Progress & Poverty, which has inspired so many and yet had so little practical impact.
My angle (and not just mine) on Georgist economics revolves around the recognition that those who own land very often create no value at all using that land. They capture the value created by orhers, by society at large. This is why location is the root of property value. Georgist (and other) economists call this "unearned rents." Imagine two potato fields with identical soils and the same irrigation source. They are owned by the same family and, thus, farmed the same way for at least a generation. Yet one is worth ten times the other. The difference: the more valuable field is located on the edge of a city. The less valuable is about 10 miles out. Ask yourself how the owners "earned" any of what they will collect when they sell the field to a developer. They worked no harder on that field than the other, brought no more knowledge to its cultivation. The work they put in was - if they were prudent - repaid annually after every harvest. They, with the assistance of the developer, are only capturing value, not created it. Why should they benefit? Well, in American society, they need no reason save the mere fact of ownership. They will even pass all of the risks involved on to the developer (and despite the bad rap they get, developers generally do add some value). And yet, we talk about the American "work ethic." The cat is out of the bag these days with the proliferation of gambling in every form. We Americans would greatly prefer to become wealthy with no work at all! So, George says, let us correct the inequities (and inefficiencies) in the land market by taxing away unearned rents. In a Georgist regime the potato field is developed only when there is a clear need (no speculation) probably incrementally as demand requires, and the entire community benefits when the unearned rents come into the local government coffers, as well as from the reduced cost of housing on the parcel. Once you've thought this through you will be befuddled by why we don't do it that way, or at least you will until you acceot that the pursuit of individual power (and wealth = power = wealth) is the underlying value our society pursues, even when we know better.
This is a great explanation, Lee, thank you! I was first introduced to Henry George through Erik Freyfogle's "The Land We Share," in which he had a chapter positing a neighborhood in which you buy a house, and then describing all the things that are built or developed around that house that increase the value of your property. It was a great way to demonstrate the idea that the increase in value is created largely by the surrounding community, with or without input from the property owner.
This made so much sense to me because the town I live in has a tremendous amount of volunteer energy that goes to a lot of intangible work, but also a lot of visible infrastructure, like bike and pedestrian trails, trees, and probably the biggest one -- voting for a municipal tax increase in order to buy our watershed and put it into a conservation easement, which a small family-owned timber company had offered to sell to the town at a discount. That tax is a resort tax and is meant to capture some of the value of our influxes of seasonal tourists, but we pay it, too.
Anyway, those activities increase the value of everyone's property who owns here, whether they live here full-time or only spend a couple weeks a year. So it only seems right that the community also benefits from that increase in value.
This is great, Lee, thanks.
Thank you for a great introduction to Henry George. Until now, I had only read a brief selection from Thomas Paine regarding property distribution. I had no idea there was an entire world of thought on this! It's such a basic and important idea and it's a subject that virtually nobody I know is talking about. Things are really cooking up in terms of housing affordability . I make a pretty good living but I can't afford to bring my mother down to Miami from Atlanta where she would like to live out her elder years. Rents are insane! Then I think about people who make less than I do and it's a disaster.
Again in the Miami market I would have had to borrow into the millions to buy a property on which to run an animal hospital. I ended up buying a mobile surgical unit after looking at six different properties. Wealthy foreign investors had bought these places and now try to sell them to me in a flip adding hundreds of thousands for the pleasure of living in debt! These folks will do nothing productive with the property but Jack up the price. I thought at least we could make some massive taxes on this practice in order to benefit the local community. This could also disincentivize this flipping. If I was able to afford these places I would be employing a dozen folks and providing a valuable service the community.
Thanks for shedding light and such an important topic! Count my subscription changed to paid!
(Also, Lee's comment below is a good overview of George's idea of "unearned rents.")
Thank so much for reading and subscribing and these great thoughts! I really feel for you being in that market. I live in a tourist town in northwest Montana where the housing prices have just gone insane the last couple years, and several less expensive apartment buildings have been bought by investment companies who then of course jack up the rent, though some of them evict people entirely in order to replace the building with something more high-end. It's got to be hard to be trying to run a business, especially one that you know needs space and equipment and accessibility like an animal hospital.
My understanding is that George's idea of a Land Value Tax, which separated the value of land itself from any improvements on it, was implemented in some cities in Pennsylvania for nearly a century, and helped keep housing affordable. His idea was that a house or factory or whatever should be taxed separately from the land, and that the land taxes should go to the community itself, as well as whatever profit was made if the property were sold. Again, only from the value of the land. His reasoning for that was that when property values increase, it's really the community itself that contributes to that increase.
There are a number of articles around about the Land Value Tax, but I find this one from Strong Towns pretty concise and straightforward: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/8/if-the-land-tax-is-such-a-good-idea-why-isnt-it-being-implemented
Thanks for being here!
You're welcome and thank you!
I really enjoy your writing and insights. As a side note.. this spring I'm taking my mom on a trip for her 80th Birthday. We are likely to take the empire builder Amtrak train which goes right through Montana! If there's a stop in your town, we'd love to take you for a coffee and a stroll :-) as of right now we're considering taking a night or two at glacier national Park. Cheers and see you on the next sub stack :-)
Oh how fun! And I live in Whitefish, so you will definitely be here, especially if you're going to Glacier :) Whitefish is one of their longer 15-minute stops. I used to take that train to and from college in St. Paul every break. Feel free to email me: amalchik@gmail.com
(Check the weather for Glacier as you get closer to the time. The snow doesn't melt from the higher elevations often until late June, which means the big Going-to-the-Sun Road doesn't open to cars as early as you'd think. But it's still beautiful even if you can't get all the way to the top. I hope your mom enjoys it!)