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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!