Georgism

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Henry George around the 1890s

The Georgismus or the Georgian tables philosophy and movement (Engl. Georgism , geoism , geonomics or Georgist movement ) is one of the US American economist Henry George called economic philosophy that private ownership the result of human labor and creativity, but all natural resources - especially land - belong to all of humanity. This philosophy is one of the best known and most influential foundations for the land reform movement and has had a great influence on numerous economists.

theory

Everybody works but the vacant lot (cropped) .jpg

The ideas of Georgism are historically based in part on the ideas of philosophers such as John Locke , John Stuart Mill , Thomas Paine, and Adam Smith . An essential precursor was the basic pension theory according to David Ricardo .

Georgism was best known for George's book Progress and Poverty from 1879, which became a bestseller and made the author one of the most famous Americans of his time. According to Henry George, the cause of all social grievances and all economic crises is the unequal distribution of land ownership. The production factors labor and capital are accordingly exploited by the production factor soil, since they are dependent on the factor soil for production and a steadily increasing amount is accounted for by the soil due to the increase in production. With increasing land consumption in a growing economy by z. B. more infrastructural facilities and technical systems also increase the price of land. Therefore, more and more lease or rent has to be paid to the landowner, which leads to a redistribution of wealth. Due to rising land prices, land is being bought into an object of speculation and in reserve. This removes land from the production cycle and creates speculative bubbles that burst at some point and led to the economic crisis.

In the practical implementation Georgists advocate a system of the free market economy in which owners of land and natural resources should pay a fee to the general public. This tax is levied in the form of a land value tax only on the natural, unchanged property, without the improvements made by the owner. The natural soil value is determined by the location and the environment. Furthermore, a shift in taxation from income, capital and production towards taxes on the consumption of natural resources (mainly land) is propagated. So one should single tax on land value (Engl. Single tax ) will be introduced. Since the land value has to a large extent been determined by government measures or by public utilities, the collection of the land value tax is the most natural form of tax. This prevents speculation and land is only used productively instead of being bought in advance. Pure, unused land thus no longer generates any profit and becomes cheaper and more available. Natural resources are therefore more easily accessible and the population is less dependent on employers, as no one will work for less than they can generate independently.

It should be noted that George was an absolute opponent of socialist ideas, particularly Marxist exploitation theory and dispossession. The right of the community to the land does not have to exclude the private right to soil improvement and production increase. Man will cultivate the soil with the security of being able to enjoy the fruits of his labor. Ownership of the land is independent of this. The differential yield beyond the harvest is intended to benefit the community as rent on land . Accordingly, he was rejected by Karl Marx.

Monopolies are also often the result of cumulative private land ownership and other privileges. Natural monopolies, including infrastructure and public transport, should be controlled by the state.

In the concept of the free economy , the land reform theory of Georgism was taken one step further with its property tax on land ownership. Land is to be transferred to public ownership in return for compensation for its previous owners in return for a recurring usage tax. However, the buildings and facilities in the country would remain private property. This georgism-derived concept was called open ground.

In recent times, taxation has been significantly expanded to include the additional taxation of z. B. fishing quotas, emission certificates , electromagnetic emissions, etc.

George assumed a deterioration of the soil and the yields, since the population growth made it necessary to cultivate less productive soils. This development did not come to the expected extreme, as advances in chemical fertilization and the industrialization of agriculture resulted in an increase in productivity with an increase in soil yields. Nonetheless, soil degradation is a global problem. The difficulty also lies in the measurement of the difference between the result of the natural soil and the additional improvement, which requires the fair taxation of this amount.

A modern representative is Mason Gaffney , for example , who developed and shaped the school of thought, known in the English-speaking world as “geoclassics” and originating from Henry George, “like no other (academic) economist”.

Effects

Bust of Henry George in the New York Public Library, 1897

As a result, Georgism was adapted by numerous people and pursued in different ways. These include, for example, Winston Churchill , Henry Ford , David Lloyd George , Aldous Huxley , Chiang Kai-shek , Douglas MacArthur , Mark Twain , Martin Luther King .

Georgism, together with mutualism and individual anarchism, formed the basis for the development of left-wing libertarianism .

Social reformer and Catholic priest Edward McGlynn was excommunicated by the Archbishop of New York for his support for Georgism and Henry George's candidacy for Mayor of New York . The bishop issued a pastoral letter in which he condemned Georgism as contrary to the Catholic faith and accused it of violating the right to private property on land. Of course, the Catholic Church was and is one of the largest land owners in the world.

British Prime Ministers David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill both wanted to introduce the uniform tax system, but failed due to resistance from the British nobility.

Leo Tolstois was a strong advocate of Georgism and picked it up in his novel The Resurrection . The protagonist Prince Nekhludov introduces a flat tax and gives his land to the farmers. Tolstoy said of Georgism: "People don't argue about the teachings of Henry George. They just don't know them. Those who become familiar with them cannot help but agree." Romain Rolland writes in his biography: "There is no other means than to give the earth back to the people who work. And to solve this basic question, Tolstoy invokes Henry George's teaching and his plan, only one tax, one tax This is his economic gospel, to which he draws continually and which he makes so much his own that he often uses sentences from Henry George in his own works ”.

Karl Marx , who rejected George's theories apart from the supplementary land tax, attacked the ideas sharply: "So the whole thing is simply an attempt, spruced up with socialism, to save capitalist rule and in fact on an even broader basis than its current one to re-establish. " He challenged his theories: "How did it come about that in the United States, where, in comparison to civilized Europe, the land was accessible to the great mass of the population and to a certain extent still is (...) the capitalist The economy and the enslavement of the working class has developed faster and more shamelessly than in any other country? "

The Austrian economist Friedrich August von Hayek first became interested in economics because of his enthusiasm for Georgism. With reference to the taxation of land rents, he admitted that "the argument for their introduction would be very powerful", but problematized "that it is difficult to distinguish between the value created by nature and the value created by society".

Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman said: "In my opinion, property tax on unchanged land value is the least bad tax, Henry George's argument from many, many years ago."

Albert Einstein praised Henry George: "Men like Henry George are rare, unfortunately. You cannot imagine a nicer combination of intellectual sharpness, artistic form and ardent love for justice. Every line is as if it were written for our generation. The spread of this Works is a really worthy reason, especially our generation has many and important things to learn from Henry George. "

The most important representatives of the land reform movement in Germany were Michael Flürscheim and Adolf Damaschke . From 1898 to 1943 there was the German Federation for Land Reform in Germany as part of Henry George's international single-tax movement.

There were several churches in the United States that were planted to implement the principles of Georgism. These include the still existing communities of Arden (Delaware) together with Ardencroft and Ardentown , Fairhope (Alabama) and Free Acres, New Jersey. The former German lease area and protectorate in the Empire of China Kiautschou fully implemented the principle of Georgism and had the land value tax of 6 percent as its only source of income. The reason for the introduction of this tax system lay in the economic problems of the African colonies caused by land speculation. Such speculations could be completely prevented by this tax. The tax system quickly brought prosperity and financial stability to the reserve. It existed until the end of the colony in World War I when it was occupied by British and Japanese. The colony was the only sub-state that relied solely on the flat tax on land value and serves as an academic case study of the feasibility of such a tax system.

Even the game Monopoly with its forerunner The Landlord's Game is based on the ideas of Georgism, which the inventor of the game wanted to spread with it.

Despite the great and still existing influence and its great importance for the economic and tax system, Georgism as the starting point of today's systems with its core demands faded a little over time. Essential for this was the relaxation in social issues in the 20th century, the increasing state quota with a high tax burden, two world wars and the division of the world during the Cold War , which led to the rejection of ideas in the West that had links to socialism.

literature

Science of political economy , 1898
  • Henry George: The land question , New York 1884
  • Henry George: Progress and poverty; an inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions, and of increase of want with increase of wealth – The remedy , San Francisco 1879
    • German translation by CDF Gütschow: Progress and Poverty. An investigation into the causes of industrial crises and the increase in poverty with increasing wealth , Berlin 1881
    • New edition of the linguistically revised German translation, introduced by Dirk Löhr , by CDF Gütschow, Marburg 2017
  • Henry George: The science of political economy , New York and London 1897
  • Michael Silagi: Henry George and Europe: on the genesis of the European land reform movements , Etana 1973
  • Ruchla Broniatowska: The land reform movement in theory and practice. Presented on the basis of land reform tax policy. Noske, Borna-Leipzig 1931 (Leipzig, Univ., Diss., 1931).
  • Diethart Kerbs , Jürgen Reulecke (ed.): Handbook of the German reform movements. 1880-1933. Hammer, Wuppertal 1998, ISBN 3-87294-787-7 .
  • Klaus Hugler, Hans Diefenbacher: Adolf Damaschke and Henry George. Approaches to a theory and policy of land reform. Metropolis-Verlag, Marburg 2005, ISBN 3-89518-496-9 .
  • Laurence S. Moss: Henry George: Political Ideologue, Social Philosopher and Economic Theorist , John Wiley & Sons 2009
  • The Henry George Theorem , Inst. For Regional Research 1993
  • Anna George De Mille / Don C. Shoemaker: Henry George - Citizen of the World, University of North Carolina Press 1950
  • Gerhard Stavenhagen: History of Economic Theory, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1969, pp. 254-256

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dirk Löhr, Fred Harrison (Ed.): The End of the Rent Economy - How we can create global welfare and build a sustainable future . Metropolis , 2017, ISBN 978-3-7316-1226-1 , pp. 9 .
  2. ^ "Pastoral Letter, 1886," The Catholic University of America
  3. ↑ http://www.businessinsider.com/worlds-biggest-landowners-2011-3?op=1&IR=T
  4. ^ Winston Churchill: Liberalism and the Social Problem
  5. ^ The Public: A Journal of Democracy, Volume 8
  6. ^ Romain Rolland - The Life of Tolstoy, Frankfurt a. Main, 1922
  7. ^ Letter from Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge dated June 20, 1881
  8. ^ Friedrich August von Hayek: The Constitution of Liberty, pp. 352-353. London: Routledge & Kegan.
  9. ↑ Ted Gwartney: The Potential of "Public Value" . In: Dirk Löhr, Fred Harrison (ed.): The end of the rent economy - How we can create global welfare and build a sustainable future . Metropolis , 2017, ISBN 978-3-7316-1226-1 , pp. 195 .
  10. ^ Interview, The Times Herald, Norristown, Pennsylvania, December 1, 1978
  11. ^ Albert Einstein, letter to Anna George De Mille (Henry George's daughter), 1934; engl. @ cooperative-individualism.org, accessed May 3, 2016
  12. ^ Donald E. Pitzer - America's Communal Utopias, 2010, p. 486
  13. ↑ Leutner / Mühlhahn- model colony Kiautschou: the expansion of the German Empire in China: German-Chinese relations 1897 to 1914, Akademie Verlag 1997
  14. ^ Metropolis publishing house: Henry George: Progress and poverty. Retrieved March 25, 2018 .