Henry George on Land Ownership: A Comment on Pullen

JOHN K. WHITAKER [*] ABSTRACT. Did George alienate many by presenting his reform program as the institution of a new form of restricted land possession rather than as the retention of traditional ownership with a substantial land tax imposed? It seems doubtful, yet the distinction merits further exploration and the peculiar and hard-to-implement nature of the tax and the difficulty of reconciling it with George's distrust of government needs to be stressed. Ideally, George might have preferred complete government ownership of land but his policy proposals were pragmatically adapted to the realities of his own society. The extent of the egalitarianism and aid to the landless implied in his program is questioned. I Introduction THAT PEPPERY BRIGADIER-GENERAL Francis Amasa Walker, who was to prove George's most vehement and influential early critic among American economists, described George as wishing to give every person on earth the right "indiscriminately to enter and enjoy at will each and every lot and parcel of land upon the globe, and every building which may have been or may hereafter be erected thereupon" (1883, p. 141). It is a mystery how any careful reader of Progress and Poverty could have reached such a conclusion and one suspects that, like Marshall after him, Walker had not made a serious attempt to come to grips with George's views. [1] Despite occasional rhetorical overstatement, it is quite clear from Progress and Poverty that what George proposed--at least for long-settled societies--was to institute "private possession" as described by Professor Pullen. I am sympathetic to Pullen's argument that George might have propagated his views more effectively and successfully had he chosen to represent his proposed land reform as restricting private ownership rather than replacing it by a qualified right of possession that was vulnerable to the charge of expropriation. But given the uproar and vilification George's book provoked, I find it difficult to believe that such semantic nuances would have helped placate many early critics, although they might have helped undermine such egregious misrepresentations as Walker's. In Britain, where government intrusion was probably less resented than in the United States, modest proposals for land taxation in 1909 helped precipitate a constitutional crisis. For its day, George's supposed land tax must have seemed gigantic. He expected it to finance all government activity, which he envisaged as considerably expanded, other sources of revenue being eliminated. No wonder that those who felt vulnerable to such a drastic fiscal reform lashed out, often unreasoningly, to the threat. Describing the scheme as the replacement of ownership by possession, while hardly placating to opponents, did at least provide proponents with a clear and appealing potential rallying cry, although whether it was much used as such is unclear to me. Pullen is perfectly correct in stressing that ownership is multifaceted and that George was willing to retain many of its incidents. Since George's day, an increasing tendency to restrict freedom in the use of land has increased the attractiveness of a relativistic view of land ownership to those wishing to draw on George's views in modern policy contexts. Nevertheless there remain basic questions about the feasibility of George's proposals, no matter how they are dressed. II Ownership Versus Possession PROPOSALS FOR TAXING THE SOCIAL ELEMENT in the income from land were an almost inevitable consequence of Ricardian rent theory and were endemic through much of the 19th century--one can instance the cases of James and John Stuart Mill. [2] The argument was straightforward. Pure Ricardian rent results from the growth and change of society as a whole, not from the sacrifices of the particular individuals who have occupied the land, and therefore ought to accrue to society as a whole. …