Re: Whither the Georgies or wither the Georgies

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 17:30:22 -0500, "robert j. kolker"
<nowhere@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Henry George wrote "Progress and Poverty" in 1879. It is now 2005. That
>is 126 years.

And Turgot was using land rent recovery more than a century before
George wrote P&P, the Romans were using it 2000 years before that, and
the Egyptians were using it 2000 years before the Romans. So?

>Where is the success of the Single Tex movement.

Single Tax is a specific, one might almost say fundamentalist subset
of the rent recovery movement. Elimination of all taxes but a tax on
land rent is not necessary to improving economic and fiscal
institutions through rent recovery, and IMO not even advisable. The
successes of rent recovery are many, varied, and unambiguous.

>In the
>whole wide world how many Ardens are there?

One. But there are many other examples of successful land rent
recovery programs, dating back thousands of years. In almost every
case, those running the systems did not understand why they worked so
well, and consequently abandoned them for reasons ranging from
ignorance to stupidity, inertia, misguided idealism and outright
corruption.

>It would seem the world is
>postively underwhelmed by Georges thinking. The Neo-Classicals won, the
>Georgies lost.

When truth loses, it is always temporary. When it wins, it is
generally permanent. How long did it take women to win legal
equality? Do you think all the societies where women are still denied
legal equality somehow prove that the campaign for women's rights has
been a misguided or futile effort?

It should be obvious to anyone familiar with the field that as a
science, economics is in a mess. Prof. Mason Gaffney has documented
the fact that this mess is largely the result of efforts to prevent
Single Taxers from making their case, by eliminating the basic
concepts (land and capital) needed to identify the relevant facts.
It's as if chemists had collectively decided, primarily for reasons of
personal financial interest, to eliminate the distinction between
atoms and molecules. Money can generally defeat truth in any given
battle. But neither money nor anything else can ever win a war
against truth, and the ultimate victory of land rent recovery is
inevitable.

-- Roy L
.