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  • Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney

    I just did a search and did not find any discussion about Dr. Gaffney's work, so I am posting this thread here for comment.


    In the late 19th century, economist and social philosopher Henry George achieved international fame by calling for the abolition of all taxation save that upon land values -- a tax reform that would reconcile the conflict between economic liberty and social justice. So persuasive were George's arguments that landed elites, desperate to protect their vested interests in unearned wealth, set out to undermine George's immense popularity.

    In "The Corruption of Economics," the precise manner in which Henry George was neutralized is uncovered by professor Mason Gaffney. That manner -- which later became known as neo-classical economics -- was to corrupt economic science. How? By blurring the traditional distinction between capital and land (and hence between earned and unearned income), by glossing this blurred distinction with jargon and abstract models, and by recasting economics generally to make free-riding by landowners seem just and moral.


    The book is based on Gaffney's earlier work, which is available online....
    Neo-classical Economics as a Strategem against Henry George
    by Mason Gaffney
    http://homepage.ntlworld.com/janusg/coe/!index.htm

    Excerpts from The Corruption of Economics
    by Mason Gaffney
    http://politicaleconomy.org/gaffney.htm

    Introduction: The Power of Neo-classical Economics

    Neoclassical economics is the idiom of most economic discourse today. It is the paradigm that bends the twigs of young minds. Then it confines the florescence of older ones, like chicken-wire shaping a topiary. It took form about a hundred years ago, when Henry George and his reform proposals were a clear and present political danger and challenge to the landed and intellectual establishments of the world. Few people realize to what a degree the founders of Neoclassical economics changed the discipline for the express purpose of deflecting George, discomfiting his followers, and frustrating future students seeking to follow his arguments. The stratagem was semantic: to destroy the very words in which he expressed himself. Simon Patten expounded it succinctly. "Nothing pleases a ... single taxer better than ... to use the well-known economic theories ... [therefore] economic doctrine must be recast" (Patten 1908; Collier, 1979).

    George believed economists were recasting the discipline to refute him. He states so, in his last book, The Science of Political Economy. George's self-importance was immodest, it is true. However, immodesty may be objectivity, as many great talents from Frank Lloyd Wright to Muhammad Ali and Frank Sinatra have displayed. George had good reasons, which we are to demonstrate. George's view may even strike some as paranoid. That was this writer's first impression, many years ago. I have changed my view, however, after learning more about the period, the literature, and later events.

    Having taken shape in the 1880-1890s, Neo-Classical Economics (henceforth NCE) remained remarkably static. Major texts by Marshall, Seligman, and Richard T. Ely, written in the 1890s, went through many reprintings each over a period of 40 years with few if any changes. Not until 1936 was there another major "revolution," and that was hived off into a separate compartment, macro-economics, and contained there so as not to disturb basic tenets of NCE. Compartmentalization, we will see in several instances, is the common NCE defense against discordant data and reasoning.

    J. B. Clark's capital theory "... gives the appearance of being specially tailored to lead to arguments for use against George" (Collier, 1979). "The probable source from which immediate stimulation came to Clark was the contemporary single tax discussion" (Fetter, 1927). "To date, capital theory in the Clark tradition has provided the basis for virtually all empirical work on wealth and income" (Dewey, 1987; cf. Tobin, 1985). Later writers have added fretworks, curlicues and arabesques beyond counting, and achieved more isolation from history, and from the ground under their feet, than in Patten's dreams, but all without disturbing the basic strategy arrived at by 1899, tailored to lead to arguments against Henry George.

    To most modern readers, probably George seems too minor a figure to have warranted such an extreme reaction. This impression is a measure of the neo-classicals' success: it is what they sought to make of him. It took a generation, but by 1930 they had succeeded in reducing him in the public mind. In the process of succeeding, however, they emasculated the discipline, impoverished economic thought, muddled the minds of countless students, rationalized free-riding by landowners, took dignity from labor, rationalized chronic unemployment, hobbled us with today's counterproductive tax tangle, marginalized the obvious alternative system of public finance, shattered our sense of community, subverted a rising economic democracy for the benefit of rent-takers, and led us into becoming an increasingly nasty and dangerously divided plutocracy.

    The crabbed spirit of neo-classical economics

    Neo-classical economics makes an ideal of "choice." That sounds good, and liberating, and positive. In practice, however, it has become a new dismal science, a science of choice where most of the choices are bad. "TANSTAAFL" (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) is the slogan and shibboleth. Whatever you want, you must give up something good. As an overtone there is even a hint that what one person gains he must take from another. The theory of gains from trade has it otherwise, but that is a heritage from the older classical economists.

    Henry George, in contrast, had a genius for reconciling-by-synthesizing. Reconciling is far better than merely compromising. He had a way of taking two problems and composing them into one solution. He took two polar philosophies, collectivism and individualism, and synthesized a plan to combine the better features, and discard the worse features, of each. He was a problem-solver, who did not suffer incapacitating dilemmas and standoffs.

    As policy-makers, neo-classical economists present us with "choices" that are too often hard dilemmas. They are in the tradition of Parson Malthus, who preached to the poor that they must choose between sex or food. That was getting right down to grim basics, and is the origin of a well-earned epithet, "the dismal science." Most modern neo-classicals are more subtle (although the fascist wing of the otherwise admirable ecology movement gets progressively less so). Here are some dismal dilemmas that neo-classicals pose for us today. For efficiency we must sacrifice equity; to attract business we must lower taxes so much as to shut the libraries and starve the schools; to prevent inflation we must keep an army of unfortunates unemployed; to make jobs we must chew up land and pollute the world; to motivate workers we must have unequal wealth; to raise productivity we must fire people; and so on.

    The neo-classical approach is the "trade-off." A trade-off is a compromise. That has a ring of reasonableness to it, but it presumes a zero-sum condition. At the level of public policy, such "trade-offs" turn into paralyzing stand-offs, where no one gets nearly what he wants, or could get. It overlooks the possibility of a reconciliation, or synthesis, instead. In such a resolution, we are not limited by trade-offs between fixed A and B: we get more of both.

    Popular responsiveness to problem-solvers

    Voters faced with two candidates, each coached by a neo-classical economist, also face a hard choice. They often appear apathetic and take a third choice, staying home. However, history denies that voters are intrinsically apathetic. They have gotten turned on by candidates who try to lead up and away from dismal trade-offs.

    In 1980 it was Ronald Reagan. Instead of the dismal Phillips Curve ("choose inflation or unemployment") he offered the happy Laffer Curve: lower tax rates would lead to higher supplies, higher revenues, and lower deficits, he promised. Lowering taxes, said Laffer, would eliminate the "wedge effect." He often cited Henry George in support of his position. Thus he would unleash supply, and collect more taxes while applying lower tax rates. The voters were sick of 2nd-generation Keynesians who had been reduced to preaching austerity, so they were game (if not wise) to buy into Reaganomics as advertised.

    Unfortunately, the Laffer Curve turned out to be wildly overoptimistic, and Reaganomics partly fraudulent and hypocritical in application. The voters again tuned out and seemed apathetic. They are not saying, however, they don't care. They are saying "come back when you have something better, mean what you say, and deliver what you promise."

    From 1936-70 it was Keynes and his apostles, who had a long run with the voters, in spite of virulent critics. Keynes's winning political formula was that consumption and capital formation are not alternatives to be traded off, but complements, reinforcing one another. Raise wages, he said, raise private and public consumer spending, and get more capital formation as a happy by-product. "We can have it all," he said; they called it "the economics of abundance." Who wouldn't prefer that to long-faced moralizers preaching we must suffer for the prodigalities of the past, or for the sake of a remote and uncertain future? Even puritans learned better as children from Longfellow's "Psalm of Life."

    When the theory of the propensity to consume, and the multiplier, lost their charm, and some strong trade unions (like Hoffa's Teamsters) showed their nastier side, the American voters tuned in to JFK and "business Keynesianism" in which the emphasis turned to fostering new investing. Keynes had been shrewd enough to cast his theories to accommodate either emphasis. Here the formula was to raise the "marginal efficiency of capital" (today we say the marginal rate of return) after taxes by giving preferential tax treatment to new investing, keeping tax rates high on income from old assets like land. It was a species of Georgism, applied via the Federal income tax. The key devices were fast write off for new capital, and the investment tax credit.

    There was no talk or thought, however, of enriching capitalists by impoverishing workers. The promise was to enrich capitalists and workers together, as higher investing raised aggregate demand for labor and its products through the "multiplier" effect.

    In time that happy glow of mutuality turned to ashes. After JFK, with his influential economist Walter Heller, the flame burned low; later leaders stumbled in the dark. They relied too simple-mindedly on demand management through fiscal and monetary policy, carrying them well beyond their power to stimulate supply. Thus they lurched into Stagflation: double-digit inflation and recession conjoined. They blamed the war, then the Arabs. They scolded the public, and they called for sacrifices, as leaders always do when they lack ideas. "You must mature and face the facts of life," they lectured. "There is no way to stop inflation except unemployment. Whichever evil you choose, don't blame us, we told you so." Faced with that, the voters exercised a third choice: they retired the patrons of those new dismal scientists.

    Before Keynes there was another great reconciler, Henry George. In 1879, George electrified the world by identifying a cause of the boom/slump cycle, identifying a cause of inadequate demand for labor, and, best of all, following through with a plausible, practicable remedy. Like Keynes and Laffer after him, he turned people on by saying "Forget the bitter trade-offs; we can have it all."

    George came out of a raw, naive new colony, California, as a scrappy marginal journalist. Yet his ideas exploded through the sophisticated metropolitan world as though into a vacuum. His book sales were in the millions. Seven short years after publishing Progress and Poverty in remote California he nearly took over as Mayor of New York City, the financial and intellectual capital of the nation. He thumped also-ran Theodore Roosevelt, and lost to the Tammany candidate (Abram S. Hewitt) only by being counted out. Three more years and he was a major influence in sophisticated Britain. In 1889, incredibly, he became "adviser and field-general in land reform strategy" to the Radical wing of the Liberal Party in Britain, where he was not even a citizen. It also happened that when Chamberlain bowed out, the Radical wing became the Liberal Party. It adopted a land-tax plank after 1891 (The "famous Newcastle Programme"), and came to carry George's (muted) policies forward under successive Liberal Governments of Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, and Lloyd George.

    How could a marginal man come out of nowhere and make such an impact? The economic gurus of the day, even as today, were in a scolding mode, blaming unemployment on faulty character traits and genes, and demanding austerity. They were not intellectually armed to refute him or befuddle his listeners. He had studied the classical economists, and used their tools to dissect the system. Neo-classical economics arose in part to fill the void, to squeeze out such radical notions, and be sure nothing like the Georgist phenomenon could recur.

    Again, are we not imputing too much weight to a minor figure? We are told that Georgism withered away quietly with its founder in 1897. That, however, is warped history. One of the great derelictions of American historians is to have neglected the single-tax movement, 1901-24. It is also a warped view of "The Single Tax" as a discrete, millennial change, a quantum leap away from life as we know it (Gaffney, 1976). Pure Georgism never "took over whole hog," but no single philosophy ever does. Modified Georgism, melded into the Progressive Movement, helped run the USA for 17 years, 1902-19, working through both major political parties. At the local level, it continued on through the early 1920s. Local property taxation was modified on Georgist lines even as it rose in absolute terms. The first Federal income tax law was drafted by a Georgist (Congressman Warren Worth Bailey of Johnstown, Pennsylvania) with Georgist goals uppermost. Real concessions were made: the politicians heard the voters. Historians of the Populist Party and movement often note that its ideas succeeded even though the Party failed, because its ideas were co opted by major parties. Georgism was a strand of American populism, later wrapped into Progressivism.

    Consider, for example, that in 1913 Wm. S. U'Ren, "Father of the Initiative and Referendum," created this system of direct democracy for the express purpose of pushing single-tax initiatives in Oregon. According to U'Ren, another by-product of the single-tax campaigns in Oregon was the 1910 "adoption of the first Presidential Primary Law, which was quickly imitated by so many other States that (Woodrow) Wilson's nomination and election over Taft was made possible" To that we may add that another "Father of the Direct Primary," George L. Record of New Jersey, was a mentor of Woodrow Wilson and an earnest Georgist who had gotten railroad lands uptaxed to the great benefit of public schools in New Jersey, and to the impoverishment of special interest election funds. "... it was the passage of these great election reforms in the Wilson Administration (in New Jersey) that led ... (to) winning the Bryan support and the Democratic nomination for President". That helps explain the gratitude of President Wilson, who included single-taxers in his Cabinet (Newton D. Baker, Louis F. Post, Franklin K. Lane, and William B. Wilson), and worked with single-tax Congressmen like Henry George, Jr., and Warren Worth Bailey.

    Consider that in 1916 a "pure single-tax" initiative won 31% of the votes in California. Even while "losing," such campaigns raised consciousness of the issue to a high degree, such that assessors were focusing more attention on land. Thus, in California, 1917, tax valuers focused on land value so much that it constituted 72% of the assessment roll for property taxation - a much higher fraction than today. Joseph Fels, an idealistic manufacturer, was throwing millions into such campaigns in several states, having earlier thrown himself and his fortune into the English land tax campaign that brought on the Parliamentary revolution of 1909.

    Consider that there was a single-tax party, the Commonwealth Land Party. In 1920 its Presidential candidate was Carrie Chapman Catt, fresh from leading her successful campaign for the 19th Amendment, and just before founding the League of Women Voters. In 1924 its Presidential candidate was William J. Wallace of New Jersey, with John C. Lincoln, brilliant Cleveland industrialist, for Vice-president. In 1919 Georgists began working through the Manufacturers and Merchants Federal Tax League to sponsor a federal land tax, the Ralston-Nolan Bill. Drafted by Judge Jackson H. Ralston, it would impose a "1% excise tax on the privilege of holding lands, natural resources and public franchises valued at more than $10,000, after deducting all improvements" In 1924 Congressman Oscar E. Keller of Minnesota reintroduced it (H.R. 5733). In spite of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, Progressivism still lived in Congress. In 1923, for the first and last time, income tax returns were made public, giving valuable data-ammunition to land taxers.

    Consider that in 1934 Upton Sinclair, so-called "socialist," almost became Governor of California on a modified Georgist platform. Two years later, Jackson H. Ralston, by then a Stanford Law Professor, led another California Initiative campaign to focus the property tax on land values. Norman Thomas, perennial Socialist candidate for President of the U.S., kept a land tax plank in his platform. Daniel Hoan, the "socialist" Mayor of America's model city, Milwaukee, had his tax assessor focus on upvaluing land. Hoan distributed land value maps to the Milwaukee public, to raise their consciousness of the issue.

    Historian Eric Goldman (1956) found George to have inspired most of the major reformers of the early 20th Century. "... no other book came anywhere near comparable influence, and I would like to add this word of tribute to a volume which magically catalyzed the best yearnings of our grandfathers and fathers". Raymond Moley wrote, "George ... touched almost all of the corrective influences which were the result of the Progressive movement. The restriction of monopoly, more democratic political machinery, municipal reform, the elimination of privilege in railroads, the regulation of public utilities, and the improvement of labor laws and working conditions - all were ... accelerated by George".

    Consider that most American states and Canadian provinces required separate valuations of land, for tax purposes. Professional valuers, responding to the general interest, were routinely valuing land separately from buildings, and developing workable techniques to handle the occasional tricky case. Valuation anticipates taxation. Lawson Purdy, one of those valuers, was Tax Commissioner of the City of New York, a founder of and power in the National Tax Association, a campaigner for George in the 1897 race, and a leader of the Manhattan Single Tax Club. Under this kind of influence, New York City kept its subway fares down to 5 cents, paying for most of the cost from taxes on the benefitted lands, It also exempted new residential structures from the property tax for ten years, 1924-34.

    Consider that Wright Act Irrigation Districts were spreading fast throughout rural California, using Georgist land taxes to finance irrigation works. The Wright Act dated from 1887, and sputtered along fitfully until in 1909 the California Legislature amended the enabling legislation to limit the assessment in all new districts to the land value only. It also let old districts do so by local option. The old districts soon did: Modesto in 1911, Turlock in 1915. This was Georgism getting its "second wind," so to speak. Beyond much question, the idea was identified with George. The legislative leader, L.L. Dennett of Modesto, got the idea from his father, an old neighbor of Henry George in San Francisco.

    In 1917, rural Georgism got a third wind: the California Legislature made it mandatory for all Districts to exempt improvements. They then grew to include over four million acres by 1927, and to dominate American agriculture in their specialty crops. They built the highest dam in the world at that time (Don Pedro, on the Tuolumne River in the Sierra Nevada), financing it 100% from local land taxes. Albert Henley, a lawyer who crafted the modified District that serves metropolitan San Jose, evaluated them thus: "The discovery of the legal formula of these organizations was of infinitely greater value to California than the discovery of gold a generation before. They are an extraordinarily potent engine for the creation of wealth". They catapulted California into being the top-producing farm state in the Union, using land that was previously desert or range. They made California a generator of farm jobs and homes, while other states were destroying them by latifundiazation.

    If this is a "minor" phenomenon it is because the neglect of historians and economists has made it so. One searches in vain through academic books and journals on farm economics for recognition of this, the most spectacularly successful story of farm economic development in history. What references there are consist of precautionary cluckings focused on attendant errors and failures. "Economic development" theorists neglect it altogether, as though California's commercial farming had sprung full blown from a corporate office, with no grass roots basis, and no development period. It is as though the clerisy were in conspiracy against the demos, under some Trappist oath against disclosing what groups of small people achieved through community action, and through the judicious application of the pro-incentive power of taxing land values.

    There is a common defeatist notion that "farmers" are implacably against land taxation. The California experience seems to belie it. In other states, also, The Grange and the Farmers' Union were pushing for focusing the property tax on land during the 'teens. In Minnesota, the Dakotas, and the Prairie Provinces the Non-Partisan League became a major power in state and local politics, electing a Governor of North Dakota and swaying many elections. North Dakota exempted farm capital from the county property tax, taxing land only. The spirit of Prairie Populism straddled the 49th parallel (the international boundary), radicalizing politics in rural Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, all of which were focusing their property taxes on land in this period.

    George's ideas were carried worldwide by such towering figures as David Lloyd George in England, Leo Tolstoy and Alexandr Kerensky in Russia, Sun Yat-sen in China, hundreds of local and state, and a few powerful national politicians in both Canada and the USA, Billy Hughes in Australia, Rolland O'Regan in New Zealand, Chaim Weizmann in Palestine, Francisco Madero in Mexico, and many others in Denmark, South Africa, and around the world. In England, Lloyd George's budget speech of 1909 reads in part as though written by Henry George himself. Some of Winston Churchill's speeches were written by Georgist ghosts.

    Thus, to the rent-taker, the typical college trustee or regent, George's ideas remained a real and present danger over several decades: the very decades when neo-classical economics was spreading through the academic clerisy. With the development of direct democracy, open primaries, the secret ballot, direct election of US Senators, the Initiative, Referendum, and Recall, and the like, crude vote-buying such as prevailed in the late 19th Century would no longer dominate the electorate. Mind-control became the urgent need; NCE was the tool.

    George's ideas and the allied Progressive Movement fell, not from failure to deliver, but to the Great Marathon Red Scare that has dominated much of the world from 1919 to 1989. This panic marshalled and energized rent-takers everywhere; by confusion, some of it deliberate, its victims included Georgists. It inhibited them until their message lost its vigor and excitement and became just a minor local tax reform. Its leaders have moved to the trivial center, downplaying George's grand goals for full employment, catering to the practical but small and prosaic advantages of median homeowners at the local level. Now, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Progressive ideas might very well pick up again where the original Movement was aborted.

    Henry George as reconciler and problem-solver

    Let us itemize the several constructive reconciliations in George's reform proposal. This will explain its wide potential appeal, hence its ongoing threat to embedded rent-takers with a stake in unearned wealth. It will explain why they had neo-classical economists working so hard to put this genie back in the bottle.

    1. George reconciled common land rights with private tenure, free markets, and modern capitalism. He would compensate those dispossessed and made landless by the spread and strengthening of what is now called "European" land tenure, whose benefits he took as given and obvious. He would also compensate those driven out of business by the triumph of economies of scale, whose power he acknowledged and even overestimated. He proposed doing so through the tax system, by focusing taxes on the economic rent of land. This would compensate the dispossessed in three ways.

    a. Those who got the upper hand by securing land tenures would support public services, so wages and commerce and capital formation could go untaxed.

    b. To pay the taxes, landowners would have to use the land by hiring workers (or selling to owner-operators and owner-residents). This would raise demand for labor; labor spending would raise demand for final products.

    c. To pay the workers, landowners would have to produce and sell goods, raising supply and precluding inflation. Needed capital would come to their aid by virtue of its being untaxed.

    Thus, George would cut the Gordian knot of modern dilemma-bound economics by raising demand, raising supply, raising incentives, improving equity, freeing up the market, supporting government, fostering capital formation, and paying public debts, all in one simple stroke. It's quite a stroke, enough to leave one breathless.

    In practice, landowners faced with high land taxes often choose another, even better, course than hiring more workers: they sell the land to the workers, creating an economy and society of small entrepreneurs. This writer has documented a strong relationship between high property tax rates, deconcentration of farmland, and intensity of land use (Gaffney, 1992).

    2. George's proposal lets us lower taxes on labor without raising taxes on capital. Indeed, it lets us lower taxes on both labor and capital at once, and without lowering public revenues.

    3. Georgist tax policy reconciles equity and efficiency. Taxing land is progressive because the ownership of land is so highly concentrated among the most wealthy, and because the tax may not be shifted. It is efficient because it is neutral among rival land-use options: the tax is fixed, regardless of land use. This is one favorable point on which many modern economists actually agree, although they keep struggling against it.

    George showed that a tax can be progressive and pro-incentive at the same time. Think of it! An army of neo-classicalists preach dourly we must sacrifice equity and social justice on the altar of "efficiency." They need that thought to stifle the demand for social justice that runs like a thread through The Bible, The Koran, and other great religious works. George cut that Gordian knot, and so he had to be put down.

    The only shifting of a land tax is negative. By negative shifting I mean that the supply-side effects of taxing land will raise supplies of goods and services, and raise the demand for labor, thus raising the bargaining power of median people in the marketplace, both as consumers and workers. This effect makes the tax doubly progressive: it undercuts the holdout power and bargaining power of landowners vis-a-vis workers, and also vis-a-vis new investors in real capital. This effect also makes the land tax doubly efficient.

    4. A state, provincial, or local government can finance generous public services without driving away business or population. The formula is simple: tax land, which cannot migrate, instead of capital and people, which can. By eliminating the destructive "Wedge Effect," the land tax lets us support schools and parks and libraries and water purification and police and fire protection, etc., as generously as you please, without suppressing or distorting useful work, and without taxing investors in real capital.

    5. Georgist tax policy contains urban sprawl, and its heavy associated costs, without overriding market decisions or consumer preferences, simply by making the market work better. Land values are the product of demand for location; they are marked by continuity in space. That shows quite simply that people demand compact settlement and centrality. A well-oiled land market will give it to them.

    6. Georgist tax policy makes jobs without inflation, and without deficits. "Fiscal stimulus," in the shallow modern usage, is a euphemism for running deficits. George's proposed land tax might be called, rather, "true fiscal stimulus." It stimulates demand for labor by promoting hiring; it precludes inflation as the labor produces goods to match the new demand. It precludes deficits because it raises revenue. That is its peculiar reconciliatory genius: it stimulates private work and investing in the very process of raising revenue. It is the only tax of any serious revenue potential that does not bear down on and suppress production and exchange. As I said, George takes two problems and composes them into one solution.

    7. George's land tax lets a polity attract people and capital en masse, without diluting its resource base. This is by virtue of synergy, the ultimate rationale for Chamber-of-Commerce boosterism. Urban economists like William Alonso have illustrated the power of such synergy by showing that bigger cities have more land value per head than smaller ones. (Land value is the resource base of a city.) Urbanists like Jane Jacobs and Holly Whyte have written on the intimate details of how this works on the streets. Julian Simon (The Ultimate Resource) philosophizes on the power of creative thought generated when people associate freely and closely in large numbers. Henry George made the same points in 1879.

    8. Georgist policies let us conserve ecology and environment while also making jobs, by abating sprawl. It is a matter of focusing human activity on the good lands, thus meeting demands there and relieving pressure to invade lands now wild that are marginal for human needs. Urban sprawl is the kind of sprawl most publicized, but there is analogous sprawl in agriculture, forestry, mining, recreation, and other land uses and industries.

    9. Georgist policies let us strengthen public revenues while in the same process promoting economy in government.

    Anti-governmentalists often identify any tax policy with public extravagance. Georgist tax policy, on the contrary, saves public funds in many ways. By making jobs it lowers welfare costs, unemployment compensation, doles, aid to families with dependent children, and all that. It lowers jail and police costs, and all the enormous private expenditures, precautions, and deprivations now taken to guard against theft and other crime. Idle hands are not just wasted, they steal and destroy.

    Ultimately, Georgist policy saves the cost of civil disturbances and insurrections, and/or the cost of putting them down. In 1992 large parts of Los Angeles were torched, for the second time in a generation, pretty much as foreboded by Henry George in Progress and Poverty. Forestalling such colossal waste and barbarism is much more than merely a "free lunch."

    George's program would abort other, less obvious wastes in government. It obviates much of the huge public cost now incurred to reach, develop, and safeguard lands that should be left in their natural submarginal condition. Today, people occupy flood plains and require levees, flood control dams, and periodic rescue and recovery spending. Others scatter their homes through highly flammable steep brushlands calling for expensive fire-fighting equipment and personnel, and raising everyone's fire insurance premiums. Others build on fault lines; still others in the deserts, calling for expensive water imports. Generically, people now scatter their homes and industries over hundreds of square miles in the "exurbs," or urban sprawl areas, imposing huge public costs for linking the scattered pieces with the center, and with each other.

    This wasteful, extravagant territorial overexpansion results from two pressures working together. One force is that of land speculators manipulating politics seeking public funds to upgrade their low-grade lands so they may peddle them at higher prices. The other force is that of landless people seeking land for homes, and jobs, and public funds for "make-work" projects.

    Both these forces wither away when we tax land value and downtax wages and capital. This moves good land into full use, meeting the demand for land by using land that is good by Nature, without high development costs. It also makes legitimate jobs, abating the pressure for "make-work" spending. Above all, it takes the private gain out of upvaluing marginal land at public cost. Such lands, if upvalued by public spending, will then have to pay for their own development through higher taxes.

    Those nine compelling features of George's program should be enough to persuade one that it had the potentiality of becoming very popular. Its premise, however, was socializing land rents through taxation. Its very strengths were its undoing, then, by evoking a powerful, intransigent, wealthy counterforce.
    13
    Yes
    76.92%
    10
    No
    23.08%
    3

    The poll is expired.

    The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge ~D Boorstin

  • #2
    Re: Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney

    You can find the basic ideas here - Neo-classical Economics as a Strategem against Henry George

    by Mason Gaffney

    Whole archive ~140k ZIP
    Individual Sections:
    • Introduction: ... The Power of Neo-classical Economics Part 1: ... The Imperative to Put Down Henry George
      Part 2: ... The Empire Strikes Back
      Part 3: ... Seligman, Wicksteed, Marshall & Walker
      Part 4: ... Spahr, Johnson & Fetter
      Part 5: ... Ely
      Part 6: ... Ely continued
      Part 7: ... Edgeworth & Pareto
      Part 8: ... Knight, King & Plehn
      Part 9: ... The Bitter Harvest
      Part 10: ... References
      Part 11: ... Bibliography
    Also look at http://www.masongaffney.org/

    Comment


    • #3
      Re: Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney

      You can find the basic ideas here
      Rajiv, What don't you know about?

      By the way, reading the section on Pareto is a real eye opener. I stopped then to comment, but it is obvious I need to read the whole thing. I am truly amazed how little of history is commonly understood and how little we know about where our modern ideologies came from. Such a wonderful obfuscation has taken place over the years. How can a century of manipulation ever be undone?

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney

        This is great stuff Reggie, an important post. And of course Rajiv, who may some day tell me how he gets this stuff so quickly. A wonder, truly.

        Henry George is a hero of mine, you can see his palm prints all over my writing LOL. I just can't square his religious undercurrent enough to go whole hog as some folks do. I also believe his small troupe of modern followers are too tightly wed to the single land tax concept as well.

        George is at his finest with his clear logic and deductive thinking, and also with his anthropological discussion of economic roots. He wrote for the common dude in a way few social economists have since. Krugman is a lightweight beside him.
        ScreamBucket.com

        Comment


        • #5
          Re: Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney

          On that note -- is the question - Who Was Henry George?

          A hundred years ago a young unknown printer in San Francisco wrote a book he called Progress and Poverty. He wrote after his daily working hours, in the only leisure open to him for writing. He had no real training in political economy. Indeed he had stopped schooling in the seventh grade in his native Philadelphia, and shipped before the mast as a cabin boy, making a complete voyage around the world. Three years later, he was halfway through a second voyage as able seaman when he left the ship in San Francisco and went to work as a journeyman printer. After that he took whatever honest job came to hand. All he knew of economics were the basic rules of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and other economists, and the new philosophies of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, much of which he gleaned from reading in public libraries and from his own painstakingly amassed library. Marx was yet to be translated into English.
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          During his lifetime, he became the third most famous man in the United States, only surpassed in public acclaim by Thomas Edison and Mark Twain. George was translated into almost every language that knew print, and some of the greatest, most influential thinkers of his time paid tribute. Leo Tolstoy's appreciation stressed the logic of George's exposition: "The chief weapon against the teaching of Henry George was that which is always used against irrefutable and self-evident truths. This method, which is still being applied in relation to George, was that of hushing up .... People do not argue with the teaching of George, they simply do not know it." John Dewey fervently stressed the originality of George's work, stating that, "Henry George is one of a small number of definitely original social philosophers that the world has produced," and "It would require less than the fingers of the two hands to enumerate those who, from Plato down, rank with Henry George among the world's social philosophers." And Bernard Shaw, in a letter to my mother, Anna George, years later wrote, "Your father found me a literary dilettante and militant rationalist in religion, and a barren rascal at that. By turning my mind to economics he made a man of me...."
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          Also, a lot of Michael Hudson's work owes to Henry George -- particularly his espousal of the Land Value Tax. See - The Theory of Rent Needs a Theory of History

          WALL STREET analyst Dr. Michael Hudson argues that the Georgist fiscal philosophy will not make headway in practical politics until its advocates present a viable historical doctrine of the role played by land, its rent and its capital gains.

          He proposes two streams of action:

          • Promote serious professional discussion of the importance of taxing land so as to un-tax labour and direct capital investment.
          • Explain the need to shift bank lending away from real estate speculation so as to steer the economy's savings back into direct capital investment.


          His research programme comprises two parts:

          1. Re-establish the importance of land and its rent as a shaping force of history by creating a group of economic historians focusing on the land issue; and organizing a prestigious series of colloquia on land use and the evolution of land rent and taxation.

          2. Create a statistical model to demonstrate the importance of land and its rent in national income, and of land-value gains in the nation's balance sheet of wealth.
          Also Hudson's - Henry George’s Political Critics

          ABSTRACT. Twelve political criticisms of George were paramount after he formed his own political party in 1887:
          (1) his refusal to join with other reformers to link his proposals with theirs, or to absorb theirs into his own campaign;
          (2) his singular focus on ground rent to the exclusion of other forms of monopoly income, such as that of the railroads, oil and mining trusts;
          (3) his almost unconditional support of capital, even against labor;
          (4) his economic individualism rejecting a strong role for government;
          (5) his opposition to public ownership or subsidy of basic infrastructure;
          (6) his refusal to acknowledge interestbearing debt as the twin form of rentier income alongside ground rent;
          (7) the scant emphasis he placed on urban land and owneroccupied land;
          (8) his endorsement of the Democratic Party’s freetrade platform;
          (9) his rejection of an academic platform to elaborate rent theory;
          (10) the narrowness of his theorizing beyond the land question;
          (11) the alliance of his followers with the right wing of the political spectrum; and
          (12) the hope that full taxation of ground rent could be achieved gradually rather than requiring a radical confrontation involving a struggle over control of government.
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          Last edited by Rajiv; April 06, 2010, 09:58 PM.

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          • #6
            Re: Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney

            Originally posted by Aetius Romulous View Post
            And of course Rajiv, who may some day tell me how he gets this stuff so quickly. A wonder, truly.
            I'm pretty sure he is a 500 year old bard living in a hollowed out tree. And I mean that in the most respectful way Rajiv.

            Economic thought along these lines is the essence of dialogue toward solution.

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            • #7
              Re: Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney

              Originally posted by Jay View Post
              I'm pretty sure he is a 500 year old bard living in a hollowed out tree. And I mean that in the most respectful way Rajiv.

              Economic thought along these lines is the essence of dialogue toward solution.
              Definitely, that was an excellent post by reggie. Also, I enjoy Rajiv's posts immensely, even though my leanings are probably diametrically opposed to his political agenda.

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              • #8
                Re: Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney

                It's so interesting that George lived around the same time as Marx, and probably was a prolific and his work as significant. But George has all but been wiped from economic history, while Marx lives on as almost a household name. How can that be, and why?
                The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge ~D Boorstin

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                • #9
                  Re: Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney

                  Originally posted by reggie View Post
                  It's so interesting that George lived around the same time as Marx, and probably was a prolific and his work as significant. But George has all but been wiped from economic history, while Marx lives on as almost a household name. How can that be, and why?
                  I suspect that had a great deal to do with the different cultures each lived in.

                  George was an American, writing in America at a time when it truly was a "land of opportunity". There were problems but the young nation was essentially wealthy, prosperous, and egalitarian by virture of the endless land and great spaces.

                  Marx was German of course, and he published his best stuff from London later in his life. Both places were locked in a mortal competition for industry and production and Marx lived in the teeth of it. Crowded, dirty, and with tens of thousands of poor, destitute, and worthless human beings.

                  Marx was better connected and his European audience was more receptive to new ideas, the current ones failing the masses terribly. George was writing about a better system and a better future for a land that was already pretty "better". Europeans picked up Marx's call to action, but simply read George.
                  ScreamBucket.com

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                  • #10
                    Re: Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney

                    Marx was never overtly political - in other words, he never sought political office. He was a political refugee, an influential thinker, but never sought to put his ideas into practice. It was other people a generation later that tried to act on his ideas.

                    George on the other hand was extremely popular, and sought to become political -- but my reading is that he confused popularity with political strength, and spurned those who were his natural allies, and thus allowed the PTB to totally eliminate his ideas from the public eye. Remember that Henry George's thoughts and popularity were very threatening to the powerful interests prevailing in the US at the time.

                    Both Gaffney and Hudson give an insight into how that happened.

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                    • #11
                      Re: Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney

                      Originally posted by Rajiv View Post
                      Marx was never overtly political - in other words, he never sought political office. He was a political refugee, an influential thinker, but never sought to put his ideas into practice. It was other people a generation later that tried to act on his ideas.

                      George on the other hand was extremely popular, and sought to become political -- but my reading is that he confused popularity with political strength, and spurned those who were his natural allies, and thus allowed the PTB to totally eliminate his ideas from the public eye. Remember that Henry George's thoughts and popularity were very threatening to the powerful interests prevailing in the US at the time.

                      Both Gaffney and Hudson give an insight into how that happened.
                      Do you think it had anything to do with the fact that George showed that wages are drawn directly from the product of labor, and not capital? This would have put a damper on the elite's control systems, would it not?
                      The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge ~D Boorstin

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                      • #12
                        Re: Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney

                        Originally posted by reggie View Post
                        I just did a search and did not find any discussion about Dr. Gaffney's work, so I am posting this thread here for comment.



                        In the late 19th century, economist and social philosopher Henry George achieved international fame by calling for the abolition of all taxation save that upon land values -- a tax reform that would reconcile the conflict between economic liberty and social justice. So persuasive were George's arguments that landed elites, desperate to protect their vested interests in unearned wealth, set out to undermine George's immense popularity.

                        In "The Corruption of Economics," the precise manner in which Henry George was neutralized is uncovered by professor Mason Gaffney. That manner -- which later became known as neo-classical economics -- was to corrupt economic science. How? By blurring the traditional distinction between capital and land (and hence between earned and unearned income), by glossing this blurred distinction with jargon and abstract models, and by recasting economics generally to make free-riding by landowners seem just and moral.


                        The book is based on Gaffney's earlier work, which is available online....
                        Neo-classical Economics as a Strategem against Henry George
                        by Mason Gaffney
                        http://homepage.ntlworld.com/janusg/coe/!index.htm
                        Isn't it interesting how the idea of taxing the UN-EARNED profiteering in land price appreciation nicely parallels my idea in city planning of: govn't de-flating land prices by flooding urban land markets with cheap land?

                        And Henry George's idea of driving-down land prices through taxation was silenced just as my idea of city planners flooding cities with cheap land was silenced. I was laughed at, just as Henry George was laughed at and silenced too. So here we are now with mass starvation and outrageous land prices, wealth (land) in the hands of a tiny minority of people, and governments operating to enrich the few.

                        Students need to walk-out of their economics classes and revolt.

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                        • #13
                          Re: Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney

                          Originally posted by Starving Steve View Post
                          Students need to walk-out of their economics classes and revolt.
                          See - A Brief History of the Post-Autistic Economics Movement

                          But eventually reality overtakes time-warp worlds like mainstream economics and the Soviet Union. The moment and place of the tipping point, however, nearly always takes people by surprise. In June 2000, a few economics students in Paris circulated a petition calling for the reform of their economics curriculum. One doubts that any of those students in their wildest dreams anticipated the effect their initiative would have. Their petition was short, modest and restrained. Its first part, “We wish to escape from imaginary worlds”, summarizes what they were protesting against.
                          Most of us have chosen to study economics so as to acquire a deep understanding of the economic phenomena with which the citizens of today are confronted. But the teaching that is offered, that is to say for the most part neoclassical theory or approaches derived from it, does not generally answer this expectation. Indeed, even when the theory legitimately detaches itself from contingencies in the first instance, it rarely carries out the necessary return to the facts. The empirical side (historical facts, functioning of institutions, study of the behaviors and strategies of the agents . . .) is almost nonexistent. Furthermore, this gap in the teaching, this disregard for concrete realities, poses an enormous problem for those who would like to render themselves useful to economic and social actors.

                          The students asked instead for a broad spectrum of analytical viewpoints.
                          Too often the lectures leave no place for reflection. Out of all the approaches to economic questions that exist, generally only one is presented to us. This approach is supposed to explain everything by means of a purely axiomatic process, as if this were THE economic truth. We do not accept this dogmatism. We want a pluralism of approaches, adapted to the complexity of the objects and to the uncertainty surrounding most of the big questions in economics (unemployment, inequalities, the place of financial markets, the advantages and disadvantages of free-trade, globalization, economic development, etc.)

                          The Parisian students’ complaint about the narrowness of their economics education and their desire for a broadband approach to economics teaching that would enable them to connect constructively and comprehensively with the complex economic realities of their time hit a chord with French news media. Major newspapers and magazines gave extensive coverage to the students’ struggle against the “autistic science”. Economics students from all over France rushed to sign the petition. Meanwhile a growing number of French economists dared to speak out in support and even to launch a parallel petition of their own. Finally the French government stepped in. The Minister of Education set up a high level commission to investigate the students’ complaints.

                          News of these events in France spread quickly via the Web and email around the world. The distinction drawn by the French students between what can be called narrowband and broadband approaches to economics, and their plea for the latter, found support from large numbers of economics students and economists in many countries. In June 2001, almost exactly a year after the French students had released their petition, 27 PhD candidates at Cambridge University in the UK launched their own, titled “Opening Up Economics”. Besides reiterating the French students’ call for a broadband approach to economics teaching, the Cambridge students also champion its application to economic research.
                          This debate is important because in our view the status quo is harmful in at least four respects. Firstly, it is harmful to students who are taught the 'tools' of mainstream economics without learning their domain of applicability. The source and evolution of these ideas is ignored, as is the existence and status of competing theories. Secondly, it disadvantages a society that ought to be benefiting from what economists can tell us about the world. Economics is a social science with enormous potential for making a difference through its impact on policy debates. In its present form its effectiveness in this arena is limited by the uncritical application of mainstream methods. Thirdly, progress towards a deeper understanding of many important aspects of economic life is being held back. By restricting research done in economics to that based on one approach only, the development of competing research programs is seriously hampered or prevented altogether. Fourth and finally, in the current situation an economist who does not do economics in the prescribed way finds it very difficult to get recognition for her research.

                          In August of the same year economics students from 17 countries who had gathered in the USA in Kansas City, released their International Open Letter to all economics departments calling on them to reform economics education and research by adopting the broadband approach. Their letter includes the following seven points.
                          1. A broader conception of human behavior. The definition of economic man as an autonomous rational optimizer is too narrow and does not allow for the roles of other determinants such as instinct, habit formation and gender, class and other social factors in shaping the economic psychology of social agents.

                          2. Recognition of culture. Economic activities, like all social phenomena, are necessarily embedded in culture, which includes all kinds of social, political and moral value-systems and institutions. These profoundly shape and guide human behavior by imposing obligations, enabling and disabling particular choices, and creating social or communal identities, all of which may impact on economic behavior.

                          3. Consideration of history. Economic reality is dynamic rather than static – and as economists we must investigate how and why things change over time and space. Realistic economic inquiry should focus on process rather than simply on ends.

                          4. A new theory of knowledge. The positive-vs.-normative dichotomy which has traditionally been used in the social sciences is problematic. The fact-value distinction can be transcended by the recognition that the investigator’s values are inescapably involved in scientific inquiry and in making scientific statements, whether consciously or not. This acknowledgement enables a more sophisticated assessment of knowledge claims.

                          5. Empirical grounding. More effort must be made to substantiate theoretical claims with empirical evidence. The tendency to privilege theoretical tenets in the teaching of economics without reference to empirical observation cultivates doubt about the realism of such explanations.

                          6. Expanded methods. Procedures such as participant observation, case studies and discourse analysis should be recognized as legitimate means of acquiring and analyzing data alongside econometrics and formal modelling. Observation of phenomena from different vantage points using various data-gathering techniques may offer new insights into phenomena and enhance our understanding of them.

                          7. Interdisciplinary dialogue. Economists should be aware of diverse schools of thought within economics, and should be aware of developments in other disciplines, particularly the social sciences.

                          In March 2003 economics students at Harvard launched their own petition, demanding from its economics department an introductory course that would have “better balance and coverage of a broader spectrum of views” and that would “not only teach students the accepted modes of thinking, but also challenge students to think critically and deeply about conventional truths.”2

                          Students have not been alone in mounting increasing pressure on the status quo. Thousands of economists from scores of countries have also in various forms taken up the cause for broadband economics under the banner “Post-Autistic Economics” and the slogan “sanity, humanity and science” The PAE movement is not about trying to replace neoclassical economics with another partial truth, but rather about reopening economics for free scientific inquiry, making it a pursuit where empiricism outranks a priorism and where critical thinking rules instead of ideology.

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                          • #14
                            Re: Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney

                            I will join all of you under the banner of "The Movement for Post-Autistic Economics", as in Paris in 2001.

                            And we need reform of the ecology departments in universities, the climatology departments, the urban planning departments, and the education departments. The general problem is a lack of fresh-thinking, critical-thinking, and receptiveness to new ideas in all of these departments.

                            The symptom of the failure of our present economic theories is the misery of the lot of mankind, especially in the Western nations. We are starving because of inflation, and that inflation was purposefully created by our governments, perhaps to control us and to destroy us economically.

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                            • #15
                              Re: Corruption of Economics by Mason Gaffney

                              Originally posted by Starving Steve View Post
                              And we need reform of the ecology departments in universities, the climatology departments, the urban planning departments, and the education departments. The general problem is a lack of fresh-thinking, critical-thinking, and receptiveness to new ideas in all of these departments.
                              It took TPTB 150yrs or so to screw up our education system. I don't think they're going to let that go without a serious fight.

                              Originally posted by Starving Steve View Post
                              The symptom of the failure of our present economic theories is the misery of the lot of mankind, especially in the Western nations. We are starving because of inflation, and that inflation was purposefully created by our governments, perhaps to control us and to destroy us economically.
                              George says that he found that interest rates followed wage rates. How interesting, especially if planned. However, I have yet to find a graph that confirms that thesis.
                              The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge ~D Boorstin

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