Henry George

They've been talking about poverty in Glasgow for a long time. They've been into land reform as well. Not just the work of Mary Barbour and the Glasgow Women's Housing Association and rent strikes during the first war, but at the turn of the twentieth century Glasgow was also the de facto HQ in Britain of the Single Tax movement, those followers of Henry George's idea of taxing land values. The poverty in the city was legendary, and it was it seems often used as an example by either side in the land tax debates almost exactly a century ago.

Here's a response from Winston Churchill in the House of Commons to the leader of the opposition, Arthur Balfour's attempts to rubbish the idea:

One hundred years ago, the Liberal Party could have begun to eradicate Glasgow's poverty once and for all. How sad that a hundred years later Glasgow East continues to shine mostly as an example of those same problems we could have solved all those years ago. What benefit has the political game been to them in all those years? What good the franchise? What good socialism? Or the vested interests of the Tories' friends? BBC News tonight suggested that this might be the most important by-election in thirty years. Maybe for the first time in a century someone could once again explain how they are going to make life really better for the constituency's long suffering inhabitants. And then make it happen.

There's this extraordinary debate going on (well actually the comments are closed) on ConservativeHome about a piece by a chappie called Tony Makara who is advocating a protectionist trade policy the likes of which has not been seen in the UK for a generation:

Anthony Makara: Britain imports too much

Over the last weeks I've read much about the subject of welfare reform. The arguments about incapacity benefit and workfare. However all these strategies for welfare reform fail to answer one fundamental question. How are we going to get people into work? I believe all the proposed plans for welfare reform will fail because they do not tell us how we are to create the one million plus jobs needed to end welfare dependency. This is because the British economy no longer produces the jobs that the unemployed need. Lets face it, a person is either in work or they are on benefit, it really is that simple, the answer to unemployment is to create jobs. [From ConservativeHome's Platform: Anthony Makara: Britain imports too much]

The outrage in the comments is interesting. We all know the Tories made a seismic shift in the mid-late seventies in embracing what they liked to call "free trade". Of course, without radical tariff eradication and resolute policing of monopoly and cartel, there is no truly free trade. But what is interesting is that this was the debate over which Winston Churchill first left the Tories at the turn of the twentieth century and joined the free trade Liberals.

You see, for forty years, free trade was a policy of the "left" (indeed much longer if we go back to the Radicals and the Corn Laws debates), a key plank of trying to increase the returns to labour and in reducing the cost of necessities to make the average working person better off, either through higher wages or through lower prices (they have the same effects). It was Philip Snowden, the Labour chancellor of the exchequer, who wrote in a foreword to a new edition of Henry George's book of the same name "Protection or Free Trade" that...

"Each new generation has in a large measure to re-learn the truths which its ancestors established by discussion and practical experience. Free Traders have been so confident in the fundamental soundness of their faith and in the security of the system, that they have neglected to keep the rising generation well grounded in the principles of the faith."

He was writing in response to the Tories' re-adoption of a protectionist stance in the face of the beginnings of the Great Depression.

I have no doubt that most Tories today believe in something called "free trade". I don't believe that most of them actually realise how far away we are from it and what steps will be necessary to get there. But I am sure myself that if we get there, we will all benefit. As Snowden also wrote, "Protection is the foster-mother of monopoly, and monopoly in all its forms...is the robbery of the community for the benefit of private interests" (you can see why Tories would like the idea!).

It is worth mentioning that the Lib Dems have a consultation paper out on the UK Response to Globalization. Go respond - we must resist any attempts at introducing protectionist policies.

Over on the Ludwig von Mises Economics blog last week, Ben O'Neill, an Australian libertarian and academic, wrote a piece against the welfare state in Is the Starving Man Free? and the full article is here:

'Modern "liberals" who advocate the view that government should provide us with the necessities or alleged necessities of life rarely appreciate that this assistance rests on a system of mass robbery and enslavement that is highly inimical to their professed belief in liberty. In fact, the advocates of such policies present them in quite the opposite light, as enhancing our liberty.'

Now, much as I hesitate to go up against an article at the great Mises Institute, this issue goes to the heart of differences between some liberals and some libertarians, though not this liberal libertarian. Indeed it is one of the core messages of the "Liberal Alternative" book we are compiling under the auspices of ALTER, and, to give it a plug, what I will be talking about in the ALTER fringe next Saturday evening in Liverpool, alongside James Graham, Tony Vickers and Vince Cable.

I also believe it gives some libertarians a "bad rap"; seeming to leave the "safety net" to the possible vicissitudes of private charity gives them a "beggar thy neighbour" reputation. Yet Liberals, and before the Ayn Rand/Ludwig von Mises school of libertarianism the mutualists and individualist anarchists like Lysander Spooner, had a neat response. For the record, I tend to agree that if we take from people what they earn with their own labour and resourcefulness it is coercion and even theft, but there is a source of value that properly belongs to us all, and not, as in the current predominant model, to the occupier - rent.

Benjamin Franklin wrote:

But notwithstanding this increase (of population), so vast is the territory of North America, that it will require many ages to settle it fully; and, till it is fully settled, labor will never be cheap here, where no man continues long a laborer for others, but gets a plantation of his own; no man continues long a journeyman to a trade, but goes among these new settlers, and sets up for himself.

[From: Observations Concerning for Increase of Mankind (1751), Sec. 8, Works, Vol. II, p. 225]

If we had free land, nobody would starve, unless that is they could not physically lift a spade to grow their own sustenance. The poor could up-sticks, spread out to the next available plot of unoccupied land and cultivate it. It would be a basic existence to be sure, but one that would not depend on another to provide, by state coercion or by reliance on private charity. And in time, one which could provide the most basic means of providing not just sustenance but opportunities to create wealth.

Now the fact is, we are not in that happy situation Franklin described. We do not have "free land". It is all enclosed. And indeed it would not suit modern, sophisticated, "civilized" (in the sense of "urbanized") humanity well if we did have lots of unused land lying around being unproductive. But the corollary of that is that there is no way the landless poor can sustain themselves without recourse to selling their labour to another. And in that state of desperation where one is about to "starve" one is surely more than most liable to coercion by that other. "Will work for food" maybe a simple slogan, but it hides a desperation likely to be seized upon by the unscrupulous.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

Then he says: "If I am born into the earth, where is my part? Have the goodness, gentlemen of this world, to show me my wood lot, where I may fell my wood, my field where to plant my corn, my pleasant ground where to build my cabin." ..."Touch any wood or field or house-lot on your peril," cry all the gentlemen of this world; "but you may come and work in ours for us, and we will give you a peice of bread."

[From: The Conservative, A Lecture delivered at the Masonic Temple, Boston, December 9, 1841]

Now what of the other side of O'Neill and the Mises style libertarians' claim that for the state to take anything from everyone to support the "starving man", to give him his basic needs, is "mass robbery and enslavement"? Well, as I said, I tend to agree that taking anything of what someone has made with his own labour or resourcefulness is theft. It is justified by the "liberals" that O'Neill castigates (that's most of us!) on the several grounds that it prevents a greater evil - the starving man, that it pays for the inputs that enable us to make money from our labour - our education and that of others to work for us, and the somewhat vague assertion that those who have much should give more to support those who have less. But it is still an offense against self-ownership; that which John Locke describes as being able to retain the fruits of our own labour.

But there is value in land that the owner does not create for him or herself. It is two hundred years since David Ricardo showed that rent increases to absorb the extra productivity that can be gained from a good piece of land compared with an inferior piece with no effort from the land owner, as owner. There is a perfectly reasonable strand of libertarianism, known as geolibertarianism, that asserts that since this rent is not earned by the landowner, but created by the expenditure of others, in labour and capital, that gives a particular location more social and commercial attractiveness, it is legitimate to collect this value from owners to compensate those who suffer from lack of land. And in a modern, urbanized economy, this would mean cash with which to satisfy their most basic needs, a "Citizen's Income" allowing them then to sell their labour, their bellies full and their body rested, without having to accept a potentially exploitative bargain.

Unlike taking part of what a person earns from his labour, impinging on his or her self-ownership, this can be justified because it is value that the owner does not earn for themselves, that it does not affect their ability to earn from their labour in future, and as a user fee in return for the state's or community's protection of their right to occupy such a location, a user fee in proportion to the potential natural productivity of that location, whether they make use of that potential productivity or not. Location is a monopoly, protected by the state; libertarians are against monopoly and state protection. It forms a neat, virtuous circle, from which those left without access to free land can be supported without the "mass robbery and enslavement" O'Neill rightly denounces.

I caught in my logs the other day someone visiting my blog from Tristan's piece way back in October about his "Essential reads". He was very flattering about my blog, but I do remember now reading it first time and wanting to defend myself against his suggestion that I was possibly the "LibDem version of a gold bug, seeing LVT as a solution to many problems as a gold bug sees a gold standard".

I admit, occasionally (well maybe more than occasionally for some) LVT seems like a religious belief, and as such one can be very zealous about it and make claims that others feel unwarranted. I know that a much more vocal LVT campaigner (yes, there are some!), Labour Land Campaign's Dave Wetzel, managed to put off a member of their NEC who works in my office because she could not believe that something for which so many beneficial claims were made had not been properly tried before now. And it is also true that for many years, the Lib Dem's own campaign group on such subjects, ALTER (Action for Land Taxation and Economic Reform), of which I am secretary, has focussed more or less exclusively on LVT to the exclusion of other "Economic Reforms" - indeed it has been suggested that "Economic Reform" was only included in the name to make a better acronym!  read more »