Would a Land Value Tax Fix That? (Neon Liberalism #77, with Christopher England)

Samantha and guest Christopher England, author of Land and Liberty, talk the legacy of Henry George and his most famous proposal: the land value tax. They put George in his historical context, alongside Gilded Age oligarchy and radical political movements from socialism to anarchism.

Why did Georgism fade away, why is it experiencing a resurgence now, and what—if anything—would Henry George have to say about AI?

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Would a Land Value Tax Fix That? (with Christopher England)

Podcast Episode · Neon Liberalism · June 7 · 1h 5m

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Transcript

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:00:00]**
Hi, welcome back to Neon Liberalism. I am Samantha Hancox-Li.

Americans are not happy with the state of the economy. There is gaping and rising inequality in our society. There is a sense that the economy just isn't working for us the way we want it to work for us. And one solution, one proposal that's emerged is a new gloss on an old idea: Georgism. Today, that's most associated with what's called a land value tax — a kind of policy proposal that says what we should tax isn't sales, and it isn't income, and it isn't even your house — it's not even what's built on the land — but it's the land itself that should be the object of taxation. And this somewhat arcane technical policy proposal is thought to be the real cure for what ails us. If you're a Georgist, anyways.

So to try and understand this movement and this idea and where it came from, I am really excited to have on the podcast Christopher England. Chris is the author of *Land and Liberty*, which is a book about the namesake of this idea, Henry George himself. So, yeah, Chris, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

**Christopher England [00:01:39]**
Thank you for having me.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:01:40]**
So, I guess first — first question, easy question — who is Henry George?

**Christopher England [00:01:46]**
Henry George was an American in the 19th century. He famously published the book *Progress and Poverty* in 1879, in which he tried to identify the root cause of this paradox: that with the progress of industrialization and communications technology development — railroads and telegraphs, things that should have been producing prosperity for all people — there instead seemed to be an increasing sense of precarity and inequality, and a sense that the republic was falling apart due to these divisions that were growing as a result of modern inequality.

And so in 1879 he publishes this book, *Progress and Poverty*, in which he tries to identify the root cause of this paradox of progress with poverty. And he says that the reason why this happens is that with the development of technology, with population growth, with all of these things that create prosperity, the amount of land and resources in existence remains finite. And so the value of land and resources grows in proportion to economic development, and those that already have control over land and resources reap the disproportionate, or perhaps all of the benefits of this economic development.

He would then famously go on to run for mayor of New York in 1886, and he would run as a Labor Party candidate. But he would outrun the Republican Teddy Roosevelt, come in second place — shocked a lot of observers around the world, including Karl Marx, who — I guess he's in England at the time — writes that American socialism is outpacing socialism in Europe because of Henry George. He would run for mayor again in 1897, but would die during the campaign.

But in my book I cover the sort of afterlife of Georgism into the Progressive Era, where Georgists become often very influential in tax policy and various other reforms of the early 20th century, and helped to orient American reform efforts from the Progressive Era through the New Deal towards questions of natural monopolies and land and utilities — and sort of collecting the rent, the monopoly profits from these monopolies, and making them a public good.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:04:48]**
Okay, so I definitely feel like rent is going to be a concept that we're going to come back to over and over again in this discussion. But there's a way you frame what George was about in your book — that George and Georgism were trying to save liberalism from itself. I'm curious what you mean by that, or what that framing is about.

**Christopher England [00:05:22]**
Well, George, in *Progress and Poverty* — he makes an extended economic argument about land and rent and all those things, but the conclusion, the part that really matters to him, is what this means for liberalism and for democracy. He's in sort of a classical republican vein of thinking. He sees republican institutions as being essential to progress — he sees these political institutions as being the institutions that have laid the foundation for all the development of industrialization, and what we might loosely call modernity.

But he objects to the idea that the institutions by themselves mean much of anything. That yes, you can have a constitution, you can have laws, but if the railroads have the power to stop traffic, if Jay Gould, who owns the Western Union, is using it to spy on communications and use that to influence politics or do insider trading — which is something he was often accused of doing — then eventually that sort of private-sector inequality will spill over into the public sphere, and republican institutions will become only superficial.

I'm sure this sounds very strange, and today we can never imagine this happening, right? But this is his thesis.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:07:01]**
It's very strange, and not at all relatable.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:07:15]**
Yeah, certainly, the Gilded Age has no parallels to what's happening today. None whatsoever.

**Christopher England [00:07:25]**
It's all very strange and foreign to us, right?

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:07:29]**
So, what I'm interested in, though, is — so there's this sense that there's a problem, right? That the 19th century is this age of almost unbelievable technological, industrial, economic progress, right? The transformations you would see in a single human lifetime are kind of unimaginable, really. Imagine you were born in 1820, and by the time you're 70, it's 1890, and the face of America has transformed from this log cabin frontier situation to coal and engines and these tremendous cities that have exploded on the East Coast and in Chicago, and so on and so forth, right?

So there's this enormous change that's happening, and it really was very clear — you look at the writers at the time, it's palpable to them that the future was racing forwards. But like you say, there was also just this growth of inequality, of private power, of the sense that the republic wasn't really working anymore. And what's interesting to me is how this clearly generates a lot of radical movements as well, right? And you talk about this — there are anarchists, there are socialists, there are Marxists. There are many different ways of reacting and trying to understand and respond to these changes. And so I'm curious how you would situate Georgism among its other ideological competitors at the time.

**Christopher England [00:09:22]**
Yeah, Richard John, a famous historian who's also a friend of mine — he says that the 1890s are sort of the pinnacle of American quackery in economics. I mean, you have the socialists — and I don't want to misrepresent them, I'm probably not saying that exactly how he would — but you have socialists, you have anarchists, you also have a wide variety of people concerned with monetary policy. You have William Jennings Bryan, you have greenbackers, you have all sorts of schemes sort of populating throughout the republic, with a sense that something is fundamentally wrong and needs to be fixed.

How does George fit within this, in the American sphere? I think he's probably the kind of preeminent critic. He sells millions of books, he is extremely influential, people throughout the world are looking at him. In terms of New York politics, he's allied at points with the socialists, but his supporters are kind of the more dominant group within labor politics in New York, and I think certainly outside of it as well. So he is very influential.

How he fits ideologically — he is someone who is drawing on classical liberal ideas. He is citing Adam Smith and Ricardo, thinking about questions of economic efficiency. Philosophically, he's rooted in kind of a Lockean liberalism that says I own what I make — but no one made land. Land is a gift of God, and therefore its distribution is fundamentally a political issue. And he would argue that it belongs collectively to people, to all people. Because when a house goes up in value, when gentrification happens and home prices go through the roof, that's not because I've necessarily done anything in particular to my house — it's because the community as a whole has changed and improved. So he's tying the value of land, the production of land value, to the growth and development of the community more broadly. And from a Lockean liberal perspective, in which you deserve what you make, the community deserves the value of the land — this is owed to it as a matter of moral right. So he is, in that sense, a liberal. He is also very much rooted in themes of American populism and civic republicanism.

But there's also a utopianism here that connects him to socialism, and in some ways even to anarchism. He speculates that if you establish this confiscatory tax on land, as land values go up, eventually the public will have more and more resources to build libraries and universities, and sponsor education and learning, and basic necessities. And as this happens, the necessity for a government that will kind of coerce people into doing the right thing will decline. And so legal repression, warfare, all those things will go by the wayside. So he does ultimately imagine, in the longer run, a society that combines the virtues of small government, almost anarchism, with socialism.

Jumping ahead a couple of decades, during World War One, one of his close friends — the person who is sort of the leading writer for the single tax movement through the Progressive Era, Louis Post — Louis Post is by World War One the assistant secretary of labor. And this is the height of the Red Scare, and so the Justice Department begins deporting thousands of immigrants for having kind of radical, scary ideas — for being communists, for being anarchists. And Louis Post, he cancels most of those, or at least 1,500 of them — the cases fall under his purview. He says a lot of them were tried unjustly. This becomes very controversial, and he's called to Congress to testify about having let these radicals loose on the country. And he says: as a Georgist, I do believe in a lot of what they say. I am an individualist, and I am a socialist.

I think that they are wrong, and not understanding the proper spheres for these two ideas — that there are places where individualism is appropriate, and there are places where socialism is appropriate, and Georgism has pretty clear boundaries for where those two spheres should be. But he openly talks about how these ideas are part of the progress of society. And so even though Georgism is very much within the mainstream of American politics, drawing on liberalism and republicanism, there is also a utopianism there that kind of develops an affinity with these more radical philosophies.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:16:04]**
Yeah, I mean, that's certainly — to pick up on my understanding of what you've been saying here, something that I really find attractive about Georgism is the way that it marries this moral economy with technical economics. Right? You talked about how there's a lot of crankery out there then; there's a lot of crankery out there now — people who will promise you all kinds of things, and it all just seems kind of gauzy.

And Georgism seems to start from this kind of sharp distinction between profits earned from real production and profits earned from mere scarcity, or mere control of some kind of scarce resource. And it says it's not against profits in general. It says, yeah, if you have worked hard, if you've labored, if you've built something that other people want, and you made a ton of money off of it — that's great, right? That's the kind of capitalism that we want to have. But on the other hand, if you're making money just from squatting on some inherently scarce resource like land, that you haven't done anything with — you inherited it, or you got it by luck, or whatever, but you haven't actually done any labor to earn that return — then you don't actually deserve that.

And we can make that distinction between the kind of labor that you did, the kind of profit that you deserve, and the kind that you don't — not in moral terms, not in terms of whether we like you, or whether you're from some favored group, or whether we think it's socially beneficial on the whole that such-and-such things are happening — but in technical economic terms. In terms of these concepts, like you say, from classical economics, from Ricardo — the concept of rent, which has its own kind of definition. So I think that, to me anyways, is one of the real attractions of Georgism.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:18:15]**
Sorry, that's not a question — it's just kind of an invitation. *(laughs)*

**Christopher England [00:18:18]**
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's a good point. So I think there are elements of George that are applicable, that resonate, because he was writing in the United States in the 19th century — he was writing in a liberal democratic society, and those values were part of his philosophy. And he was an institutionalist. He saw changes as often gradual and forming out of existing institutions. He was not someone like Fourier, who was in France trying to imagine a totally different society and parsing out exactly how many men and women should be in each phalanx, and who should be administering the orgies, and things like that. No — George was a newspaper man who was very much part and parcel of recognizably modern American politics, and that sort of shows. He got his start within American politics as a newspaper man, as someone who was influential in San Francisco politics, as opposed to starting out as a theorist who is writing from a place of pure abstraction.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:20:05]**
So I think that's interesting, and it kind of leads me to my next question, which is: how much of a political movement was Georgism? Right? We talked about — okay, there's Henry George, there's a book, he ran for some offices. How much of an actual mass political movement was it, in America and around the world?

**Christopher England [00:20:42]**
You know, that's a good question. In my book, I focus more on kind of the leaders of the movement — the people who are orchestrating campaigns, people who enter into mainstream American politics as politicians, as writers, as propagandists. And the relationship between these ideas and the public — it's complicated. They're oftentimes watering down Georgist ideas in various ways to make them more broadly applicable. And sometimes they're running for office quite successfully. Georgism becomes important in American urban politics — mayors like Tom Johnson in Cleveland run on these ideas, and they win. But I think a large part of what they're really running on is increasing taxes on the rich and increasing social services, and people appreciate the ways in which they now have paved roads and lights and sewer systems. How much of the appeal is ideological versus purely practical — that these are people who have begun to build something like a modern American government that performs public functions, and begun to do it by taxing wealth — that's hard to say.

But I will say there are some points where I feel like I was able to see a little bit of the ways in which the average person looks at these issues, to see really the public response — which can be more difficult during this time. There's no Twitter; you can't just go out and see what everyone's saying. Most people aren't writing that much, and they don't leave that many records. But when I was looking at land value taxation in Vancouver, I found plenty of public hearings in which everyday citizens went out to talk about the question of land value taxation there.

Vancouver was famously called the first single tax city in North America — which is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it did establish taxation principles based off of Henry George's ideas. And what I saw was that a lot of people spoke approvingly of Henry George, but more generally, there seemed to be a pretty broad belief that one core principle of Georgism was right: the idea that land values were created by the community was clear in a rapidly developing city. People saw this. They thought it was wrong that people were holding on to land and not using it when other people needed it, and they saw that the value of this land had been created by the community, and so therefore the community deserved it. And I think that basic kind of axiom — the community deserves the value of the land — at various places and times proved to be quite persuasive.

How many of those people had read all of *Progress and Poverty*, and understood everything he had to say about the fall of the Roman Republic into kind of the empire — that's hard to say. But I think that to some extent, some of the more basic ideas of Henry George became popular wisdom, at least in certain communities. So I would say that by the 1910s, some form of disproportionate tax on land became pretty ingrained in a lot of urban municipalities. The historian Daniel London has also written about this specifically in New York, and how Lawson Purdy, who is leading tax assessment in New York in the 1910s, is a Georgist — a close friend of George — and these ideas are very much tied into New York City's progress during that time period, or its development.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:24:41]**
Okay. So I mean, I guess, given all that — why don't we have a land value tax? We have a land value tax in a couple places — I can't remember where they are. There's a couple jurisdictions in America that have tried it. Mostly America does not have a land value tax, right? We have property taxes, but we don't have land value taxes. The Georgist movement might have been big in the 19th century, but it doesn't really seem to exist at all in the 20th century. What happened? Why does the movement fail?

**Christopher England [00:25:22]**
Um, one of the big issues is that a lot of the fundamental issues that George was addressing just ceased to be relevant shortly thereafter. Because then you have, by the 1920s, the rise of the car, and with the rise of the car you have the rise of the suburb. And these concerns about urban rent cease to be as relevant when people start getting their own homes — they stop being supportive of taxing property. In the '20s and '30s you start to see major backlash against property taxes. And so I think for a long time the idea of land being kind of a vital axis for inequality just seemed kind of obscure, and almost inexplicable. If you look at the way in which mid-20th-century historians wrote about Henry George, they clearly just don't understand it at all. Land is cheap — it doesn't make sense to them. They only see land in purely agricultural terms. So I think that's an issue.

I mean, there are issues with: how do you actually assess the value of land? Can you accurately assess the value of land absent the value of the home itself? There are systems that are developed to do that — places like Denmark implement land value taxation consistently for decades and decades and decades. But sometimes it can be an obstacle. In England — in the UK — they pass a land value tax, but ultimately it doesn't have the infrastructure to do a national valuation; that kind of gets stalled with World War One and just never happens. So there are kind of logistical, technical hurdles that can make it difficult to start this sort of system from scratch as well. But I think more foundationally, it's just seen as maybe not that relevant for a long time.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:28:31]**
Okay, that's interesting. I mean, I can certainly see those kinds of arguments for why the concern with land value fades away. You also talk a little bit, though, about how Georgist DNA remains in the progressive movement. Is that right? Or, what kind of lasting impact does Georgism have after the concern with a single tax starts to fade away?

**Christopher England [00:29:22]**
So I would say Georgism remains pretty vital well through the 1910s. There are a lot of Georgists in Wilson's administration — I think in large part because he's trying to win over cities, which are traditionally kind of Republican-oriented, but which have leaned Democratic under single tax mayors like Tom Johnson. By the 1930s, Georgism has become much more diffuse. A lot of Georgists are wondering whether or not their ideas are still as relevant.

But New Dealers do grow up in a world in which Georgism is important. They look up to many of these people, like Tom Johnson, when they're kids. And very few of them are strict, doctrinaire Georgists, but if you do look at the ways in which they address the Great Depression, they do tend to echo some of the same sort of themes and concerns. So, great example: Great Depression — people were out of work, industries are collapsing, but the government never purchases factories, right? It never tries to begin publicly owned industrial labor. But what does it do? It develops a full leasehold system for the public domain, where the government owns and leases land in much the same way that Georgists had long argued for. It develops public water power with the TVA project, which had actually been initiated by Georgists during World War One. It builds government-owned towns to combat landlordism — in the words of Rexford Tugwell — over 100, or about 100, government-owned towns are constructed during the New Deal.

So well through the New Deal, there is still a sense that land and natural monopolies are an important axis for — if not necessarily still a vital axis for inequality, at least the factors most subject to public ownership. That they are the things that are clearly public in nature. And maybe it's not always a good idea for the government to be running stores, but it is fine for the government to be owning monopolies and owning land — these are things that are inherently public in nature.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:31:52]**
Yeah, that's an interesting way of framing it, right? The kind of distinction that says, well, there's a certain kind of profit and labor and individual initiative that the government doesn't really have much business in — like you say, the government shouldn't necessarily be running your local retailer. The government runs one of my local retailers, actually — the PA Wine and Spirits. They're not — yeah, it's not great, I gotta say.

**Christopher England [00:32:15]**
Oh, yeah.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:32:22]**
I mean, it's not like we're talking about some Soviet situation where the shelves are bare — yeah, there's booze on the shelves. But having lived in a wide variety of places, I would not say that PA Wine and Spirits provides great service to the public.

**Christopher England [00:32:40]**
Virginia also has government-owned liquor stores, and they were fine — but there is, I think, less selection than in many private stores.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:32:50]**
Yeah. But — I don't want to spend a whole episode talking about that particular issue. But just to get on that — so there's this distinction, right? There are certain aspects of the private market where we say the government really shouldn't be involved in that, but there are other things where it's like, yeah, you really do need some kind of government intervention, government ownership, government regulation. And that's the thing that George was interested in, right? Monopolies, rents — certain kinds of natural monopolies, as economists will call them today, whether that's a matter of land or natural resources or certain kinds of market structures that just tend towards monopolization. But the particular issue of land, and especially housing, kind of falls off the radar as more and more Americans get bought into the housing market through suburbanization. That's the compelling story, I guess.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:33:54]**
My other question is: what about the Marxists? Right? You frame it as if, back in the 19th century, there's socialism, there's anarchism, there's Georgism. Later on there's progressivism — there's all these competing movements. Anarchism — I mean, there are still anarchists out there, but they are mostly internet creatures these days, right? But Marxism has a much longer, much more sustained life than Georgism does in the 20th century. And I'm curious why you think that is. Why does that movement succeed where Georgism, you know, has some influence but fades away in other essential respects?

**Christopher England [00:34:34]**
I do think that largely boils down to the Russian Revolution. I mean, George was certainly more influential in the United States through that time period. Yeah, I do think it's the Russian Revolution that really catapults Marxism into becoming kind of the obvious alternative to capitalism. I'm not sure that that is the trajectory that it was on, or that it would have been the trajectory absent sort of historically contingent circumstances.

I mean, certainly, if you're looking from the perspective of explanatory power, Marxism doesn't hold up. I don't think that his class analysis has ever been predictive of kind of his own movement. To the extent that Marxism takes root in the real world, it's largely through the form of various peasant uprisings that are outside of the scope of the sort of industrial conflict that he anticipated would lay the foundation for socialism. So I don't see it as necessarily anything inherent in his ideas or his writing — which is not particularly transparent or good. No, I think it's mostly historically contingent circumstances.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:36:31]**
I'm sorry, Marxists, but I do think that that's quite plausible, right? I mean, once Lenin had pulled it off, right — the October Revolution — and they're like, "Look, we're actually in charge now. We did beat the Whites, that very much did happen. We are going to implement all of these socialist ideals." At that point, it became very hard to argue with the example of having actually done it, right? And there were other branches of Marxism, or other forms of socialism, that were more reformist or more liberal — you can talk about Eduard Bernstein — and people are like, why would I choose low-fat socialism when I can get the real deal in the form of Marxist-Leninism, or later Marxist-Leninist-Maoism, or whatever, which has this real revolutionary potential — or so it seemed at the time.

**Christopher England [00:37:42]**
I mean, you also see this in relation to some Georgists, like Lincoln Steffens, who is a journalist, a muckraker, very much associated with Georgists through the Progressive Era. But in World War One, he goes to Russia, and he sees the Russian Revolution, and he's won over. He says, this is the future — clearly they have predicted the future in a way in which we failed to do. Look, this is actually happening. And so he becomes a Marxist instead. Is it because he thought that Marxism was morally more just? No — he actually disagreed with that. He felt as if Georgism still had kind of the better logical, philosophical arguments, but in practice Marxism was the system that had triumphed. And so that gave a philosophy which always promised a sort of historical inevitability the authority of being a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:38:47]**
Yeah, I mean, that ideological struggle in many ways comes to define the 20th century. The Soviets lose that particular ideological struggle. And what's interesting to me now is that we are kind of seeing a return, both of democratic socialism — which kind of got evaporated between these two poles during the Cold War, right? Speaking of the mayor of New York City — we have a democratic socialist mayor of New York City, and he seems pretty committed to both sides of that, right? He's not trying to be the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin of New York — of Brooklyn, or whatever. Sorry, just the thought of it is just so ridiculous. He's a market socialist, a democratic socialist — you can call it all different kinds of things — but a moderate socialist, right?

And we are also, as I talked about a little bit in the introduction, seeing a resurgence of Georgist thought. We don't have any Georgist mayors yet, but the ideas are out there — they are popular with at least some people in the movement. So I'm curious why you think that is. Why are we seeing this return of these older ideals that seemed like they had been totally discredited during the 20th century?

**Christopher England [00:40:22]**
Well, I think there's certainly a sense that something is awry in the economy. And sometimes it seems to defy explanation, because I think there are kind of metrics by which we have been economically successful, but there's a sense of still something very fundamentally wrong. I do think one of the reasons why George has made a comeback in recent years — certainly maybe the most fundamental reason — is because of housing prices. Not only are they high — not only do they constitute kind of a loss of real spending power — but they really add to a sense of precarity.

I think there's a sense in George — they weren't that far away from the frontier — that it is possible, if you have access to land, to make it. You don't really need any real income in a modern sense to survive if you have at least access to land. There aren't that many people nowadays who I think could actually make it on a homestead. But really fundamentally, land — a place to sleep — is kind of a vital necessity, one of the greatest necessities. And if it is scarce or hard to come by, that certainly creates a sense that even in potentially a high-income situation, your conditions are not necessarily entirely stable — that you're potentially one catastrophe away from not having a place to sleep at night. And so I think that creates a sense of insecurity, even amidst some markers of economic success, and a sense that people aren't getting ahead, despite what could be perceived as economic progress. So I think that's a reason why Georgism, at least, has become influential.

And I think Marxists are in some ways appealing to the same issues. Mamdani — he's campaigning on cost of living, and he's particularly focused on sort of foodstuffs and groceries. But what's the real reason why groceries are so expensive in New York? Because it's hard to find a place that's affordable to operate a business. Grocery prices are ultimately largely, I think, downstream of the high cost of land. I think most cost of living issues — not all, but most of them — are downstream of scarce access to space, or scarce access to resources, like oil. And so I think Georgism is very clearly oriented towards many of the fundamental reasons why people feel insecure during this moment. But Marxism is, I think, more popularly known — it has obtained a greater sense of historical legitimacy, and so it's an easier ideology to turn to, even when sometimes it doesn't very accurately diagnose many of the issues that people are dealing with.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:44:21]**
Okay, so — I don't want to beat up on Marxism anymore. I kind of want to ask you about a different ideological competitor, which these days they call abundance liberalism, right? Abundance liberalism looks, for example, at the New York City housing crisis and says, well, the problem isn't land and rents and so forth. The problem is that we've made it illegal to build housing in New York City, right? It is an artificial scarcity that's been imposed through regulation, rather than through any kind of natural scarcity.

I mean — we could talk about this for a long time; we have on previous episodes of the podcast — but there are height limits, and there are explicit limits in terms of zoning, and there are kinds of construction limits that we impose that functionally mean you really can't build very much on this plot of land. And even if you could, well, you have to go through this whole discretionary review process — you have to appeal to this zoning board, and then this piece of the city council, and they're going to want a little bite, and even then your neighbors might choose to sue you through some other legal process. So we've just created all these restrictions that don't really do anything except prevent us from building more housing. And so, who cares about a land value tax? What we need to do is upzoning. And I'm curious what you think about that kind of perspective.

**Christopher England [00:46:02]**
Yeah, I think George would be favorable to many of the ideas of abundance. First of all, one of the primary intellectual engagements that he has is a critique of Malthus. Really, what he is arguing foundationally is that poverty is not a natural result of scarcity — it's a result of the ways in which the monopolization of scarcity, or scarce resources, redounds to some people as compared to all of them. So he does believe that economic progress is good, and that we can have abundance if we just open up access to resources.

I would also say that his movement was usually tied to a view of unencumbered executive power. They believe the government ought to be able to do things. Nineteenth-century America is a nation of parties and courts — the courts really dominate American politics, and procedure, which is usually favorable to property, holds back progress. And so Georgists, like really a lot of progressive and New Deal-era reformers, believe in getting the courts out of things, and allowing government to just do stuff without so much procedure. So I think in those ways they're resonant.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:47:20]**
Right.

**Christopher England [00:47:22]**
George also believes in developing housing. One of the key ideas that justifies land value taxes is that it will encourage the full and best usage of land — that if you're holding land out of operation, you'll stop doing that if you have to pay for that space, and this will allow other people to use it towards its best usage.

Now, do I think that eliminating zoning would be able to deal fundamentally with all these issues around housing prices? That's hard for me to say. I don't know. I think that certainly a very high portion of contemporary housing prices do stem from artificial scarcity. But at the same time, I think it's also true that there is kind of inertia in urban space. I mean, it's already built up, it's already developed. How much are we actually tearing down what already exists? Where is the space to redevelop? I think it is not a totally inelastic good in the ways in which maybe George might have thought about space — I'm not even sure he thought about it that way, but maybe — but it is still a kind of inelastic good. And I think even if you remove all of the regulations, that doesn't mean that urban land suddenly loses all value. I think even in places where you have removed all zoning regulations, that's not exactly the case.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:49:37]**
Yeah, I mean, to me, I would almost bring it back to the idea — there's a way to frame Georgism in these very technical economic terms: oh man, the land value tax, it's so efficient, right? It doesn't get passed on to consumers. Land values are a great kind of wealth tax, because you can't run away with them — they're not like some piece of art that you can put on your boat and travel around with. They're right there; you can't transport them very easily. It has these nice incentive effects that you talked about, to develop it to the most productive and highest use. So there are all these technical economic arguments.

But there's also the moral economy of it, right? That pairs that with this other sense of, yeah, you should be able to work and labor and profit, and there's a sharp distinction between these places where the government should be stepping in and should be regulating stuff for the benefit of the community, and this other arena where it's like, no — in the old sense, in the old line, that's your free labor.

And to me, I would apply that to the housing situation and say, well, actually, some would say the community should not be doing this kind of exclusionary zoning. We should be talking about zoning in terms of actual pollution, right? If you're actually creating a public nuisance, if you're impinging on other people's property, et cetera, et cetera. But the community doesn't actually have that much business saying, well, you can't build an apartment building right there. That should be the space for you to deploy your productive labor in the ways that you want to. So I don't actually see that much conflict between the kinds of changes, the kinds of policies that the abundance libs are talking about, and the kind of moral economy that I see in Henry George.

**Christopher England [00:51:47]**
Yeah, zoning isn't necessarily an issue that George would have been engaging with during his time period.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:51:55]**
No, no, of course not.

**Christopher England [00:52:00]**
But perhaps one of the closer analogies is tenements. There is legislation offered in New York to regulate tenements, and he says no — we can't just regulate this housing out of existence for poor people. That's not better than offering them substandard housing. The solution isn't to eliminate this housing, or regulate it so that it doesn't exist. It's to open up resources — encourage a kind of more vibrant, open economic system by using land value taxes to cut down on speculation. And so if he was opposed to tenement housing restrictions, he's probably not going to have supported zoning.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:52:54]**
I mean, I think we see a similar question recur with the question about SROs, where there was this argument — a single room occupancy is a kind of apartment building where you rent out your own room, and there's a communal kitchen and a communal bathroom. They're very cheap, is the important part, because you're just not buying a lot of space here. And as a result, they were mostly occupied by very poor people, and they weren't very hygienic or sanitary — they didn't have great conditions. And so reformers said, we've got to ban these things, right? We've got to make it so you can only build nice, high-quality housing. But the people who lived in SROs mostly couldn't afford nice, high-quality housing. And so we banned SROs, and we got tent cities instead. So I think there's something to that argument.

**Christopher England [00:54:02]**
Yeah, I think one could say that because Georgism entails a belief in the social ownership of land, that could also entail kind of justifying land use restrictions that benefit nature or the community. But I don't think Georgists would generally have favored that type of legislation — not legislation that would engender scarcity. Their whole idea is to do more, make more, encourage growth and development.

I was recently reading Jacob Anbinder's dissertation on the development of housing restrictions in the US in the '60s and '70s, and a lot of that comes from, I think he would say, a very essentially Malthusian position: that we have too many people for our resources, and we need to limit that. Limiting the amount of housing will limit the growth of population — you can't have as many babies, you're going to discourage immigration, you're going to discourage migration to places like California specifically. Whereas I think social democratic liberals were, in his account, pretty critical of this. He cites Bayard Rustin, the civil rights activist, arguing that these ideas of no growth are persuasive to people who already have the things that they need — to elite, upper-middle-class liberals — but that if this becomes the norm for liberals, then eventually liberalism will kind of alienate working people and will regulate itself out of existence. Which appears increasingly to be the case.

Of course, foundationally, the thing that George was arguing against was Malthusianism, right? The idea that we need to limit growth, we need to limit population, because our resources are all going to be exhausted. And so I think the overlap is not always perfect, but philosophically George tends to have, I think, a lot of similarities with abundance liberalism.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:56:55]**
Okay, so — there is one thing. This might feel like a little bit of a swerve, but I don't think it is. It's something you brought up over email, which is the relation between Georgism and AI, which I think raises a lot of these kind of familiar questions. We are promised, anyways, that this is a revolutionary leap in technology. It's going to transform the world, it's going to produce all of this tremendous abundance of something or other. But also people are afraid, right? They feel like — it's not for me, it's for my boss, right? It's for the billionaires; they're getting rich off of this, but it's not working for me. There seems to be this tremendous fear that this kind of radical technological change is only going to serve the elites, and not the people in general. And so I'm curious how you would bring a Georgist lens to this kind of question.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:58:00]**
Yeah, George did not write about AI. Just a disclaimer.

**Christopher England [00:58:22]**
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. It's obviously kind of outside of the scope of what George personally engaged with. But I do think that there are interesting ways in which he talks about and considers similar issues. He does envision an age in which eventually labor becomes obsolete — he says one day in the future we might have technological progress that will make it so that we don't really need to work. And what will that mean for us? Will we become lazy and useless? And his argument is, I think, one, that people don't just exist to preserve their material goods. They also have ideals — they have things that they believe in, things they want to be — and they want to engender respect, and a sort of belief within the communities to which they belong. He says people will fight and die for ribbons; they'll participate in the Olympics for olive branches. It's not just about material goods. It's about having a community that one feels important in and contributing to, and that can motivate people to create great things, do great things.

But he also believes that it is within the purview of the public to cultivate good things, to encourage education. He exists in a 19th-century America in which it is still very common to see the republic as both very vital, but also very fragile, and very much dependent upon a public which is educated. Nineteenth-century Americans — many of them would regard the common school as maybe, next to the Constitution, the most foundational institution the nation has. And so I think he envisioned that as we approach a period of kind of obsolescence of human labor, public resources would expand — the value of land and resources would grow, tax collection would grow, and the state would support positive, constructive values.

But he also argued that our values under scarcity are warped and perverted. He argues that when we feel precarious, when we don't trust in our economic security, we tend to valorize wealth, and we tend to look up to the people who are wealthy, and we tend to want to emulate them — even though the ways they got to the places where they are are often corrupt and unsavory. Parts of the passages of *Progress and Poverty* seem very resonant with our modern existence, where we kind of idealize entrepreneurs who seem maybe a little bit sociopathic — whereas during times of greater affluence or comfort or security, during mid-century America, we had looked up to artists and intellectuals and rock stars and things like that. Now we look up to business people.

Long story short, I think that ultimately he sees progress as being dependent upon a liberal democratic republic, but he also sees that republic as being rooted in a society that will cultivate education and culture and higher values, and that will take public goods and use them to promote those values. Whereas I think what we currently see with AI is that even though it potentially infringes on a lot of copyrights, and potentially appropriates a lot of other people's property to expand corporate profits — what we've seen now with AI is what could be a technology that is socially beneficial only benefiting the people who own it, maybe engaging in theft, but also, I think very foundationally, undermining confidence that we as a society could or should continue to cultivate kind of humanistic values. There's a sense that maybe now we should just rely upon the machine to think for us. And Sam Altman has, I think, said this more or less explicitly — that eventually intelligence will be a utility that we turn to them to access. That it's no longer something that is within our purview as humans — something that we instead turn to the business to lend us.

And I think, fundamentally, in summation, George would see it as important that these goods be appropriated for the public — to be used to sponsor and encourage and cultivate a faith in the continued relevancy of our own intelligence and human values. Otherwise, I think he would say that we would sort of lose the kind of virtue and intelligence necessary to be a self-governing people.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:04:28]**
Okay. We probably could talk a lot more about AI, but we are coming up on the end of our hour here, and I think that is a good note to end on. So, Chris, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

**Christopher England [01:04:40]**
Thanks for having me.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:04:41]**
Yeah. And to all you out there listening — if you are curious what this beautiful mug that I've been sipping from this whole time is, it's a product of someone's labor, anyways, and you can spend the product of your labor to buy it at the Liberal Currents merch store. If you need a mug or a bag or a T-shirt, or anything else to drink coffee out of, or otherwise express your support for Liberal Currents — go on and check out the Liberal Currents merch store, link in the description.