by Harold Kyriazi, PhD, Pittsburgh, PA
(The following presentation was made at the Council
of Georgist Organizations conference Sat., Sept. 1, 2001,
in Pittsburgh, PA. Dr. Kyriazi is the author of
"Libertarian Party at Sea on Land," available from the
Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, www.schalkenbach.org/books,
for $12 (137 pp., year 2000).)
Libertarians are really not very different from
most people except that they tend to be true to some basic
principles. However, they haven't thought through their
principles to the level of land. I see a philosophical
relationship and practical relationship between Georgism
and libertarianism. These two movements can help each
other and work in a synergistic fashion.
In my book in the very first chapter I talk about
three basic principles, and you can start with the right to
life. Because we have the right to life, we have the right
to three dimensional space in which to exist, and we have
the right to land on which to live and from which to make a
living.
The dictionary definition of libertarian is someone
who believes in freedom of thought and freedom of action.
We are not going to concern ourselves today with freedom of
thought. It is probably a little bit outdated, back to the
time when religion was very authoritarian and oppressive.
At that time the whole freedom of thought movement was a
big deal.
We are going to focus on freedom of action. It is
useful to break up the universe into three different
categories. Us, fellow citizens, sentient beings. The
second category is 3-dimensional space. A third category
is matter, that is, the stuff of the universe besides us.
Freedom of action can be thought of as freedom to interact
with all three of these categories. If you and I interact
with each other, that is called freedom of association. If
we interact with 3-dimensional space by moving around, we
call that the right to travel and we travel over public
right of ways. That is an important part of freedom, that
we have public right of ways.
The third category is interacting with matter. Here
on earth we think of that as using the earth. This is
where Georgism falls out of Libertarian philosophy. We
believe in freedom of action, and part of that is the right
to interact with the earth. That is where I see Georgism
fitting, and of course there is the Georgist remedy of
community collection of ground rent. We geo-libertarians
really must avoid the word "tax" when we talk to
libertarians. That is something the government levies with
no real firm ties with what they are providing. Rent is
something where you get what you pay for.
From this interaction of us with matter we generate
the fourth category of things in the universe, and that is
our stuff. We generate private property. Libertarians
tend to get confused on this issue or argumentative because
they think that land should be considered private property.
They don't understand that land and all the other raw
matter in the universe is something we all have a right to
interact with. When we do that and create things that we
all need to live, we create tools, that is what we really
own, and that becomes part of us.
It is important to understand that there is a labor
component to genuine property, and this goes back to John
Locke and the labor based theory of property. This is not
to be confused with Marx's labor theory of value.
The point here is that Georgism is a part of
Libertarian philosophy.
The second point that I would like to make for the
Georgists here is that the Libertarian Party and the
libertarian movement are growing. This is not to say that
we shouldn't also be working with others. It is not either
or. There are a lot of people that we can work with. The
Libertarian Party is growing. Right now we have over
30,000 dues paying members. From this we are able to
support a staff of a dozen full time workers at the
national office in Washington, DC.
One of our fortes is that the libertarian movement
is growing at the local level. J.R. Graham is working in
the San Diego area and making strides over there. The
Pittsburgh group has been active for 10-11 years now.
Libertarians are starting to run for office. A certain
percent of those Libertarians are going to be persuadable
or fairly easily persuadable that Georgism is a part of
libertarian philosophy, that heretofore they have not
really been true libertarians if they have been ignoring
this important aspect of freedom.
Here in Pittsburgh, Dan Sullivan was the first one
to start out in the early 1990s, and through his efforts of
coming to our Libertarian Party meetings, he got some of us
to go out and talk to property owners about how they would
benefit from the shift of taxes off buildings and onto
land. I listened to Dan and I thought, "Where is this
coming from, what does the property tax have to do with
Libertarianism?" It didn't sink in. But I think by
talking about the principles of libertarianism, it can
eventually sink in. Here in Pittsburgh, we went from one,
Dan Sullivan, to about seven Georgist Libertarians.
Libertarians take principles very seriously. We
call ourselves the Party of Principle. In the year 2000 we
had over 1400 candidates nation-wide. Over half of the
races for US House of Representatives were contested by
Libertarians. In 1998, over 850 candidates were running.
The point is we can reach a good percentage of
libertarians, many of whom will run for office.
I ran for office a couple of times with land value
tax as a major part of my platform. We are running and
informing people about it. Ron Rosenberger ran for State
Senate the same year that I ran, and the land value tax was
also part of his platform. It is not really important that
Libertarians win office any time soon, but we are running,
and we are informing people about the land value tax. For
example, when I ran for the City Council here in Pittsburgh
in 1995, the man who won, Sala Udin became a supporter of
land value tax. He shared several forums with me during the candidacy where I talked about
it. Maybe he picked some of it up, or maybe Josh Vincent's
work with him and other members of the City Council had
more to do with it than me. A lot of times, the key is
hearing it repeatedly from a lot of different people. The
Libertarian Party represents an ideal resource.
I didn't start out to write a book; I was just
collecting quotations on the subject from classical
liberalism. But it grew into a book, and with the help of
Mark Sullivan and Dr. Robert Andelson, the Robert
Schalkenbach Foundation did publish it. Initially I didn't
have any aims like having other libertarians advancing
Georgism in mind, but if we do have hundreds of Libertarian
candidates eventually running on the land value tax theme,
we are going to let the cat out of the bag. I think the
cat will be out for good if we keep up the level of
understanding and education.
Maybe why the Georgist movement faltered was
because it wasn't built on a completely sound philosophical
basis. Libertarians are very much grounded
philosophically. Georgism is part of the overall
libertarian philosophy, and by having us Georgist
libertarians reach out to our fellow libertarians, maybe we
can have them carry the Georgist movement further than it
has been carried.
I think when Georgism becomes part of a Libertarian
campaign it really helps the candidate "sell" the
philosophy more than just plain libertarianism. I had been
unable to talk to working people on a meaningful level.
All the run-of-the-mill Libertarian can say is, well, we
want to get government out of your pocketbook. The working
man really feels he is being oppressed, and now I realize
he is being oppressed. He is not perhaps being oppressed
by the people he thinks he is being oppressed by; he
doesn't see that the real villain in this case is the
landlord as landlord. It really allows a Libertarian to
make a much more effective campaign if he can say, "Yes, I
understand you are having to struggle hard to survive. "
But government isn't the only problem, as most libertarians
think. Working people tend to think of government as their
friend and someone they need to help them.
Another way Georgism can help a Libertarian
campaign is by saying we won't need big government as much
when we have community collection of ground rent. If we
institute Land Value Taxation it will free up land by
ending the incentive for speculation in land. That will
allow more efficient creation of wealth. We will have more
competition for labor, and with more competition for labor
we will have higher wages. That is where the traditional
Libertarian element comes in -- you will be able to keep
all your wages. How will we pay for government? Well,
that will come out of land rent that we collect. Georgism
can help Libertarians run more effective campaigns.
To conclude, I think that Georgism and
libertarianism are intimately related, in that Georgism
derives from libertarian philosophy. I know the Georgist
libertarians at this conference will be trying to influence
our fellow libertarians to become fully libertarian and
hopefully over the next few years will let the cat out of
the bag and become part of a large movement to educate the
masses. I agree with Henry George that we won't get
fundamental change unless and until the masses understand.
Dr. Kyriazi is a Research Associate at the
University of Pittsburgh. He may be emailed at
hkyriazi@lycos.com
GEO-LIBERTARIANS ATTENDED NATIONAL
LIBERTARIAN PARTY CONFERENCE
Harold Kyriazi (Pittsburgh), Todd Altman (Mississippi),
Julian Heicklen, and Dan Sullivan (Pittsburgh) attended the
Libertarian Party National Convention held in Indianapolis
the week-end of July 6-7, 2002. The four are wearing "They think
they own the earth" buttons which were good conversation pieces.
Sullivan distributed his 16 page essay, "Common
Rights vs. Collective Rights", which is posted on line at
http://geolib.com/Sullivan.dan/commonrights.html. The
essay booklet is self-published by Dan Sullivan, email
pimann@pobox.com, or phone 412-OUR-MONEy. Sullivan is the
founder of the Geolibertarian Society and a past chair of
the Libertarian Party of Allegheny County, PA.
According to news accounts, the Libertarian Party
was founded in 1971 in Colorado by David Nolan. Party
founders were disenchanted over the Viet Nam war and Pres.
Nixon's wage and price controls. The Libertarian Party is
a party of people who believe in reasoning from a base of
self-consistent principles. Notable Libertarians were
Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Jay Nock, and Frank
Chodorov.