Review of the Book:
The Golden Key to Continuous Prosperity
Steven Cord
Ralph W. Conner
[Reprinted from
GroundSwell, March-April 2005]
How can an illustrious individual who was the third most famous
man in the United States during his lifetime (1839-1897) be
relegated to the obscure dustbins of neglectful history? By what
means can an economic prophet be written out of history when his
arguments and premises remain as valid today as 125 years ago?
Leo Tolstoy remarked, "The chief weapon against the
teachings of Henry George was that which is always used against
irrefutable and self-evident truths... the method of hushing up ...
people do not argue with the teachings of George, they simply do not
know it."
Henry George was a political economist who wrote his master-work,
Progress and Poverty, in 1879, over 125 years ago. He postulated
that there was a middle way of socio-economic truth between
socialism and capitalism, which could be achieved by capturing
wealth from the taxation of land values and distributing it to the
poor.
He believed that economic problems such as poverty and
depressions stemmed from too much wealth being tied up in land
ownership monopolies. He believed the solution was to remove taxes
from labor and capital, and to place a single tax on land values. He
advocated government ownership of railroads and telegraph utilities.
At the height of the Industrial Revolution, replete with robber
barons endowing major colleges and academic institutions, vested
interests conspired to keep Georgist philosophy dormant and
obscured. "The truth that I have tried to make clear will not
find easy acceptance," wrote George. "If that could be, it
would have been accepted long ago. If that could be, it would never
have been obscured."
Dr. Steven Cord has written a new book, The Golden Key to
Continuous Prosperity: How to Vote Yourself a Tax Break (Without any
reduction in Government Revenue), that attempts once more to break
the obscurity.
Cord is qualified for the task. He served as president of the
Henry George Foundation of America and also of the Center for the
Study of Economics, and is currently founder and executive director
of the Center for a Better Economy, in Columbia Maryland. An eminent
Georgist for over 54 years, Dr. Cord taught economics at Indiana
University of Pennsylvania for nearly 25 years and is the author of
Henry George: Dreamer or Realist?, published by the Robert
Schalkenbach Foundation. He helped persuade some 20 localities in
Pennsylvania to shift property taxes from improvements to land
values.
Cord provides volumes of empirical evidence to prove the efficacy
of land rent taxation (LRT) as a successful social strategy. An
appendix corroborates that LRT can eliminate the need for payroll,
social security withholding taxes, sales taxes and other taxes on
production, labor, and sales.
The evidence includes Web sites and summaries of 22 of the 237
empirical studies conducted by Dr. Cord and others. A list of
prominent endorsers of LRT includes Milton Friedman and other Nobel
Prize Winners for Economics. How the LRT would help a comprehensive
strategy for reducing the threat of terrorism (the single tax
strategy is invoked to eliminate terrorism by creating a viable
middle class in the Middle East!), aid farmers, and help fight
sprawl are judiciously reviewed. The obvious benefits of a
redeveloped Mexico, resulting in less illegal immigration and "job
gobbling" by aliens, are vetted.
Cord then eloquently reminds us of the urgency of implementation.
He enjoins all readers to feel the apocalyptic dangers of failure to
act to enact these policies to eliminate poverty and war or
terrorism in modern society.
Cord uses a question and answer section to allow skeptics to hear
their own concerns voiced and soundly answered. He concludes with a
well-documented appendix and an admonishment to contemporary
Georgists to talk to their neighbors and friends about tax reform.
Several things set this book apart from other efforts to promote
Georgism. First, Cord is careful to explain how the land rent tax
(LRT) is not the same as simply taxing the selling price of land.
George's goal, according to Cord, was "to reduce the private
collection of the annual rent of land to zero." The highest and
best use of land based upon an imputed rental value constrained only
by zoning is the correct valuation for the land rent tax formula.
Second, Cord attempts to distance himself and LRT from Henry
George in order to make it more credible with contemporary
policymakers. For example, he criticizes the standard Georgist
presumptions that land monopoly is the sole cause of depressions,
and that poverty is a major social pandemic, as George had predicted
it would be. Cord says we now know that depressions can have many
difference causes, so George was wrong for claiming depressions
result primarily from land speculation. Yet he then reports that
George advocated "counter-cyclical bank borrowing" as a
remedy for depressions, which suggests that George had a more
sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of fiscal and monetary
policy.
Progress does not necessarily breed poverty according to Cord,
who cites much evidence to the effect that "in the last 40
years U.S. poverty, according to government statistics, has
decreased." (page 74). But Cord and the experts he cites
overlook the stubborn and persistent pockets of poverty that exist
across the U.S. that show little or no signs of shrinking. Indeed,
they seem to be spreading as more people are unable to transition to
new jobs as corporations downsize and manufacturers outsource
production. More people are serving time in U.S. prisons than at any
other time in U.S. history. These are signs of a systemic problem
that George would not have ignored, or felt were irrelevant to the
LRT reform effort.
Cord also distances himself from George's embrace of natural law.
Natural law as a philosophy means the body of ethical imperatives
inherent in human beings and discovered by human reason. Natural law
opposes the notion that moral law is subjective, evolutionary,
pragmatic, or existential. It affirms that all humans share a set of
supposedly ethical norms and imperatives that they commonly perceive
without dependence on supernatural disclosure and illumination.
Natural law, according to Cord, is passe' and not respected by
modern economists. Policymakers want a more secular or empirical
justification for taking policy positions. But here, too, one
suspects that George was closer to the truth than Cord admits.
Conservatives have plainly gained ground politically in recent years
by identifying themselves with the re-emergence of these principles.
Cord's discourse on ethical and moral relativity is confusing and
inconsistent with the call for social justice that is at the very
core of Georgism and the reason for its great moral appeal today.
In his final trimming of the Georgist program, Cord says
Georgists ought to consider bribing landowners by paying them
compensation for their loss in a transition to LRT. He also says it
is probably more effective to target policymakers with ideas for
reform than it is to appeal to the general public.
I have deep reservations about both of these recommendations.
Compensating land owners to turn over land to government or common
ownership takes the greatest secular idea known to man and empties
it of its moral content and probably would greatly reduce its
economic effectiveness. It would be a half-measure that has none of
the messianic zeal of the true Georgist movement. Similarly, to
envision the LRT as a way to empower politicians to take lucid
constructive action to change our society is to turn George's theory
of social change on its head. The reality check comes when we
examine the "how to" aspects of implementing these lofty
goals: Who will ultimately be the implementers, common citizens or
politicians driven by enlightened citizens around the world?
I feel Henry George at heart was a populist who believed in
citizen action from the bottom up and not the top down. George said,
"The people must think, because the people alone can act!
Social reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting, by
complaints and denunciation, by the formation of parties, or the
makings of revolutions, but by the awakening of thought and the
progress of ideas. Until there be correct thought, there cannot be
right action, and when there is correct thought, right action will
follow."
A true how-to book of this nature must subscribe to the eternal
wisdom of the sage of Philadelphia.
This book does not achieve its overall objective of being a
primer on how to get a tax break. It contains many utopian options
for relief via federal or state actions, but no political plan for
arousing the various legislative bodies with a time-table for
reforms.
This book does succeed in collecting usable data for future
discussion groups, but Cord's strategy of debunking Henry George to
increase his credibility appears to be counter-productive. With all
of George's obscurity and academic detractors, it is curious why a
true follower would resort to such "outside the box thought"
when the basic premises of grass-roots advocacy have not been fully
deployed in action models or governance on an expansive basis.