What George REALLY was railing against was absentee ownership. Veblen made this clear in his book of that title. Now that two-thirds of Americans own their own homes -- on credit -- should they be taxed fully on the land? Or as I -- and also Ed Dodson -- have suggested, should there be a "basic allotment" that is untaxed, in order to lower the cost of living?
I have suggested to Andy Mazzone that he join me in calling ourselves post-Veblen economists. I prefer this to my UMKC colleagues' post-Keynesianism. And inasmuch as Veblen wrote nearly half a century afterMarx, it is preferable to post-Marxist, with all the baggage that moniker would entail.
George's fatal failing -- and what cripples his attempt to create an overall economic theory out of his head in Progress and Poverty -- is his failure to understand money, credit, debt, interest and the financialization of economies. His theory of interest -- as Bà ¶hm-Bawerk calls it, a naà ¯ve productivity theory -- is entirely non-monetary, and shows his lack of understanding Price Theory 101, or the relationship between cost of production, price and value. This makes his book best suitable for the wastebasket as far as modern readers are concerned.
His blind spot has crippled his followers into imagining that landlords end up with today's rent -- not the bankers as "Rent is for paying interest." So they miss the point that the major defenders of the real estate interests are the banks, who sit on the landlord's shoulders so to speak (or if you prefer, lurk in the landlord's intestines as a tapeworm to extract the nourishment).
This is what I meant when I characterized George as pro-rentier. Today's dominant rentiers are bankers and bondholders, that is, financial investors. That is why Occupy Wall Street focused on Wall Street.
By missing the target and not understanding the economy -- largely by leaning on P&P as a crutch, instead of reading classical economics or George's more effective contemporaries who analyzed rent (Patten, Veblen, etc.), Georgists have fallen off the right wing of the political spectrum.
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