Like many economists unable to agree with the benefits of “The Single Tax” (to replace a litany of others)—an appellation Henry George didn’t favour—it appears necessary for neo-classically trained economists to declaim the ideas of Henry George, because he’d criticised them and emerging ‘Austrian economists’.

Nevertheless, each of George’s works displays incredibly tight logic, and the lesser critiques of contradictions he described in the reasoning of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill in “The Science of Political Economy” barely diminishes the respect he shows for both these economists.

Heterodox economists often try to position Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as entirely new. In doing so, some adherents distance themselves from Henry George’s foundational work. For example, Australian economist Bill Mitchell explicitly attempts to create the disconnect.

Mitchell’s characterisation of Henry George operating strictly under a “taxes-must-raise-revenue-to-spend” paradigm mischaracterises George’s writings on sovereign money. George understood that governments spend money into existence before taxing it, as evidenced by his explicit endorsement of Abraham Lincoln’s Greenbacks.

What Henry George actually wrote about greenbacks

In Beneath the Silver Question (The Sterling Library, April 1894), George wrote: Greenbackism (so-called from the popular name of the direct issue of paper money made by the national government during the Civil War) was, in original and rational form, the recognition of the fact that this money needed no backing of deposited bonds or gold reserves, and was the cheapest and fairest form of money, giving to the greater part of the country what it had never had before, a uniform and convenient medium of exchange, and utilizing for the benefit of the whole people the enormous economies effected by the substitution of paper for the precious metals.

The day before the “Cross of Gold” election, Henry George publicly denied the need for gold or silver to back the currency

While George’s masterpiece, Progress and Poverty (1879), focuses primarily on land, wealth distribution and rent, he specifically used the word “inflation” when analysing industrial depressions and the business cycle. In Book V, Chapter I (“The Primary Cause of Recurring Paroxysms of Industrial Depressions”), George uses “inflation” to describe “the inflation of land values” as in the epiphany he described to his son: –

Heterodox economists, including supporters of Henry George, have much to offer failing economies, but they suffer from a paucity of numbers compared to status quo economists. Instead of inventing reasons to fall out with each other, economists favouring modern monetary theory, land value taxation, or delivery of universal incomes need to work together for the common good. It just might work.