What even a superficial study of history reveals is that conflict is at least as prevalent as cooperation throughout the ages. This is true within groups of people but is even more the case between groups of people. There have been many reasons used to cultivate hatreds of those considered to be outsiders. Racial, ethnic and religious differences have been convenient bases for denying not just equality of opportunity but denying the basic recognition of reciprocal obligation to respect even humanity.

As Henry George’s message and vision emerged to find support in almost every society around the globe, many writers took on the issue of how to bring people of diverse cultural norms and deeply-entrenched prejudices together in common cause. This is a story deserving to be told, its importance reinforced by what is happening in the world today.

Over the last five or six months I have been working through the issues of The Single Tax Review, published from 1901 to 1923. Each issue is filled with thoughtful and frequently controversial articles on the state of the world and conditions in individual countries. The long-time editor of The Single Tax Review, Joseph Dana Miller, filled the Review’s pages with commentary that have a contemporary sound to his analysis and message. In each issue he reviewed newly-published books written by Single Taxers and others.

Other leading Single Taxers regularly contributed articles and book reviews as well. One such Single Taxer was Arthur C. Pleydell, who, in the late 1890s served as editor of Justice. When the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation was established in 1925, Pleydell was one of the initial directors. What I am sharing with you here is a book review he wrote in 1905 of a book titled The Color Line, written by a Tulane University professor named William Smith. In this book Professor Smith argues against recognition of social equality for persons of color. Arthur Pleydell responds as one might expect a disciple of the Single Tax to respond. I point particularly to the final two paragraphs.

• Ed Dodson (21 June 2020)

Somewhere, sometime there’ll be an awakening to the criminality of not taxing away the annual rent of land and other natural resources, instead of taxing wages. Yes ….. criminality.

That’s because we’ll come to see that not to do so creates poverty.

We’ll understand the sanctity of ‘private property’ does not apply to the rent of land.

It will be a revelation to many – just as the sexual abuse of children was a revelation to the many who knew nothing about it – but, as with sexual abuse, some on both sides of the equation do already know about it.

The privatisation of publicly-generated economic rent isn’t spoken of in ‘the best of circles’: that it has put the vast majority into a form of wage slavery only a little superior to chattel slavery; that it is permitted to continue to shrink the lives of this vast majority from what may have blossomed from them; that it sends people off to wars over land and natural resources.

Until that day ……………. all the best!

…. our relentless descent into an economic depression.

Mainstream economists have no answers. They only display their complete impotence. Maybe if we look at what heterodox economists have to say?

TaxLandNotMan@TaxLandNotMan When you ask yourself how parts of society could be made to believe the nonsensical things they often do, just remember that our established news, education and political organizations have already convinced most people it is normal for the masses to pay the few to use land. 1:07 AM · Jun 10, 2020

Bryan Kavanagh@bryankav123·3h Replying to @TaxLandNotMan Yep, it’s a lonely number of people able to see high land prices as a measure of economic illness: another pandemic. Since 1974, it’s been a destroyer of productivity & wages. And businesses believing low wage growth is good for them really do need to think that one through. 10:17 AM Jun 10, 2020

Yup! And not just black lives. The lives of indigenous Americans, too.

It was Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD) who had the insight and decency to acknowledge that “Poverty is the mother of crime.”

However, ‘money’ as such is no response. Nor is ‘education’ as we know it. We have to change ‘the system’.

Interestingly, it’s indigenous people who have the deep knowledge about how the system must be changed: we’ve got to stop treating their patrimony, their land, as a commodity. They have much to teach the world of ‘investors’.

Surely, it’s too late to do that?

It isn’t too late. It could be fixed overnight by taking on board something the indigenous people of Australia have been saying for years, or as ‘Midnight Oil’ sing in ‘Beds are Burning’: We must ‘Pay the Rent‘.

The rent is owed equally to all as a right—not a gift—to each and every one of us. It would afford a universal basic income.

Otherwise, the remedying of black and indigenous lives, and the lives of all the dispossessed and impoverished, is going to be a very, very – l – o – n – g – haul!