A Review By John McCone
The book that most clearly lays out the ethical and economic case for land value tax and summarizes the geo-libertarian position is, of course, Henry George’s famous masterpiece Progress And Poverty. What The Property Owning Democracy, by Gavin Kerr, brings to the table is a deep engagement between the geolibertarian position and the two dominant ideologies that current battle with one another in the arena of policy-making for modern democracies: namely the Classical Liberal tradition and Social Liberal tradition, including many great political thinker who lived after the time of Henry George.
Kerr has simultaneously read extensively, and considered, the positions taken by: Classical Liberals, Social Liberals and Geolibertarians. The Property Owning Democracy contains detailed critiques of the works of right wing political thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin, G. A. Cohen, J. B. Clark, Gerald Gaus, Fredrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Richard Epstein as well as left wing political thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hill Green, L. T. Hobhouse, John Rawls, Jeremy Waldron, John Tomasi, Joshua Cohen, Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, along with proto-geolibertarian and geolibertarian figures such as Adam Smith, David Richardo and, ofcourse, Henry George. Kerr mostly focuses on central left and central right political thinking giving both extreme libertarians and extreme Marxist positions relatively little consideration. This is probably justified as central ideologies tend to have the greatest influence on real political policies.
The main question which The Property Owning Democracy poses is: How much should market freedom and free exchange be curtailed, if at all, to promote the best outcome for the general public? Kerr both presents the reader with a wide assortment of views, which many other political thinkers have expressed on this important subject, and critiques certain key elements of their philosophy while championing the Geolibertarian position that, by socializing all economic rents (or the greatest portion one can practically attain), it may be possible to secure sufficient material resources for public distribution to simultaneously lift everyone out of poverty without interfering with market freedom. Kerr emphasises that geolibertarianism does not involve any price fixing and that LVT revenues are simply set by competition between free agents for access to a given location – the state merely acting as a Landlord that receives the rent resulting from the bidding auction between different agents over the use of a given piece of property – thus, arguably, geoliberianism potentially offers a redistributive (or “predistributive” ) system which embodies perfect market freedom.
The Property Owning Democracy contains interesting critiques of Berlin by Kerr on the extent to which one can meaningfully distinguish “positive” freedom from “negative” freedom and whether one can, in any way, meaningfully describe someone without the financial resources to procure sufficient food for survival as free, even in the negative sense of the word. Kerr also questions whether laws, proposed by certain left wing thinkers, which propose banning the formation of all organisations that are not worker’s cooperatives, where all workers have equal an equal say in electing the management of the company, might not, in fact, actually limit people’s freedom and capacity to pursue their best understanding of the good – especially under circumstances where everyone is equally capable of forming their own for-profit company. Another interesting feature of this book is it’s cataloguing of the views which thinkers, like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Fredrich Hayek and Milton Friedman took of Henry George’s “single tax” proposal.
I would recommend this book for those who are deeply familiar with the Social Liberal or Classical Liberal position or both and are interested in understanding how the GeoLibetarian position relates to these, and especially to people who see merit in the arguments coming from the right and from the left and seek a coherent resolution that embodies principles from both of these camps. Although I would recommend that those unfamiliar with Geolibertarianism should first read Progress and Poverty before diving into The Property Owning Democracy. I would also recommend this book for Geolibertarians who are familiar with Henry George’s philosophy but unfamiliar with the works of writers such as Isaiah Berlin or John Rawls. For these people, The Property Owning Democracy can serve as a useful crash course on the views of political thinkers that lie outside the “GeoLibertarian camp” as well as a user manual for engaging with them and getting up to speed with the kind of arguments that academics, which study these traditions, are familiar with.
Could The Property Owning Democracy be a crucial synthesis between the political left and the political right which sets the stage for a great Geolibertarian renaissance?
Only time will tell…
