See my previous articles on Geonomics for more detail:
Geonomics and the true cost of poverty
A new form of Capitalism: Geonomics
A new form of capitalism is needed: Geonomics
or any of a vast number of articles on Georgism or Geonomics available on the Web.
George nearly won the NYC mayoral election, twice; his son came in third the second time when George died prematurely at 58 in 1897. The first time, he came in second while Tammany Hall installed its hand-picked candidate, and beat a young up-and-comer, Teddy Roosevelt.
Still, George's ideas were broadly adopted, not only here, but world-wide, especially in the early part of the 20th century. They worked, and continue to work, in somewhat attenuated form, in Norway - where oil revenues are returned to the people, who have a higher per capita living standard than Americans; in Pittsburgh, whose renaissance building boom was fueled by a land value tax; in Detroit, where there was practically nothing to tax but land, until the automakers firmly established themselves, and the politicians lost their way and started taxing wages and capital (exactly the wrong approach in Motown) etc.
Remember who is giving money to the universities, who sit on subsidized land. It is the wealthy donors, who inevitably got that way by having some sort of resource monopoly - land, oil (John D. Rockefeller), steel (Andrew Carnegie), railroads (William Vanderbilt) etc. - who frame, or re-frame the economic debate. Do you think they want to hear George's message that the land and other natural resources they grew wealthy upon were really stolen from the people? Not likely. They're not called Robber Barons for nothing. For more about how Georgism was sidelined, read Professor Mason Gaffney's excellent article, The Corruption of Economics.
Fortunately, all is not lost for Georgism, and a number of Henry George schools continue to flourish, including the one I just completed a year in, here in New York City. They had 1,000 students this year!
As the Dean pointed out in his closing speech at commencement last week, "Humanity is not in its 11th hour, it is in its 13th hour."
Indeed so. If we do not find a way to curb our resource appetites and simultaneously to discover new, less resource-intensive forms of energy production, less polluting forms of food production, ways of producing less waste or truly recycling it (instead of just downcycling it, as we do now), we will sink into our own muck.
Scientists and economists (even the corrupt ones who don't really understand what's wrong with their Chicago School capitalist model) have been warning us for some time that we are on an unsustainable course. Soon, already in some places, nature will slap us upside the head for our willful ignorance. Geonomics provides the answer to both the economic impossibility of fueling society by producing ever increasing amounts of debt, while simultaneously increasing our debt to nature.
Time is running out. Will humanity rise to the challenge?
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