“value,” and “equity” have different meanings to different ears.
In the ominously contracting whirl of events, with our political freemen wheeling distractedly within closing economic barriers, it is appalling to hear the serious citizen say lightly that he knows nothing of economics. It is probable that he is not nearly as ignorant as he thinks; but, for all of us, there is urgently required some simple and fundamental conception in which related details are nested as in a many-seeded fruit—a conception which will permit comprehension but which must also survive examination.
It was undoubtedly with a perception of our desire for simplification, and moved by the aggregate miseries of mankind, that Henry George stepped boldly into the field and endeavored to reduce to final simplicity all our difficulties and all our remedies. The response to his teaching has been so eager that it seems almost ungrateful to question whether the cost, in terms of ultimate advantage, is not too great to pay for sheer simplicity. It would be callous indeed to ignore the earnestness of his effort. “Progress and Poverty” should be read, with the utmost sympathy, by every student of the economic situation.
The great service that Henry George rendered was the flouting of smug economic thought; but between his analysis and his synthetic remedy, there is a hopeless chasm. Throughout the analysis he isolates continually as an irreducible element the alleged fact “that men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion.” From this very doubtful assumption he leaves for himself no avenue of escape; and, realizing the hopeful and compassionate heart of the man, one is almost forced to regard it as the gesture of a conjurer—an airy plea to believe that he has nothing in the way of sentimentalism up his sleeve. Placing this law, “that men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion” first as among “truths which have the highest sanction—axioms which we all recognize,” he goes on to characterize the identical phrase as,—“The fundamental principle which is to political economy what the attraction of gravitation is to physics.” “The fundamental principle of human action.” “The supreme law of the human