Here is an interesting preface from the magazine ‘Land and Liberty’ which brings to light the intelligent ideas of a great economist who lived over a century ago.
‘A great economist once explained the laws of economics with a clarity that has never been equalled.Through this he brought to light the fundamental causes of poverty amidst growing wealth. He demonstrated how this could be remedied through replacing all taxes on production with a tax on the rentable value of land.
But his vision was wider and deeper than this. He was concerned with civilization as a whole and with the kind of life possible for all when poverty is overcome and all people are free to develop to their full potential. He saw with remarkable clarity that a society may flourish only when founded in justice. He saw that economics was ultimately an ethical science, and that a just society is possible only when the majority care for justice above private advantage or gain. The laws of economics may be seen clearly only through the prism of justice, and an intuition of justice is natural to everyone.
If the understanding of the laws of economics is open to all, as part of the natural understanding of society, then the modern reduction of economics to mathematical formulae and statistics only serves to obscure the real working of economics from natural reason and observation. As represented in the media by politicians and economic experts one might never guess that it was everyday human life that was being discussed.
For many ordinary people economics and politics seem to have nothing to do with them, and this endangers democracy. The modern world is moving towards anonymous bureaucracy, as is suggested in the book ‘The Human Condition’. The tendency to reduce economics to mere mechanism dehumanises the world and obscures the ethical dimension that is the real ground of economics.
This wise economist was called Henry George
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