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A Neglected Thinker, Part One
Mar. 13th, 2024 08:55 amI do not spend all my time examining patent applications, although it may seem that way sometimes. On Wednesday, February 28, I gave a presentation to the PTOS (Patent and Trademark Office Society) on the topic, “Henry George: A Neglected Thinker, His Thoughts, and Their Relevance in Today’s World.” I plan to share what I said (approximately, as I don’t have a recording), with my online friends and friends of friends. The original presentation was transmitted electronically to anyone who cared to attend; we did not reserve a room for it.
“You’re educated people. If someone refers to Adam Smith or Karl Marx, then whatever you think of those men and whether or not you’ve actually read their books, you probably have at least some idea of who they were and what their ideas were.
“You may not have heard of Henry George, or have barely come across some mention of him, but a hundred and forty years ago, he was famous, praised and denounced by leading intellectuals, workingmen, and Irish political prisoners.
“Born in Philadelphia in 1839, he became a printer’s apprentice, a sailor, a shopkeeper, a printer, journalist, newspaper editor, farm tramp, and inspector of gas meters. In 1879, he finished his most famous book, Progress and Poverty. He had difficulty finding a publisher — who would buy a 571 page tome on political economy by an obscure autodidact who had never finished high school, let alone college? But in time he did find a publisher; as a printer, he set the first two stickfulls of type himself, and the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
“Progress and Poverty was an inquiry into why advances in production and machinery had not brought general prosperity. Some people had become rich, but workers’ wages had not risen much, if at all, unemployment was a chronic problem, and there were periodic panics leading to mass unemployment. “Panics” were later euphemized as depressions and then recessions. These occurred in kingdoms and republics, in countries with free trade, and in countries with protective tariffs, and so forth. What, then, was the underlying cause?”
That’s enough for now; I will provide further installments.
“You’re educated people. If someone refers to Adam Smith or Karl Marx, then whatever you think of those men and whether or not you’ve actually read their books, you probably have at least some idea of who they were and what their ideas were.
“You may not have heard of Henry George, or have barely come across some mention of him, but a hundred and forty years ago, he was famous, praised and denounced by leading intellectuals, workingmen, and Irish political prisoners.
“Born in Philadelphia in 1839, he became a printer’s apprentice, a sailor, a shopkeeper, a printer, journalist, newspaper editor, farm tramp, and inspector of gas meters. In 1879, he finished his most famous book, Progress and Poverty. He had difficulty finding a publisher — who would buy a 571 page tome on political economy by an obscure autodidact who had never finished high school, let alone college? But in time he did find a publisher; as a printer, he set the first two stickfulls of type himself, and the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
“Progress and Poverty was an inquiry into why advances in production and machinery had not brought general prosperity. Some people had become rich, but workers’ wages had not risen much, if at all, unemployment was a chronic problem, and there were periodic panics leading to mass unemployment. “Panics” were later euphemized as depressions and then recessions. These occurred in kingdoms and republics, in countries with free trade, and in countries with protective tariffs, and so forth. What, then, was the underlying cause?”
That’s enough for now; I will provide further installments.
