More: Good News, Bad News

My cold seems to be pretty much over, although I am still blowing my nose to get rid of some remnant extra mucus.

On the other hand, my leg is bothering me a bit. It doesn’t seem to be the knee, exactly, but some muscle or ligament near the knee. I’m not in constant pain, but I get twinges, especially when I stretch my right leg to walk down stairs, which has led to my walking up stairs, and taking the elevator down.

Billionaires, Paupers, and Political Instability

“They were belted barons led by a mitered archbishop who curbed the Plantagenet with Magna Charta; it was the middle classes who broke the pride of the Stuarts; but a mere aristocracy of money will never struggle while it can hope to bribe a tyrant.” — Henry George, Progress and Poverty, Book X, Chapter 4, “How Modern Civilization May Decline”

It is to some extent all too understandable that billionaires like Bezos, Zuckerberg, and the Muskbrat are now being respectful to Donald Trump. A big businessman who openly opposes a corrupt and vengeful president would risk various federal agencies waging lawfare against him and his businesses, perhaps not only trimming his own fortune, but even putting him out of business, and harming many people for whom he may feel responsibility.

I think that Henry George is well worth reading and rereading, yet someone who refers to Progress and Poverty, especially the chapter from which I quoted, may object that we are not in the straights that George feared; we have a substantial middle class, and our society is not divided between plutocrats and the wretchedly poor. That is surely true to some extent, and yet an article in Slate discusses housing as our biggest economic problem, and reports that the shelter index has been rising for 56 straight months. Unfortunately, the authors do not associate the housing problem with land prices, and do not advocate George’s remedy. Upper middle class families who own their homes, and can leave their children an inheritance from these homes or other investments, to a large extent derived directly or indirectly from land, can give their children a good start in life, and wealth to help their own children and grandchildren; people who don’t own valuable real estate largely cannot.

People don’t have to be starving, and don’t have to have studied Georgist economics, to feel that something has gone wrong, and to feel that things need to be set right somehow, which I believe has contributed to the politics of the last decade. Unfortunately, neither the leftists nor the Trump fascists have a good understanding of the land question, and how it contributes to growing inequality and economic instability.