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“Protection or Free Trade”
The copy of Henry George’s Protection or Free Trade I ordered from the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation last month arrived the other day, and I’ve started reading it. This isn’t just any copy of a book I first read as a teenager, more than forty years ago, but the latest in a series of annotated, scholarly editions of the great thinker’s books. I’ve read the introduction by William Peirce, a retired professor of economics and a Georgist activist, and gone on to begin rereading the book itself.
Professor Peirce makes the point that George was a public choice economist avant la lettre, as Adam Smith also was to some degree. George understood that it is insufficient to look at the abstract merits and faults of a policy conducted ably and without corruption; one should also consider the incentives of politicians, lobbyists, and civil servants to modify and pervert it.
Professor Peirce makes the point that George was a public choice economist avant la lettre, as Adam Smith also was to some degree. George understood that it is insufficient to look at the abstract merits and faults of a policy conducted ably and without corruption; one should also consider the incentives of politicians, lobbyists, and civil servants to modify and pervert it.