Abstract
AbstractRichard Giles, a leading Australian Georgist political economist, suggests that criticisms of mainstream economics can be reduced to three: neglect of the Physiocrats, rejection of Georgist political economy, and the attempted revival of Georgist land economics with faulty variants of those principles. Yet, in defending Georgism, Giles fails to show it can resolve the legacies of chattel slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism. Despite that limitation, Giles shows that the renewal of land economics is essential to achieving economic justice. Along the way, Giles provides original insights about the limitations of modern monetary theory, the Malthusian economics of global migration, and the rise of global nationalism.
Highlights
As a well-known Australian exponent of the careful and conscientious reading of Henry George, the world’s best-known land economist, Richard Giles has been critical of mainstream economists, political economists, and Georgist economists
As president of the Association of Good Government in New South Wales, and editor of Good Government: A Journal of Political, Social and Economic Comment, Giles has developed a version of Georgist political economy that is faithful to a formalist reading of Henry George without losing sight of the bigger questions that engaged Henry George
Mainstream economics is the most insane. It neglects the work of Henry George, but it goes beyond that by overtly and covertly attempting to bury and mischaracterize George, for example, through penalizing those who seek to study, practice, or apply Georgist political economy
Summary
As a well-known Australian exponent of the careful and conscientious reading of Henry George, the world’s best-known land economist, Richard Giles has been critical of mainstream economists, political economists, and Georgist economists. As president of the Association of Good Government in New South Wales, and editor of Good Government: A Journal of Political, Social and Economic Comment, Giles has developed a version of Georgist political economy that is faithful to a formalist reading of Henry George without losing sight of the bigger questions that engaged Henry George. The rejection of Georgist political economy compounds the insanity, and the attempt to revive Georgist land economics through variants called “geoism” and “geo-libertarianism” completes this insanity On all of these counts, Giles indicts academic economists. He gives too much weight to the role of academic economists in the creation of economic insanity He fails to address how the “single tax” proposed by Henry George can resolve the continuing problems of historical wrongs such as chattel slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism. In the rest of this essay, I describe what Giles’s new book does in more detail, highlight the book’s unintended contributions, and provide three comments on where more work could be done
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