Samuel Johnson: Good evening, and welcome to bout five of six, the rematch. Tonight everyone agrees who is being robbed, and the only question is what to do about it. I am Samuel Johnson, and I am obliged this evening to watch two Americans, which is twice my usual allowance.
Niccolo Machiavelli: The Doctor once called the Americans a race of convicts, so tonight he is attending a parole hearing.
Samuel Johnson: Sir! In the near corner, returning from bout one, stands Henry George, the gentle printer who would collect the rent of the whole earth for the public purse. I find him kind, I find him sincere, and I find him dangerous. As I once told Boswell, your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves, but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.
Niccolo Machiavelli: And in the far corner, returning from bout two, stands William Graham Sumner, who would let nobody have anything from the public purse at all. I promised to back whichever man fights dirtier, and I have money on the professor.
Samuel Johnson: Both men despise the subsidy. Georgia forgives its data centers two and a half billion dollars a year, and neither man would forgive them a penny. Tonight they discover how much they despise each other’s cure.
Niccolo Machiavelli: In The Prince I advised that what belongs neither to you nor to your subjects, you may give away freely. Every governor in America has followed that chapter, Doctor, and not one has credited me.
Samuel Johnson: That is not advice, sir. That is a confession on behalf of the entire profession.
Niccolo Machiavelli: It is chapter sixteen, and it has paid for more ribbon cuttings than any book ever printed.
Samuel Johnson: Mister George, Professor Sumner, the floor is yours, gentlemen. Somebody fetch Boswell, for I expect blood.
Niccolo Machiavelli: Professor, aim low and keep moving.
Henry George: Thank you, Doctor Johnson, though I have never levelled anyone in my life. I say the cure is to charge full rent for what no man made, and to tax nothing that any man did make.
William Graham Sumner: Thank you, Signor Machiavelli, but I do not aim low, I aim accurately. I say the cure is to give nothing, regulate nothing, and make every man sign his own bill.
Henry George: The Professor would protect the Forgotten Man by forgetting him a second time.
William Graham Sumner: Mister George would rescue the taxpayer by making the government his landlord.
Henry George: This conversation is brought to you by PhilosophersTalk.com, where thinkers discuss!
William Graham Sumner: Created by AITalkerApp.com, create your own animated conversations. Link in the description!
Henry George: Friends, the Professor and I have each been on this program before, and we agree on a great deal. Neither of us would give a data center a favor that is denied to the grocer. Neither of us would send a ratepayer the bill for another man’s power line. So tonight is not about whether there has been a robbery. It is about what to do with the burglar, and on that, I fear, the Professor and I are about to become very unfriendly.
William Graham Sumner: We agree on the robbery, and I am obliged to him for that much. I spent my life saying that A and B may not pass a law to make C pay for X. I said it about tariffs, and I say it about data centers. But where Mister George sees a public treasure being stolen, I see a public treasury about to be enlarged. He does not want to end the jobbery. He wants to own it.
Henry George: Then let me show you what I want to own. Watch what happens to land the moment a data center is zoned on it. In Loudoun County, Virginia, parcels zoned for data centers sell for two to three million dollars an acre. In Hillsboro, Oregon, an appraiser said a winery’s value was not based on grape production. It was based on what a data center would pay for the same acres. The farmer did nothing. The vines did nothing. The value came from the wires, the water mains, the highways and the people, all of them public. Tax that value in full, and you need not tax the machines, the wages, or the grocer at all.
William Graham Sumner: Two to three million dollars an acre, and Mister George would take nearly all of it. The farmer who held his land for forty years and sells at last finds the state at the closing table with its hand out. You call it rent. He calls it his retirement.
Henry George: If he bought at the price of a pasture and sells at the price of a server farm, the difference was handed to him by the public, and I would collect it from him gently. But do not tell the audience I would drive the data centers away. A tax on land cannot drive anyone away, because the land cannot leave. That is the beauty of it, Professor. The data center can move to Ohio. Loudoun County cannot.
William Graham Sumner: That was nearly a good point, and I will return to it.
Henry George: Let me first state the Professor’s case, since he states it so poorly himself. He says every favor the state can grant becomes a prize that men will lobby to win. He says a commission set up to protect the public will soon be captured by the companies it regulates. He says the only rule that cannot be bought is a contract both sides have signed. And he points to Ohio, where one demand to pay for eighty five percent of reserved power for twelve years made four fifths of the forecast vanish. That is a strong argument, and I have put it better than he did.
William Graham Sumner: You put it adequately, which from me is a compliment.
Henry George: Now the flaw. The Professor’s contract was written by a monopoly utility that holds an exclusive franchise from the state, under a tariff approved by a public commission. His free market is a regulated monopoly charging a price the state allowed. He has not escaped the state, Professor. He has only asked it to be stricter. And his contract does nothing for the man downwind. A family breathing a power plant’s smoke never signed anything. You cannot sign a contract with ten thousand pairs of lungs.
William Graham Sumner: The first part is true, and I dislike it intensely. The utility is a monopoly, and the contract is only as honest as the commission behind it. The second part I concede as well. The law of contract cannot reach a man who never came to the table. For him there is the law of nuisance and the courts, which are slow, and I will not pretend they are fast.
Henry George: Thank you, Professor. That is the most generous thing you have ever said, and it was a confession.
William Graham Sumner: And now, as I promised, your point about Ohio. You say the land cannot leave, and that is true. But its value can. Tax the Loudoun acre in full, and the next data center goes to the cheaper county. The Loudoun acre falls back toward the price of a pasture, and your rent fund falls with it. You have built your treasury on a boom.
Henry George: Then the rent falls, and the tax falls with it, and the farmer pays less. It is the only tax in the world that shrinks when the owner’s luck runs out. Your Ohio exemption, Professor, came in at twelve times its forecast, and nobody in Columbus sent the taxpayer a refund.
William Graham Sumner: Now Mister George’s case, stated properly, which I do only because the audience deserves to see what they would be voting for. He says some things no man made, the ground, the river, and the right of way. He says their value comes from the whole community, so the community should collect it. He says the grid and the water main are natural monopolies, so the public should own them outright, the nation the lines and the city the water. It is coherent, and it is sincere, and here is the trouble with it.
Henry George: Go on, Professor, I am bracing myself for the trouble.
William Graham Sumner: The men who would own the grid for the public are the very governors who just gave away two and a half billion dollars a year. You would hand the reins to the horse thief and call it reform.
Henry George: And you would leave the horse in the thief’s barn and call it liberty!
William Graham Sumner: I would leave it in no barn at all. I would make the man who wants the horse pay for the horse, at a price he agreed to, in a contract he signed, before he ever rode it out of town.
Henry George: Then answer me this, Professor, and I ask it gently. When the data center draws three million gallons a day from an aquifer, from whom does it buy the water? Nobody owns the aquifer. Your contract needs a seller, and there is none, so the company takes it free. My rent supplies the seller. The community owns the water and sends the bill.
William Graham Sumner: And who sets the price? An assessor. Your single tax would make the assessor the most powerful man in America, and he would be bought by Tuesday.
Henry George: I will admit what I cannot tell you. Nobody knows what an aquifer is worth, because nobody has been made to publish what is drawn from it. The assessor would be guessing at first. But a public assessor can at least be wrong in public, which is more than a sealed contract can say.
William Graham Sumner: And I will admit the same about my contracts. They are sealed. I am defending a document I have never been allowed to read.
Henry George: Then we are two honest men arguing in the dark, and I would rather light a lamp than sign in it!
William Graham Sumner: YOUR LAMP IS A TAX COLLECTOR!
Henry George: YOUR CONTRACT IS A MONOPOLY WITH MANNERS!
William Graham Sumner: CONFISCATION!
Henry George: RENT!
William Graham Sumner: THE ASSESSOR WILL BE BOUGHT!
Henry George: THE COMMISSION ALREADY WAS!
William Graham Sumner: SOCIALIST!
Henry George: I AM NOTHING OF THE KIND!
William Graham Sumner: LANDLORD OF AMERICA!
Henry George: UNDERTAKER OF THE FORGOTTEN MAN!
William Graham Sumner: SENTIMENTALIST!
Henry George: If you have enjoyed this, please do like and subscribe, and forgive me for raising my voice. I had not done that since the Governor. The Professor is an honest man who has spent his life defending the Forgotten Man, and in all that time he has never proposed one thing that would give the poor fellow back a dollar. He is a physician who has described the disease perfectly and recommends that the patient be left alone with it.
William Graham Sumner: Like and subscribe. Mister George wrote a book called Progress and Poverty, and his remedies would deliver the second without the first. He ran for mayor of New York twice. The voters took his cure exactly as seriously as I do, and they had the advantage of not having read it.
Henry George: Doctor Johnson, I return the floor, and I promise you I have not levelled it.
William Graham Sumner: Signor Machiavelli, back to you. I fought exactly as dirty as the facts required.
Samuel Johnson: Thank you, Mister George, and I note the floor is exactly where I left it. Sir, I score this bout for Henry George, which I never expected to say about an American leveller. He made the Professor admit that his free market is a regulated monopoly with good manners.
Niccolo Machiavelli: Thank you, Professor, though I suspect the facts required rather less than you delivered. My card goes to Sumner, the dirtier fighter. He hit George with the governors. The men who gave the money away are the very men George would put in charge of the grid.
Samuel Johnson: Dirtier, sir? Mister George forgave his opponent on the way out the door!
Niccolo Machiavelli: Forgiveness in front of an audience is a weapon, Doctor. I very nearly changed my card.
Samuel Johnson: My Dictionary defines a Whig as the name of a faction. Tonight I watched two factions of one man each, and both of them were right about the robbery.
Niccolo Machiavelli: In The Prince I wrote that a ruler who relies on hired arms will never be safe. I must admit George has a point there. A city that rents its water from a stranger has hired its army.
Samuel Johnson: Somebody fetch Boswell at once, for the Florentine has agreed with a reformer!
Niccolo Machiavelli: I once raised a militia for Florence so we would not have to rent our soldiers. It ran at Prato, and I ended up snaring thrushes. So I agree with George in principle and with Sumner in experience.
Samuel Johnson: When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, sir, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Our final bout will concentrate the whole question. Walter Bagehot and Alexander Hamilton open the ledger and decide whether any of this can pay its own way.
Niccolo Machiavelli: And Hamilton is my man, Doctor. He built a nation on borrowed money and was shot by a sitting vice president. Cesare Borgia would have admired both.
Samuel Johnson: Until then, I remain your impartial servant.
Niccolo Machiavelli: And I remain between positions, but do come back.
