Why the Georgist Movement Has Not Succeeded:.

In this article, the author presents his response to the comments made by an economist on his article "Why the Georgist Movement has not Succeeded." The economist makes the point that Georgist true believers may not recognize Georgist policy successes "because they were not done in his name." The author shares that one thing that this comment brings to his mind is that success might be identified as a situation in which Georgist policy so dominated public finance and was so taken for granted that people no longer thought of it as Georgist. He also emphasizes as the fundamental Georgist concept the proposition that people "have an inalienable right to the product of their own labor." The author points out two circumstances that have rendered this proposition highly problematic. First, the term "product of their own labor" has a rhetorical concreteness that is absent in actual markets. A worker can produce the same physical product but, if demand has fallen or supply risen, the exchange value of each unit of the product will tend to fall. So it is not one's physical product but physical product times product price that matters. Second, although people may sometimes think in terms of what they produce or the value of what they produce, more often they think along two other lines. One line is a major theme of author's paper. However much Georgists have identified land rent/increments in land value as unearned, most people think of their income as earned.