Peter Kropotkin, there are four politics & Economy thinkers I have studied and I am curious to know your opinions on THEM: Huey Long, Henry George, Thomas Piketty, and Dorothy Day.
Great — I am happy to discuss them all.
I appreciate Huey Long's redistribution of wealth to the poor, his expansion of social programs, education, and hospitals, and his attack on monopolies. But I don’t endorse his methods, because he was authoritarian, he craved and aggressively used his centralized state power, and he tolerated and employed corruption. Huey Long wanted to give people bread, but at the cost of their personal freedom.
Henry George - I respect his ideas enormously, especially his insight that land monopoly is the basis of poverty, but I don’t believe his thinking went far enough. I appreciate his attack on landlordism, his realization that private land ownership creates inequality, his understanding that unearned income is exploitative, his moral argument that land should belong to all, and his intended tactic of capturing land value for public benefit.
• But I completely disagree with his vision of retaining the state, and his belief that a single tax alone can solve inequality. Implementing Henry George’s ideas would have only been a half-step forward, because he just wants to regulate exploitation, not abolish it.
Thomas Piketty - the author of Capital in the 21st Century - I love his diagnosis but I reject his curative policies as inadequate. I agree with Piketty that wealth inequality is extreme and growing, I agree that capitalism concentrates power, I agree that inherited wealth destroys democracy, I agree that exploitation is baked into the system, and I agree that capital will always accumulate in fewer and fewer hands unless it is checked. But - I disagree with Piketty on his methods. (He makes mistakes similar to Henry George). He is wrong to expect progressive taxes to fix capitalism, he is mistaken in his tolerance of private property, he errs in wanting to leave production in private hands, and he is hugely naive in relying on the state to administer redistribution. Piketty’s data is very brilliant, but society “cannot redistribute the fruits of theft and call it justice.” Capitalist structures cannot merely be taxed, they need to be abolished.
Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement - I am closest to her mindset; I admire her deeply, we just have minor philosophical disagreements. I appreciate her radical houses of hospitality that function as mutual aid centers, her support of communal living, her voluntary poverty, her service to the homeless and hungry, her anti-war activism, her anti-capitalist critique, and her belief in decentralization, local self-reliance, cooperatives and worker communities. Of course I like her - she borrowed many of her ideas from my books Mutual Aid and The Conquest of Bread. My only mild criticisms are her spiritual and religious framing, her emphasis on personal sacrifice, her occasional tone of suffering, and her framework of Christian morality. I thoroughly support her theories, but I dislike the theology it’s based on. Overall though, Dorothy Day is one of the very few 20th century activists I admire.
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