Still, Mill could be patronized into oblivion as "the saint of socialism": "saint" apparently meaning something like "scrupler." It was Mill who popularized the idea of raising taxes on landowners only after first compensating them, thus buying the right to tax them. It was a selective scruple: neither Mill nor anyone, to my knowledge, ever proposed compensating workers, consumers, or the owners of capital before taxing them. It was something of a red herring, because it assured that net revenues would be about zero. It simply gave debaters something to chew on while precluding meaningful action. Regardless, Mill set the stage for George by analyzing the matter clearly, and putting reform on the table. On the continent, H.H. Gossen, Auguste Walras, and later his son Leon Walras took up the idea - Leon with great passion and elan.[22] It was then only left for George, who corresponded with and respected Mill, to convert theory into action.
J.E. Cairnes, who took the lead against English support of U.S. slavery, also was a member of Mill's and Wallace's Land Tenure Reform Association. He proposed imposing maximum rent controls in Ireland. F.Y. Edgeworth, scion and heir of Irish landlords, snapped menacingly, faulting Cairnes' mathematical technique; it is not known if that succeeded in intimidating Cairnes, but it is likely that others of lesser standing took the hint.
Still, classical political economy was a remarkable phenomenon. Its major writers in England were able to portray the dominant class of rent-takers as idlers and superfluous drones. One surmises they got by with this because the idlers were proud of it. In their value-system, labour was not respected; conspicuous leisure was. Saving was regarded contemptuously as stinginess: conspicuous consumption was the mark of a gentleman and aristocrat.
In the later 19th Century, however, especially in America, values were changing. The franchise was broadening. Pure rent-taking could not be defended in its own terms; it was reeling under attacks from the new functionalists. This is when George could go the rest of the way, showing how to use classical economics to rationalize land distribution through tax reform. Fred Foldvary well-calls him a "geo-classical"[23] political economist. Worse, George was a popular public figure with high-flying ambitions, a large constituency, a bias for action, and a sense of urgency.
The menace George posed to rent-takers is clear from how he viewed them. To George, the landowner per se is nonfunctional (unproductive), a layabout drone, a drain on the hive, a transferee, a welfare case. Worse than that, he or she often makes the land itself lay about, too: then he or she is dysfunctional or counterproductive, a double-dipper. Worse yet, landowners become triple-dippers when they use their discretionary income and wealth to dominate politics and drain away yet more treasure through subsidies, public works and services, protections from competition, cheap credit, and so on. Often they are not just passive drones, but active predators.
As to the academic clerisy, George first suspected, and then impugned their motives. They were myrmidons of the rent-takers, using smoke and mirrors to addle, baffle, boggle, and dazzle the laity. He provoked, supplying motive for venomous reaction from those whom the shoe fit.
The inevitable counterattack came to be called "neo-classical economics" (NCE), as though it were simply a natural development and improvement of tried-and-true classical economics. Rent-taking had to be made to appear useful in functional economic terms. The classical underpinnings of George had to be undone in a fairly subtle way, to seem simply evolutionary. There had to be some legitimacy of apostolic succession, while also nodding to the cult of progress. "Neo-classical" was an inspired stroke of public relations, suggesting modernity coupled with continuity of tradition. It is not, however, an accurate description. It was a radical paradigm shift. The task was to vandalize the stage Mill had set for George, torch the old furnishings, and reset the stage permanently in ways to discomfit George and frustrate future Georgists.
There is nothing inherently mystical about noting that capital turns over: every storekeeper and banker experiences that routinely. A remarkable quality of Clark's capital, however, is that it can ooze ("transmigrate," in Clark-ese) into land, becoming land itself. That is the only apparent reason for the mysticism, smoke and mirrors.
Clark's capital being deathless it is just like land, and theorists after Clark have made land just another kind of machine. The economic world was thenceforth divided into just two elements, labour and capital. "... that destroys the equality of capital to accumulated savings, and dismisses all Ricardian and Malthusian problems in one fell swoop" (Tobin, 1985). He might have added, it dismisses all Georgist, conservationist, spatial, temporal and environmental questions. It put blinkers on economic theorists which they wear to this day.
J.B. Clark's bibliography includes at least 24 works directed against George, over a span of 28 years, 1886-1914. These are in the bibliography to the present work. They begin with The Philosophy of Wealth, 1886. In this work Clark refutes "financial heresies and strange teachings concerning the rights of property ..." (1886, pp. 1-2). The only such strange teaching specified waits to p.126, where a "Mr. Henry George" is accused of "ignoring the productive action of capital." That is a strange complaint to raise against one who recommended untaxing capital, but there it is.
Clark points out that wealth is created "from the mere appropriation of limited natural gifts ..." and that repelling intruders "is almost the only form of labour which exists in the most primitive social state" (p.10). The atmosphere as a whole, showers or breezes, "minister transiently to whomsoever they will, and, in the long run, with impartiality." Therefore they are not wealth. Those who appropriate them create wealth by so doing. The essential attribute of wealth is "appropriability," to create which "the rights of property must be recognized and enforced, .... Whoever makes, interprets, or enforces law produces wealth." He gives to commodities "the essential wealth-constituting attribute of appropriability." He goes on in that vein: those who seize land and exclude others thereby produce its value; George, who would untax capital, is guilty of ignoring its productive action.
Next came Capital and its Earnings, 1888. Frank A. Fetter, a disciple of Clark and harsh critic of George, commented as follows in the course of an encomium to Clark:
Clark's argument rose from an "original polemical impulse, ..." (ibid., p.144)
Remember, those are not the words of a critic, but a militant disciple of Clark. Fetter was more Clarkian than Clark, criticizing him only for his occasional backing and filling. He was certainly more forthright and importunate. The very candor and extremism of Fetter's exposition, giving a quick take on Clark, makes his chapter a good display of Clark's essential polemical motivation.
Fetter might have written the same about Clark's major work, The Distribution of Wealth (1899), which is mostly a compilation of earlier writings. "One can hardly fail to see on almost every page" Clark's focus on undercutting George. Clark's attacks continue to 1914, "Dangers of Increased Land Tax," whose title tells not only where Clark stood, but that the land tax was a live issue in American politics in 1914 (cf. Alvin Johnson, below). Such attacks, direct and indirect, constituted most of Clark's career up to 1914.
In 1890, J.B. Clark confronted George personally in a debate at Saratoga (1890c). Clark's title was "The Moral Basis of Property in Land." Here he draws on the concept that capital is an abstract essence that "transmigrates" from capital objects into land, a concept he first advanced in 1888. In 1888 a reaction was sweeping the country after the Haymarket Riots of 1886. In this atmosphere, it was timely to strike at the radical who had been trendy and lionized since 1880 (Henry, 1994).
Another personal confrontation was with George's chief lieutenant, the lawyer, journalist and future Assistant Secretary of Labor, Louis F. Post.[24] This was in a debate at Cooper Union (Clark, 1903).
In 1891, in his review of Marshall's new Principles of Economics, Clark virtually ignores Marshall for 26 pages while attacking the concept that land rent is a surplus, and/or that other incomes are not surpluses. The preoccupation with George is transparent.
Clark moved to Columbia University, 1895. According to Professor John Henry, he was recruited thither partly "in response to his running dispute with Henry George, a nemesis of Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler" (Henry, 1994, Chapter 1, p.5). Actually, Butler was then still waiting in the wings, a strong Dean destined (pre-selected?) to become President in 1902, but this only strengthens the point.[25] How so? Because the real President of Columbia in 1895 was preparing to run for Mayor of New York - against Henry George himself. This was the wealthy patrician Seth Low (Barker, pp.616-18).
President Seth Low personally recruited Clark, working out a Byzantine scheme to have him paid by Barnard while teaching at Columbia (Rozwadowski, p.199). To secure Clark, Low had to outbid another powerful anti-Georgist, Daniel Coit Gilman of the Johns Hopkins University, recently founded with B&O R.R. money (Barber, p.223). Clark was a hot property: the new Rockefeller Baptist (aka The University of Chicago) and The Southern Pacific R.R. (aka Stanford University) had also bid on him. An academic myrmidon on tap would be most useful in all such settings; J.P. Morgan's (Low's) need was the most urgent and/or the best-funded.
George was also in a running dispute with E.R.A. Seligman, Chairman of Columbia's Department of Economics over many, many years under both Presidents Low and Butler. Seligman was an ally of Clark's at the Saratoga debate. Butler, in turn, was the funnel through which the wealth of Wall Street, personified by the dominating banker J.P. Morgan, patronized Columbia, making it the wealthiest American university for its times.[26] Money poured into the Department of Economics. Under Seligman, his Department swelled from two members to "forty or fifty" (Hollander, p.353).[27]
This was a period of secularization of U.S. colleges. Businessmen were replacing clergymen on boards. The new broom swept out some old problems, no doubt. At the same time, it posed new threats to academic freedom, threats of which Butler was the very embodiment. Clerics, after all, owe some allegiance to Moses, the Prophets and the Gospels, which are suffused with strident demands for social justice. They were displaced by others more exclusively attuned to the Gospel of Wealth. Academic tenure was a distant dream: top administrators hired and dismissed with few checks and balances. They only needed dismiss a radical occasionally: others got the message. Boards of trustees were self-perpetuating and unaccountable: "checks and balances" never applied to them (except in the banking sense) - Dartmouth College (1819) had established that.[28] They were interchangeable with directorships of major corporations, many of them great landowners and/or franchise-holders.[29] Pressures on academics were extreme: it was placate or perish (Sinclair, 1923).
Some of these pressures were specifically anti-Georgist.[30] For example, Professor Allen Eaton was fired from the University of Oregon for successfully pushing a series of characteristically Georgist measures: municipal ownership of the Eugene waterworks;[31] taxation of waterpower sites; direct election of U.S. Senators; keeping valuable State-owned timberlands from being given to Southern Pacific (Sinclair, p.171-74). These advocacies put him directly in league with W.S. U'Ren, leader of the Oregon single-tax campaigns, and Joseph Fels, his supporter. Elisha Andrews was forced from Brown for favoring populists George and Bryan (Barber, 1988a, pp. 93-94).
Scott Nearing was fired in 1915 from the University of Pennsylvania (Sass, pp.238-39). Pennsylvania Trustee Joseph Rosengarten explained that "men holding teaching positions in the Wharton School introduce there doctrines wholly at variance with those of its founder and ... talk wildly and in a manner entirely inconsistent with Mr. Wharton's well-known views and in defiance of the conservative opinions of men of affairs" (Sass, p.239). Mr. Wharton's views are not stated, but might be inferred from the Wharton estate's holding of 100,000 acres in New Jersey, lying between Philadelphia and Atlantic City. This land supported towns and industries in the 18th Century, but under the Whartons went out of use (Ackerman and Harris, p.154).
What were Nearing's "variant" ideas? Modern socialists claim Nearing as their own, but it is relevant here that in 1915 he published in The Public, a Georgist organ (Nearing, 1915). Uncowed by the Wharton Trustees, in 1917 he was speaking for the Joseph Fels Lecture Bureau, a Georgist organization based in Philadelphia, along with prominent Progressive Georgists Warren Worth Bailey, John Dewey (yes, the John Dewey), Frederic C. Howe, and George L. Record (J.D. Miller, p.462). He published an analysis of the "occupations" of the trustees of most U.S. colleges and universities (Nearing, 1917), fodder for Sinclair and Veblen, whose books on the same subject followed soon after. His best-known "variant idea" was opposing child labour (Sass, p.239; Sinclair, pp.100-110). This was exactly the cause advanced by George's lieutenant and biographer Louis F. Post, founder and long-time Editor of The Public, in which Nearing published. As Assistant Secretary of Labour under Wilson, Post (with Julia Lathrop) founded The Children's Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labour.[32] The community of interest with Nearing is evident.
The safe route for academics was to work for a patron and grovel. Clark's record is fairly clear. He began as a favorite of Julius Seelye, President of Amherst (Dewey, p.429; Henry, 1994, Chap.1). Later, Seelye moved to Smith, and in 1882 hired Clark there. Life under Seelye could be perilous for the truly scholarly. In 1884, Seelye peremptorily fired one of John B. Clark's colleagues, the homonymic geologist John Clarke, for "heterodoxy" (Schuchert, p.54). Clarke was competent enough: he went on to publish several books and 450 professional papers in his field. He became Director of the New York State Geological Survey, and organizer of the State Museum in Albany. His "Memorial" in the Geological Society Bulletin runs 25 pages. His fault at Seelye's Smith had been giving geological evidence of evolution.[33] J.B. Clark was not one to commit such a social gaffe of loose-cannon scholarship.
Before 1886, J.B. Clark had engaged in some "socialist posturing," briefly made fashionable by the depression of the 1870s, and the labour revolution of the early 1880s.
George was a very present danger at this time to the rent-takers of New York City, where he now resided, published, lectured, and organized politically. He had been nearly elected Mayor in 1886, and probably really was but got counted out by the Tammany machine (Barker, pp.480-81). This had been a major event: future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt "also ran." Indeed, it was a national event. New York City was "a point of vantage worth contending for, since the moral effect of such a victory of the working class would be incalculable, .... Such rebellious movements are highly contagious. ... in New York, the labour movement had plunged boldly into political action. ..." (Myers, p.356).
It was even an international event, in George's vision. With Michael Davitt, he saw rebellious Ireland as a staging ground for a truly radical program he might then reexport to America through the militant Irish-Americans of New York City, George's major ethnic voting bloc (George, Jr., 1900, p.347). Considering that these Irish-Americans had recently staged the Fenian invasion of Ontario, their militancy and their ties with the Ould Sod, while not overwhelming, were substantial enough to alarm conservatives. George was preparing to run again in the 1897 campaign, which finally took his life. It seems entirely believable that men like Low and Butler in a city like New York would patronize a man like Clark at a University like Columbia of 1895 to subvert a man like George.
By this time (1895) Clark was promoting his 1890 theme (of spiritual, transmigratory capital) in debate with the Austrian capital theorist, Boehm-Bawerk (Clark, 1895; Boehm-Bawerk, 1895). Clark's concept of capital "... gives the appearance of being specially tailored to lead to arguments for use against George" (Collier, 1979, p.270).
Some modern radicals, schooled mainly in Marx, interpret Clark as being motivated to undercut Marx and communism (Henry 1982, 1983, 1992).[35] This view runs into the difficulty that Clark's concept of capital is much like Marx's, and was obviously tailored to refute George, as Collier says. Clark's theory is that land and capital are the same, because "pure capital" is abstract value, and value moves from capital to capital, and also from capital to land, by "transmigration" and "transmutation." When capital "transmigrates" to land it "vests itself" in land, which is a "receptacle for value." Thus land "is made to contain" the capital of those who buy it (Clark, 1890). Remember, Clark introduced these ideas in a debate with Henry George, head-to-head, at Saratoga.
Clark's concept of capital tracks Marx's rather well. Here is Marx: "The value of commodities ... in the circulation ... of capital, suddenly presents itself as an independent substance ... in which money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts off in turn (1867, rpt. 1906, p.172). "Land as capital is no more eternal than any other capital" (1847, p.138). Clark's concept of capital, on which he insisted so dogmatically, was not aimed against Marx; it is almost as though borrowed from Marx. It was aimed against Henry George, just as Marx aimed his salvos against Pierre Proudhon. Proudhon, like George, offended Marx by distinguishing land from capital.
Another difficulty for the anti-Marx hypothesis is that Clark does not address nor name Marx. Rather, he addresses George, his works, his ideas, and his proposals. Clark does not address communism, but "socialism." Clark regularly used "socialism" as a mischievous surrogate for Georgism. In various passages he lumps Georgist ideas with "socialism," and "agrarian socialism." Marx, on the other hand, is not in the index to The Distribution of Wealth, nor have I seen him named in any of Clark's works.
In Clark's world, "Marxism" was rather a remote, inchoate menace, an exotic import easily put down as alien, atheistic and un-American. Georgism was different: it was quintessential native radicalism. It found support with labour: Samuel Gompers and Terence Powderly both backed it. It also had immediate political potential with small farmers, with small urban businessmen, with renters, and with small homeowners. Its leader was neither atheistic nor fundamentalistic, but in step with the popular social gospel movement of the times. He was a WASP married to an Irish Catholic, popular with Irish ethnics and liberal Jews. Single-tax had been part of Populism, and was to become part of Progressivism, rising to a crescendo 1913-24, during Clark's later career. It was easily implementable by a simple turn of the tax screw, using institutions already in place, and carrying forward tendencies already moving in practice. For Clark and his contemporaries it was the clear and present danger. Even in England, "When Karl Marx died in 1883, there must have been dozens of Englishmen who had argued about Henry George for every one who had even heard of" Marx. (Douglas, p.48).
If Clark had focused on confuting Marx, he would have naturally allied with the Austrian School, whose members had that paramount objective. Instead, he attacked the Austrians and their capital theory (1895a, 1907), opening a vendetta that Frank Knight, Clark's follower, later carried to outlandish lengths, as we will see. Anti-Georgism could not tolerate anti-Marxism. Knight in turn imposed it on the whole Chicago School of neo-classical economics, which he dominated from its inception.[36] George Stigler, echoing Knight, objects to the Austrian-School concept of a "period of production" because it presumes a difference between capital, which has one, and land, which does not (Stigler, 1941, p.278). Stigler's only objection to the dogmatic, intransigent Clark is that Clark made too many concessions (ibid., p.217).
Another consanguine element of Clark and Marx is Hegelianism. Clark's early work contains astonishingly Orwellian passages deifying the state. For example, "The State and no other may say into what form pure capital may go. It has said that it may go into land. For ends of its own it has so decided; and the ends are good" (Clark, 1890c, p.27). Such abject sentiments would not shock Clark's contemporary economists: most of them, like himself, had taken their graduate training in Bismarck's Germany. R.T. Ely's prospectus for the "Platform" of the new American Economic Association began with this: "We regard the state as an educational and ethical agency whose positive aid is an indispensable condition of human progress." Even that was "toned down," according to Ely, from what Simon Patten and Edmund James wanted, which was to be an American carbon of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik (Ely, 1938, pp.132-49). Such sentiments served, however, to isolate the whole economics profession from the median American.
The Austrian's goal was to show that capital and its owners are productive; Clark's goal was to show that land and its owners are productive. To this end he, and his followers to this day, were and are willing to accept substantial taxation of capital, and call it benign (Seligman, 1916; Stockfisch, 1957; Harberger, 1968). This concept informed the architects of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, under which American businesses and workers now moil, travail, ail, and fail. "... to date, capital theory in the Clark tradition has provided the basis for virtually all empirical work on wealth and income" (Dewey, 1987, p.429). Let's recap that. A concept "specially tailored to lead to arguments for use against George" (Collier, 1979, p.270) is still "the basis for virtually all empirical work on wealth and income" (Dewey, 1987, p.429). Could that help explain why land and rent are minimized in this empirical work (Kurnow)?
The survival and coexistence of Marxist economics and neo-classical economics among modern academicians, and the submersion of Georgist thinking, may be in part a logical outcome of this semantic consistency of Marx and Clark. It makes for easier mutual vituperation at a visceral level. In this odd sense, the warring camps "need" each other. The dominant neo-classical schools can debate comfortably with Marxists who share their naive dualistic or two-factor view of the world. Issues can be reduced to prejudices, with routine appeals to known biases. Neither party needs to budge or think; each enjoys belabouring the other. Basic definitions are not questioned. Each group makes an easy foil for the Pavlovian posturing of the other.
Coping with Georgism, on the other hand, calls for actual cerebration, reexamining basic concepts. After all, how is a Chicago economist to explain why he, a dogmatic, extreme spokesman for private property as a social panacea, favors socializing part of capital through taxation? How can he damn the "radical, confiscatory" Georgist who would relieve capital from taxation? A Marxist might damn the Georgist for that, as Marx himself did: he called George the last ditch defense of capitalism. But the Chicago School? Where previous radicals like Marx would wield the meat-ax blindly against all property, George would strike surgically to tap the rent of predatory and dysfunctional property. He, George, would spare and nurture functional property. He would distinguish the drones and predators from the creators and conservers of capital. This is a hard one to deal with, especially for the drones and predators.
In 1899 Clark delivered his other main stroke against George, his doctrine of factor symmetry. By now George's sharp tongue was silenced by death, but Clark prefaces his Distribution of Wealth with this. "It was the claim advanced by Mr. Henry George ..." that led him to generalize the theory of marginal productivity (p.viii). It was not intended as a compliment. Chapters VII and VIII of the book are aimed at "Mr." George, by name. When he is not beating on George directly, he is getting at him through Ricardo.
In fact, no one who has read George can study Clark's magnum opus without recognizing it as a tract leveled against the unwashed "Mr." George almost from beginning to end. Throughout, the obvious idea is to merge land with capital, by whatever device. On p.2, the rent of land is merged with interest "for reasons that will appear later." This begins a kind of "proof by infinite retreat." The promised reasons are later put off again to Chapter XXII, which puts them off to Chapter XXIV, where they finally disappear in the fine print of one of the longest footnotes in history, pp.395-98. Along the way he repeats his idea that capital is immortal, reprinting earlier works as chapters. At one point he says rent is interest because it equals the interest rate times the price of land. Elsewhere he says unearned increments are really part of the wages of workers who are also landowners. Device after device is used; deferral after deferral of promises to treat central matters "later." Meantime, however, rent is interest and land is capital throughout the book.
Clark had telegraphed his anti-Georgist intent in the 1891 review of Marshall, pp.142-43, in this convoluted passage:
Whatever we may think ofthe outcome, Clark thought he was refuting Henry George.
Clark's enduring influence, and its ideological content, may be inferred from Paul Homan's paean (1928):
The evidence suggests that this light was inspired by an urgent need to blind students to the message of Henry George.
As to capital formation, depreciation, and obsolescence, Clark simply assumed them away by postulating a static state. He alleged that was the proper way to analyze basic economic principles; dynamics was too complex, and muddied the waters. One might study dynamics after mastering the basic principles of statics, a mastery somehow never quite achieved in time to get on to dynamics. Ever since, micro-economic theory has been largely lacking a time-dimension: a curious lack for a discipline using calculus and aping the methods of physics. Clark purged time, and relations of sequence, from micro-economic theory.
George was the first economist to address head-on the problem of "recurring paroxysms of industrial depression," as he called them. He made this an integral part of his theory. Even Karl Marx, who nominally recognized the problem earlier, and appeared to make much of it, addressed it mainly with a jumble of press clippings on the suffering of the unemployed (Marx, 1867, Chap. XXV, Sect. 5, Articles d-f). George adumbrated a cost-push analysis of depression, in which cyclical overpricing of land was the prime cause. Veblen's later cost-push model of the upper turning point looks suspiciously like George's, but with the term "goodwill" substituted for price of land. Wesley Mitchell, Veblen's disciple, pioneered further work in business cycles, but in a militantly Baconian way that let his work be compartmentalized, separated totally from mainstream NCE as framed by Clark.
Clark's static state assumed the problem away; NCEists chose to live in a dreamworld free of depressions. Thus, by 1929, NCE stood defenseless against the overwhelming catastrophe that broke then. Even Harry Gunnison Brown could only refer to it as a "period of slack business." Brown was in many ways a George supporter, but he tried to reach NCEists in their own paradigm, and became so habituated to it that he had no way to cope with chronic unemployment.
Even when Keynes developed macro-economics to try, at least, to deal with relations of sequence, macro was carefully segregated from micro. To this day, micro, the "core" of economics, remains static and Clarkian. The failure of economists to integrate micro and macro is an ongoing scandal of professional dereliction or incompetence. Compartmentalization has been the profession's response to many of its problems, as we will see further.
During the Great Depression there was some reaction against the NCEists whose self-imposed blinkers had made them lead us into it. With the nation's attention focused on World War II, however, NCEists recaptured the academies, if they had ever lost them. The reform spirit was safely deflected overseas. Radical land and tax reforms were accomplished in Japan, to the everlasting credit of academic economists like Shoup and Vickrey who worked under MacArthur there. Reforms were pushed (but much too gently) in the Philippines. The Soviets were allowed - who then could stop them? - to crush the Junkers. Economist-reformers crowded into U.N. agencies. It was safe fun, working from privileged sanctuaries, telling little third-world nations how to reform themselves.
Meantime, the home front was a separate compartment. The U.S. invested $7 billion in the "G.I. Bill" education programs, 1945-52. It was a great transforming event; it opened doors of college training to a generation. Veterans fresh from risking life and losing years and body parts to military service now gave more years to being pumped up with human capital. The pump, however, was firmly in NCE control. The returning veterans received from their grateful nation "human capital" like this:
It was everywhere: it hit one from every angle. It was an integral tenet of NCE; you learned to make it part of your reasoning process, or failed your exams. Thus, as far as economic policy went, the great public investment was worse than wasted. The early spadework of Clark and his like came to guide the flow of billions of dollars, and the minds of millions of people.
Clark did not stop at subsuming land in capital. He also makes a great point that wages are rent, too. The policy implication is that wages would make a good tax base. Seligman, as we see next, carried this forward into the income tax, leading to the present tax system which raises much more from payrolls than property.