Posted on 08/09/2016 10:39:05 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica
Everywhere you look in early progressivism, the influence of Henry George and his ideals as espoused in the book Progress and Poverty can be found.
So when doing some digging around this morning, I was surprised to learn that Sanger's father Michael was ardently in favor of George's ideas. My surprise was only in the individual,(my reaction was more like "Oh wow - now, that figures. It makes perfect sense.") for in the aggregate it is impossible to have progressive ideology without Henry George.
The Higgins family was so impacted by the work of George that one of Margaret's brothers was named Henry George McGlynn Higgins. This is just as significant for what you do see - as what you don't see. Henry George McGlynn Higgins, is named both after Henry George himself, and also a well known(I would say notorious) at the time Georgist priest in New York, Edward McGlynn.
In Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion, the following is written: (page 18)
Similarly intolerable to most of Corning was Michael Higgins's support of Henry George's radical solution to the inequitable distribution of wealth in America. George proposed a single tax for landowners on the unimproved value of land. In a home with few books, George's exposition of this idea in Progress and Poverty - Published in 1879, the year of Maggie Higgins's birth - held an important place in a small family library that included the Bible, Aesop's Fables, Gulliver's Travels, Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh, and Michael's medical books on physiology.
Indeed, here is what Margaret Sanger herself had to say about her brother, who passed away at the young age of four: (Autobiography, page 29)
Henry George McGlynn Higgins had been named for two of the rebel figures father most admired.
Henry George strikes again. Henry George is to progressive ideology what Karl Marx is to communist ideology.
He was a freethinker, at a time when the American Republic allowed freedom of thought. (Witness the popularity of Walt Whitman, who the Gays have curiously bypassed as an early prophet.) The flame of the First Amendment burned bright in the hearts of the people. Now when the disinformational and misgovernance elites shamelessly exploit young people’s innocence, they encourage the young to despise the ideals that made the American Revolution the light that would take us through the age of the Reign of Terror, into a new era in which there could be loyalty to God, family and country.
bfl - thanks for posting
Sounds like they’ve gotten most of what they wanted.
It would be important to add to your comments, that Henry George was one of the first major topics of indoctrination among college students by professors with ill intent.
The idea of ‘freedom of thought’ is somewhat misused in your context as typed.
See http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3374248/posts
The horrors!
BTW, even William F. Buckley, Jr. thought there was some merit in a Georgian tax scheme. The idea being that the property would be taxed based on how much land it occupied. This would encourage investors to build up because they would be taxed the same regardless of the number of floors. So this would encourage the most efficient use of the land.
What is going on in Alaska as far as every citizen getting a piece of the mineral and oil wealth is Georgian in nature. It may not be pure capitalism, but it is far from socialism.
>>He was in favor of free trade and preferred a property tax to an income tax.
Not only that, but he was a “single-taxer”.
He thought that property taxes should be the only taxes.
This is consistent with his beliefs in the labor theory of value, and the Physiocratic axiom that land is the source of all wealth.
George was closer to modern libertarianism than progressivism. Some modern-day Georgists call themselves “geo-libertarians”.
On FR the blank is filled in with Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Gramsci, George, etc.
I have an anthropologist friend who can make a good case that everything started going off the tracks when humans invented agriculture.
So we've been screwed since the get-go.
No one had to line up behind Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Gramsci, George, Dr. Spock, Sanger, etc. Lots of people did and lots of people didn't.
Conservatives and libertarians are currently losing the intellectual battle for several reasons, the least of which is the arguments someone made over a hundred years ago.
“far from socialism” does not equate with “good”.
Could you be more specific as to what Buckley actually wrote?
And what did Buckley say about George’s ideas on, say, land nationalization? Or George’s ideas about wealth redistribution?
That’s essentially what the progressives did, they went the other way, and its what makes Georgism overall a bad thing. The progressives looked at George’s ideas on these topics,(nationalization/redistribution) were big fans of them, and that’s how Georgism becomes an important foundational part of progressivism.
mark
Need to learn more about him. I can’t remember hearing of him before.
Sanger did not support or advocate abortion (something PP is loathe to tell people).
She was racist and classist and proposed eugenics based on contraception and sterilization including involuntary sterilization .... but not abortion.
I was more of a Ringo guy myself.
I take issue with this statement. We aren't losing any intellectual battles, we are losing each and every emotional battle, because that is the ground upon which this current war is being fought.
The Left controls the airwaves, and every argument they put forth is some sort of emotional appeal. They never argue facts, they only argue emotion.
Conservatives have ceded the universities, the press, and the government to the liberals. Because of this most future business executives end up with liberal notions as well. So we have ultimately ceded the business establishment to liberals as well.
Liberals are not as stupid and emotional as conservatives claim. Marxist theory is quite complex and is certainly not based on emotion.
Arguing against Marxism, socialism, Keynesian economics, progressivism, and nihilism requires intelligence and a knowledge of the logical and/or pragmatic fallacies underlying all of those bad philosophies.
Yes, much of the discussion in the news is of an emotional tenor, but behind the scenes highly intellectual arguments are going on in which conservatives are not taking part.
We have abandoned the field. Conservatives are on radio stations, podcasts, YouTube videos, and think tanks primarily preaching to the choir. Maybe people like Crowder and Molyneux are having some effect and getting some liberals to move toward the right. However, as long as the official sources of "knowledge" and "wisdom" are held captive by the left, there is little hope that our country will move back toward its founding principles.
I’m partial to Hoss, too.
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