Carver: Reluctant Demi-Georgist

摘要

In 1954, just prior to becoming a nonagenarian, Dr. Thomas Nixon Carver, who had retired from the Harvard faculty more than two decades before, began a new career as a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times. The vigorous and trenchant pieces that appeared under the by-line of this remarkable man until his death, seven years later, at the age of ninety-six, are well remembered by the present writer, who was then pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Southern California―coincidentally, Carver's alma mater. Iowa-born, educated at U.S.C. and Cornell, Carver was the author of eighteen books (on sociology, social philosophy, and even religion, as well as on economics), including Essays in Social Justice, which contains a unique chapter, "The Single Tax." In 1915, when this work appeared, he was David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy at Harvard, and had just spent two years as a high official in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The following year he served as president of the American Economic Association. What makes the chapter unique is that in it Carver firmly endorses a large measure of land-value taxation for reasons of his own, while at the same time attacking, sometimes scathingly, many of the arguments advanced for its adoption by Henry George and his followers. Let it never be imagined that this crusty scholar was not an independent thinker!