From ripple to reform

Winston Churchill may have been an advocate of maintaining and extending his empire, but at home he was the father of the welfare state. On the other side of the world there was Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Chinese republic who served as the president of his country from 1919 to 1925. One of his guiding political principles was "welfarism". Where did those great ideas come from? From a book called "Progress & Poverty", a must read for any interested in serving the public. Penned by Henry George it saw the world from the lens of a man who was reduced to such abject poverty that he went out in the street asking for $5. He later confided. I was willing to kill for that money.

The dispossessed and the disenchanted always have their own perspective; which atleast from their own viewpoint is correct. The challenge is to make men of privilege look at reality from their perspective; an even greater, almost insurmountable challenge is to make the privileged controllers of wealth empathize with the poor and relate to their plight to the point where they are galvanized into action. those who can do so are the intellectual icons in their fields. So how does one grow to the stature of an intellectual from that of a mere scholar. The former lays bare the vices that contribute to societal misery simultaneously conducting incisive analyses of the sources and effects of the problems. That is the easy part. One that any seasoned news reporter can do with effortless ease. The challenge is to present an actionable remedy. The intellectual will never leave his reader dazed an disgruntled by the enormity of the vice. The remedy serves a dual purpose. While it gives hope to those affected by social ills it helps those not affected by them to realize that they exist and that something must be done about them. The intellectual remedy centered inquiry sets in motion a chain of events that ultimately produces currents of change that historians call "reforms". It only starts as a small ripple centered on finding a remedy. "The inevitable evil that one so patiently bears becomes almost unbearable teh moment one conceives the idea of reforming it. Every abuse that is then eliminated highlights those that remain."

That is exactly what Henry George did when he published his treatise "Poverty and Progress" in 1879. If it is difficult to make others see reality from your eyes in general, it was almost impossible to achieve that end in 19th century United States. poverty was the result of ones own failings. Full Stop. So the Americans thought. So the believed. Even the poor subscribed to that toxic and self defeating view of privilege, and the absence of it. It was in that darkness that Henry George lit his torch. He argued that poverty was a fault not a failing. The fault lay in how society was structured and the remedy lay in restructuring it distribute wealth not uniformly but "fairly". He proposed a reform of the tax regime to get to his goal. In Henry's scheme it was the societal structure that was teh main culprit while to a lesser degree individual choices were to blame.

What would Henry George have said today of societies that had the ability to build "fair" structures but chose to be "unjust" because they were morally unhinged. While in the 1870s and 1880s the socio economic structure was the major driving force behind the misery of the individual, in societies that are morally bankrupt the individual is the main culprit: though social institutions are to blme in no small measure. It is the individual that structures the family, the family structures the community, which in turn structures the society.