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We are here to mark the sesquicentennial of the birth in this city of Henry George, a man acknowledged to have been an original thinker, but one whom all too many have set aside.

The International Union for Land Value Taxation and Free Trade, although it has held 17 conferences around the world before this one, is really a small band of people. We must be honest about that if we are to be seen as honest at all. We come from around the whole world, but once having gotten back home will be spread woefully thin.

So it is reasonable to believe others, who may be aware we are here this week, will wonder why we came all this way. What is important about a thinker-gone-past? Why bother?

That is the only question I intend to face here this morning as we open the conference and, as the current president, I try to set a theme.

Having given no little thought to the matter, I propose this sentence -- Henry George is our contemporary synthesis in the course of human events. -- and will do nothing more with my time than try to justify it.

It is said that when in Rome one should do as the Romans do. But since we are in Philadelphia I will take a liberty and amend it just a trifle. When in Philadelphia, let me say in setting the ground rules for how I will go about justifying my short sentence, do as has been done here over the years.

First of all, there is the closing phrase in my sentence: "the course of human events." Some will recognize it. " When in the course of human events..." another stalwart band agreed here earlier in said course.

It is helpful to this effort for reasons of setting the chronological scale. Henry George can be seen as "contemporary" in a very long stretch of time. Major things in history overlap. It might be said George marks the "beginning of now," but more about that in due time.

Second, in this eclectic process of finding ground rules in and for Philadelphia, there is the Liberty Bell. Chairman Collins and his committee have chosen it as our logo. It appears on the sesquicentennial stationery and on the cover of our conference papers. Fittingly.

Henry George is best remembered, by most of those few who do remember him, as the advocate of the "single tax," which one recent writer -- trying to be friendly, believe it or not -- described as the "confiscatory and unworkable single-tax panacea." Others speak of it as his "remedy." George's remedy is, in fact, relatively simple and concise, but slightly longer: a full sentence but short. It did not, though, any more than did the single sentence I am preparing to justify, simply spring out of nowhere. It came gradually out of what might be called a "realization," an understanding of the human condition, which grew in turn out of his life's experience.

It is George's full realization which I am claiming to be the contemporary synthesis in the course of human events. The remedy must stand or fall on its own merits, but it has little chance of standing unless and until George's full realization is understood; because there is sequence. One thing follows, arising out of another. So it is significant here that, when asked whether or not his remedy was a panacea, George answered, "No, the single tax is not a panacea. But liberty is. And the single tax is but the taproot of liberty."

Third, on this matter of ground rules, let us go back to another document put together painfully and tediously only a few blocks away from Henry George's birthplace during an earlier hot Philadelphia summer.

It was on Monday, August 13,1787. The document is recognizable from the date. Toward the end of a particularly contentious day, when the question was which house of Congress should have the power to raise money, the delegate from Delaware, Mr. Dickinson, rose to remind his colleagues: "Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us."

It was good advice, as things turned out, and his colleagues for the most part took it, but the two sentences troubled me for a great many years. We are, after all, designated Homo sapiens, and proud of it. Who does not lay store by our shared capacity to reason? The whole truth is, of course, and one comes to it gradually, that "reason" can mislead us, has misled us dreadfully in the century just closing, a century which has been given over to the antithesis in the course of human events.

Henry George's great genius, after all, was his ability to reason. It was in this city when, as a small boy, he "went down to the wharf with another boy to see the first iron steamship which had ever crossed the ocean to our port." George was puzzled, as the boy with him must have been, too, at an iron boat. It was his capacity to reason which explained to him why the iron boat did not sink. (It is relevant to this comparison between experience and reason to read George's own explanation of how he figured it out.) But the whole truth about the philosopher and his realization is that it came steadily out of his own life's experience. He was aware of the blight of poverty because he and his Annie were destitute. He did not "invent" the single tax, or even his whole realization. Experience was his only guide. He reasoned things out on the basis of what he witnessed, and that is the sense in which he can be seen as the contemporary synthesis.

Now, where did the word "synthesis" come from? Not from Philadelphia, I am sorry to have to say, but from another continent. Georg Hegel gets the credit for it. The word comes from his helpful construct called "dialectics," which is nothing more nor less than a way of understanding that same course of human events borrowed for my sentence.

Hegel himself goes on and on about it, so let me turn to Will Durant, who had a way of simplifying things and boiling them down, so that even an unschooled American could understand. Durant puts it this way:

The movement of evolution is a continuous development of oppositions, and their merging and reconciliation. Schilling was right -- there is an underlying 'identity of opposites'; and Fichte was right -- thesis, antithesis and synthesis constitute the formula and secret of all development and all reality.

History is a dialectical movement, almost a series of revolutions in which people after people, genius after genius, becomes the instrument of the Absolute. Great men are not so much begetters, as mid-wives, of the future.

It was good of Durant to make that final point for me, because it is necessary in this process of justification, and it gets us back to experience as the only reliable guide. Just as dialectics was the work of Hegel and Schilling and Fichte, working together,talking together, so Henry George's realization, which he drew originally out of his life's experience, was already familiar in part to a long list of other reasoners: the French physiocrats, Tiberius Gracchus, and a Spartan king named Agis, to suggest a few. He was surprised to learn so some years after having drawn Progress and Poverty out of his own heart and head, but in The Science of Political Economy he credits the physiocrats and others.

The concept is important because it must be understood in order to justify my choice of John Locke as having given us the thesis and Karl Marx the antithesis in the process of which Henry George must be seen as the contemporary synthesis.

Locke is only one of many. He was in a dialogue with Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf. Algernon Sidney died for saying too much about individual liberty -- that being the thesis -- out loud. One of my favorite characters in this particular level stretch in the course of human events is "Freeborn" John Lilbume, an advocate of liberty so contentious that, when he died, his biographer thought his grave ought to be marked this way:

Is John departed, and is Lilbume gone!
Farewell to Lilbume, and farewell to John ...
But lay John here, lay Lilbume here about,
For if they ever meet they will fall out.

There were still important things to be said on behalf of the thesis a century later when Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations. But it was essentially the idea of the individual (going back to a state of nature to see him better), and how best to write a social contract whereby we can all live as free individuals at one and the same time, together, on the face of a small planet.

That is what they were talking about then, and what we are still talking about now, for the dialogue is not yet ready to be closed.

Karl Marx is certainly the tag for the antithesis, a savage and angry rejection of all the things those liberal thinkers had said. Marx's emotionally-driven ideas (he was indignant, figuratively red in the face with rage at the fact free enterprise was leaving some people poor) were so strident they had to play themselves out before there was room for a synthesis to be heard in the public discussion -- the great, extended, human dialogue which is part of experience itself.

Marx, of course, had his dialogue. He talked with Engels and Kautsky, and the fellow who originally sold them their bill of goods: Moses Hess. There later came Lenin and Mao, more recently Gorbachev, and ever so many others, lots of them amongst us. I will hazard the guess any of you knows or has known a socialist.

Which brings us to the carefully chosen word: Contemporary. Why can we see George as the "contemporary" synthesis in the course of human events?

It is because communism -- the antithesis -- is dead. Socialism has been tried and found wanting. The categorical rejection of Locke's thesis has been discredited. These are bold statements, of course, and I have been faulted for them, even by some of our colleagues in this admittedly small band, in the process of assembling this week's dialogue. But I am not alone in my position.

Zbigniew Brzezinski completed less than a year ago a book about "the terminal crisis of communism."

"It describes and analyzes," he said at the outset, "the progressive decay and the deepening agony of its system and of its dogma. It concludes that by the next century communism's irreversible historical decline will have made its practice and dogma largely irrelevant to the human condition."

That was months before Andrei Sakharov was elected to parliament in Russia, if you can believe it, and long before the students set up the Statue of Liberty's little sister in Tiananmen Square.

So much for the easy part. It is less difficult, I am well aware, to establish that Marx's antithesis has been tried and found wanting than it may be to establish to the satisfaction of that vast multitude of people who are not here with us this week that Henry George's realization is the synthesis whose cue has come.

Let me go back, for a moment, to Durant's idea (above) that great men be seen more as midwives than as begetters. If Henry George's idea emerges as the public synthesis it will not be my doing, or even our doing, or that of any few reasoners. It will come out of the course of human events, out of our whole experience, out of what Durant chooses to call the Absolute. The best that our geniuses can do is to see more clearly, and perhaps earlier, than the rest of us what is actually going on in the ebb and flow.

While this dialectical frame of understanding has been in the back of my mind for quite awhile, it was a phrase Nicolaus Tideman used in a paper he delivered up at Dartmouth College a year and a half ago that gave me some confidence it might be currently accurate -- that George's realization is at long last "contemporary."

Dr. Tideman, who bats next this morning, was one of several scholars talking about land takings, and about some surprising legal rulings that have been handed down concerning them in recent years. The rulings, he argued, could not be understood except in terms of a "not yet acknowledged idea" that seems to be catching hold.

By the time he had reshaped the paper to fit the Columbia Law Review (where it appeared in the December, 1988, issue), Tideman had worked it out this way; "We are on the verge of an understanding that land and natural resources are the common heritage of humanity and must be managed in a way that provides equal benefits for all persons in all generations."

You will be hearing about many more such examples of "not yet acknowledged" ideas, catching hold around this country and around this world these days, during the coming week. Such examples abound.

It is important to remember, for instance, that George's most concise statement of his remedy was not the moniker, "single tax," but a slightly longer chain of words: "We must abolish all taxes save those upon land values."

The people of these United States are surely ready to believe we must "abolish all taxes," as we know from a long string of recent election returns. All too few "within the beltway" seem yet ready to agree, but the deep, almost instinctual "tax revolt" (for want of a better term) out in the boondocks is certainly another of those not-yet-acknowledged ideas.

The burden of supporting George's realization as the contemporary synthesis, though, is the business of the day and of the week. And in order to do that we must go back for a better look at Locke's thesis and at Marx's antithesis to set our compass.

The idea of the individual and liberty, of course, goes back a long way before Locke and Freeborn John, so the course of human events, like the recurring dialectical cycles, must in the interest of clear understanding be divided up into segments.

It has been my advantage, as a native and life-long resident of the small but cantankerous state of New Hampshire, to have a parochial close look at the seeds of an important milestone in the course of human events: the development of the written constitution. New Hampshire can claim it has the first one, so can Massachusetts, and we both do. Recent presidential election history will give you some idea of how well we two neighboring states get along. The point (which needs, and will ultimately get its share of documentation) is simply that I have had reason to dig into John Locke's writings -- and, even more revealing, into what was being said and thought about them at the time they were spelled out into the several first American constitutions.

The ongoing public dialogue was well along by that time, and had gone past life and even liberty when Locke wrote his Second Treatise (in secret, it is believed; he would not admit being the author until he was on his death bed, and thus relatively safe, compared at least with Algernon Sidney.) Locke and the dialogue had arrived at the question of property. Any number of participating reasoners in their esoteric scholarly dialogues, then and since, have agreed Locke's thesis boils down, really, in the final analysis, to the idea that a social contract is necessary to secure property rights, life and your whole self being a part of your property.

The dialectic with which we are concerned can thus be simplified as follows: Locke's thesis was that liberty depends upon property rights; Marx's antithesis was that there can be no such thing as property, and certainly no such thing as rights; George's synthesis is simply that there are two kinds of property (beyond one's self), and thus two kinds of property rights, it being necessary to see the difference (because they differ drastically) if we are to secure either one.

Having boiled things down to this extent, it is advisable now to use an even closer lens, and to look inside Locke's Second Treatise (which, I can assure you, was on New Hampshire bookshelves when our constitutions were being written) to resolve exactly what led, first, to Marx's antithesis, and now finally to George's synthesis.

It comes, naturally, in the section headed "Of Property," where Locke readily concedes God "hath given the world to men in common." He went on to say, though, God did not give it to us simply to look at and admire. He gave it to us to use. Locke was in perfect agreement with George (or, more exactly, George was in perfect agreement with Locke) that the base of property rights is the fact "every man has a 'property' in his own 'person', so that anything a man has "removed from the common state," anything with which he has "mixed his own labor," rightfully belongs to him, and government's job is to secure that right.

Locke's first examples were acorns and apples, deer and the hare, all of which once captured and left outside the refrigerator, may spoil. That was the first fact of life that gave rise to a qualification: the first of what have been called Locke's provisos. He said a man could mix his labor with these things, and make them his own, provided he did not claim so many they would spoil.

But Locke understood, as George reminds us in the synthesis, that such improvements as one can make by mixing his labor with a natural thing are only one kind of property: "The chief matter of property being now not the fruits of the earth and the beasts that subsist on it, but the earth itself."

The earth, of course, does not spoil, but it has another little problem. It is limited: fixed in quantity. As Will Rogers said, they aren't making land any more. Locke had a little more difficulty with that one. He was just as sure the earth was there to be used as was the hare and the apple. He came up with a second proviso: it was all right for the individual in the state of nature, he said, to mix his labor with land and so call it his own, "since there was still enough and as good left, and more than the yet unprovided could use."

And there is the rub.

The fact there is no longer enough and as good left for the unprovided is exactly what led, and it has led from time immemorial, to the proletariat which got Marx so all fired up. It has led us, more recently, to the welfare state.

Locke (writing in secret, it should be remembered) moved on within a few pages in his Second Treatise, inching his way down the course of human events, to the invention of money, which has been quite a help. It took care of the first proviso -- spoliation -- even before the refrigerator. The individual better able than others to pick up acorns and catch the hare, could do so and sell them to someone else before they spoiled, which met the first proviso. But nowhere in the treatise does Locke offer a resolution to the earth's limits.

Even in Locke's time there was poverty. Grinding poverty. Read Arthur Dowe's paper written for this conference for more details.

Enter Marx, and those with whom he talked, because it was this grinding poverty they were talking about. It was the injustice which drove them, which fueled their movement, and which has led us in turn to a deeply troubled century, during which their bright idea was being tried and found wanting. Marx's antithesis which, in effect, was to throw the baby out with the bathwater, is clearly not the way to go.

So we are left to take another look, through an even closer lens, at Locke's second proviso: Enough and as good.

Scholars have wrestled with it. Books have been written about it. The second proviso has been explained away, and the tortuous manner in which some reasoning has done so is relevant to Mr. Dickenson's warning reason can mislead. But the "unprovided" do not go away. Poverty continues, and in fact deepens. The gap between haves and have nots is widening, and the vast sums of money being spent by fiat to keep the two halves together is breaking us. In this country we are wrestling with a budget deficit, the most unresolvable ingedients in which are "entitlements," which in turn are simply the cost of making up for the opportunity with which some are still "unprovided."

The word "enough" in the second proviso is a challenge, of course, but the words "as good" are even harder. Who knows who has had enough? and when? Who knows exactly how good one tract of land is, to say nothing of whether or not another tract of land may be "as good?"

It is that early invention, money, interestingly, which provides the answer for the second proviso exactly as it did for the first. Money can do for poverty, for destitution, what it has already done for spoliation, and that is precisely the resolution Henry George arrived at so many years ago. It is the synthesis for which the public dialogue is now finally ready, having been hung up for so many years.

"It is not necessary to confiscate land," said George. "It is necessary only to confiscate rent." And that can be done in money.

The market decides exactly how good any particular tract of land is, and the extent to which it is worse, better than, or as good as another. David Ricardo is one who realized that fact even before George had come across it. Exactly that measure of value -- the degree to which any tract of land is as good or better than the least productive land then in use -- is what we are calling economic rent. It is land's true value in the market, although not its speculative value, which is a fly in the ointment, a fly that will go away once we clean up the rent.

George's synthesis thus matches up with Locke's thesis, and at just this point. Government's role is to protect property rights, even the individual's rights in land, but they differ from his rights in improvements by the fact they come into existence only after everyone's common rights have been provided. Government is certainly not meeting its test when it confiscates wages -- "abolish all taxes," says George -- and there is no call for it to do so. Government needs only take for society as a whole, in money, the market's measure of that point at which there is enough and as good left for private use -- "land values." George's remedy is a double whammy, as Dr. Mason Gaffney said in his lecture last winter at St. John's University. "Abolish taxes" is the carrot, the tax on "land values" is the stick. It will make the free enterprise system work for us all. Liberty can be made secure.