Henry George's Labor Theory of Value: He Saw the Entrepreneurs and Workers as Employers of Capital and Land, and Not the Reverse
Robert J. Rafalko
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 1989, vol. 48, issue 3, 311-320
Abstract:
Abstract. Henry George, the 19th century American economist and social philosopher, saw the problem of protecting the working peoples' wages and Jobs one of distributive justice. He attacked as fallacious the idea that equality of opportunity to work was a “privilege” accorded to labor. The protectionist system, he held, was based on the antidemocratic notion that “the many are called to serve and the few to rule.” The paternalism of protection, whether in the domestic or the world economy, is “the pretense of tyranny,” he argued. He holds that labor, including workers and entrepreneurs, and not landholders, or owners of capital, is the source of all economic value. Labor, he reasoned, “employs capital,” and not the reverse. George's theory of value was an improvement on Adam Smith's, putting into it a greater emphasis on the importance of land in the analysis of the distribution of wealth. But it was a production cost theory, with all its problems and advantages.
Date: 1989
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1536-7150.1989.tb03182.x
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ajecsc:v:48:y:1989:i:3:p:311-320
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0002-9246
Access Statistics for this article
American Journal of Economics and Sociology is currently edited by Laurence S. Moss
More articles in American Journal of Economics and Sociology from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().