Welcome, visitors from LibriVox!

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If you’ve come here from my recent LibriVox recording of Progress and Poverty, welcome! I hope you enjoy the audiobook.

And if you haven’t come from there, check it out; it’s a really interesting book.

A lot of what Henry George discussed in that book chimes with what I’ve written about Jubilee and class servitude. I don’t agree with everything he wrote, but I learnt a lot from reading it.

I think he argues well that permanent land ownership is a problem, but his proposed remedy seems unnecessarily coercive and confiscatory. On the other hand, it’s hard to see what plausible non-coercive remedy he could have come up with in the nineteenth century, without the benefit of all the economics that’s been discovered since then.

I must thank TriciaG for editing my LibriVox recordings. (Normally readers edit their own recordings.) She did it very skilfully, and without her help, I don’t think I would have recorded this book at all.

Thanks also to Lauren Landsburg at the Library of Economics and Liberty, whose copy of Progress and Poverty I read from. She very helpfully found which precise edition of Progress and Poverty her site’s text was based on, and made many corrections to the text before I read the errors into my recordings, or wasted time trying to figure out what the text was meant to say.

And Kimberly Krause and Larry Wilson did most of the proof-listening to the edited recordings of this audiobook, and provided some encouraging moral support, too; thanks, you two!

Thanks to all those people, I enjoyed recording the book. But now I’m tired.

6 thoughts on “Welcome, visitors from LibriVox!”

  2. Thank you for reading Progress and Poverty. You did a very excellent job. It caught my eye on Libravox since I had read some of what Henry George did. Amazing.

    Here is a link to an article that I think you might find interesting.

    http://www.archdaily.com/390959/china-plans-to-move-250-million-into-cities-by-2025/

    It tells about China’s plans over the next 12 years to move 250 million rural land owning peasants from their self sufficient, sustainable, village existence into the cities so the plutocrats can create many more wage/consumer slaves. Mao may have had his failings but he apparently understood the importance of people owning and working their own modest piece of land.

    Thanks again.

    Reply

    1. I’m glad you liked the recording, Craig.

      The most alarming thing I’ve read about Mao that stuck in my mind was the so-called Great Leap Forward. Outwardly, this current push for urbanization might appear different from the Great Leap Forward, but I worry that it might be advanced by the same spirit of authoritarian central planning. It’s not clear from the article how coercive the urbanization is, but the New York Times article it linked to quoted someone else comparing it to the Great Leap Forward.

      Thanks for commenting!

      Reply
  3. Pingback: Of money and mouths | Ideophilus

  4. Thank you, thank you, thank you for reading Progress and Poverty so beautifully! I had so wished this would happen one day- and you have taken up the onerous task and accomplished it wonderfully. You might be interested in a recent documentary film called RealEstate4Ransom ( on YouTube) which looks at the problem of real estate speculation, particularly in an Australian context, as well as Henry George’s remedy for such speculation and rising housing costs.
    Thanks again!

    Sending you every blessing
    for Christmas and the New Year

    Reply

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