Zinn and the Art of Mutter-cycle Maintenance

As a school teacher, I am immensely grateful for the extensive labor Howard Zinn pursued in creating a meaningful, reliable, and accessible alternative approach to history from the one too often encountered that takes primary notice of the well-to-do without closely examining the source of their well-to-do-ness.

However, Mr. Zinn himself engages in an intellectual sleight-of-hand when all he devotes to the great issue of "equality of access to land" is . . . nothing! Imagine it: forty acres and a mule as a concrete measure of land access--nothing. What to do about the crop-lien system and share-cropping--nothing. The great transfer of location rent to the mere owners of the earth--nothing.

No, sad to say, with respect to the land question Zinn merely follows the complacent, submissive policy of Progressives and and Liberals and Laborites (not to mention the silent complicity of the extortion of land rents by so-called conservatives who mask their defense of private property in the Earth behind blasphemous pieties (God ordained private ownership of the Earth) or the resort to momentum (it's always been that way (which it hasn't)) in avoiding the uncomfortable question of land-and-liberty particulars.

For instance, all Zinn allows Henry George, arguably the most articulate advocate of specific public policy that would wrench control of this earth from an elite, are three pages of heart-stopping description of the effects of poverty. George unquestionably is affective in his depiction of poverty's cankerous effect. But to read Zinn you'd never notice that George called for a tax on land values equal to the potential rent a landlord would charge you to use the location of his parcel.

You are welcome to join a mentored discussion of The Land Question this Saturday morning, 9-10 am by ZOOM.

Stop muttering, start articulating.