by Gavin R. Putland
(Address to the Melbourne Unitarian Peace Memorial Church, August 17, 2008.)
Thank you, Peter. And thanks to all of you for welcoming this former Trinitarian Methodist, and current Trinitarian Orthodox Christian. I’m here as Research Officer for Prosper Australia, which is Australia’s leading Georgist organization. A “Georgist” is one who believes that government should be financed out of the rental values of land and natural resources and other monopolies, rather than from taxes on productive activities. I’ve been able to establish that at least one prominent Georgist, namely Dr. H. William Batt of Albany, NY, is a Unitarian. But we’re a broad church.
Henry George, the recognized founder of our global movement, was Episcopalian. Max Hirsch, the early leading light of our movement in Australia, was Jewish. William Vickrey, the most Georgist economist to win the Nobel Prize, was a Quaker. And the people I presently work with include two Roman Catholics and a Buddhist. For good measure, our present executive committee includes at least one member from each of the Liberal Party, the Labor Party, the Greens, and (if they still exist) the Australian Democrats. So collectively we’re a broad-minded group, able to accommodate a broad range of individual rigidities.
When I was asked to speak on rising oil prices, I saw that there were many aspects of the problem that one could talk about. Some people say the recent spike in oil prices was a one-off, caused by speculators taking refuge in commodity markets. In the longer term, one can argue about whether the price rise is mainly driven by depletion of supply, or rising demand, or the intention of governments to put a price on carbon emissions, either by taxation or by a cap-and-trade system. And even if we admit that the basic problem is the finite amount of oil in the ground — which seems pretty obvious to me — we still don’t know how uncomfortable things are going to get, for at least three reasons.
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