CGO

The Council of Georgist Organizations is the umbrella group for a dozen or more separate organizations which exist to spread the ideas of Henry George. It meets once a year for a conference. The 2007 conference will be in Scranton, PA, in July. The 2008 conference is planned for Kansas City.

Papers are presented, discussions advanced, contacts made, encouragement shared. It is a pleasure to be involved with a group of people who share a vision of a more just society, a world without poverty, and who understand the means by which we can move in that direction. We have almost nothing else in common. Our politics vary, our religious persuasions vary, our points of view on many things are coming from many different directions.

The CGO crowd is welcoming and curious, and you will find yourself feeling at home very quickly.

Some of us have only recently gotten involved, others have been involved for decades. Family groups abound, and many can point to several generations of Georgism in their families. Some live in Georgist communities such as Arden or Fairhope. Some are economists by training. Many write or speak regularly on these subjects. Many are active on boards of one or more Georgist organizations.

Recent meetings
2001 Pittsburgh
2002 London, Ontario
2003 Bridgeport, CT
2004 Albuquerque
2005 Philadelphia
2006 Chicago
2007 Scranton
2008 Kansas City

Bill Batt: Comment on Parts of the NYS Legislative Tax Study Commission's 1985 study “Who Pays New York Taxes?”

My choice was to explore a tradition of economics and tax policy that I had discovered toward the end of my Commission service: the philosophy of Henry George. In the summer of 1993, I flew to Los Angeles to attend the annual conference of the Council of Georgist Organizations; I had become fascinated with these, to me, totally new ideas. I have counted myself a Georgist ever since. Never in the course of ten years reading and discussion of New York's tax policy options did anything even close to this perspective cross the horizon. And it is fair to assume that the staffers on the Commission today – it still exists – have no inkling of what narrow perspective they work from. Even with ample evidence that the framework of neoclassical economics on which most of the contemporary American tax system rests is collapsing, tax professionals have carried on with little awareness of its pitfalls. Alternate schools of economics are quickly growing in many quarters – very frequently outside of conventional university economics departments. There is even ample evidence now that the still prevailing neoclassical economic paradigm can be shown to violate the laws of physics!4 Professional tax literature, however, shows little evidence of being aware of any of this. ... read the whole commentary