Why Georgists use the 🔰 mark

Humility is the soil in which the movement sprouts anew

This is a lightly edited version of a speech I gave to the Georgist delegation at the Strong Towns 2025 National Gathering.

One of the things I was struck by at Strong Towns was the pervasive conviction of a grassroots, bottom-up movement, and the emerging consensus that humility, patience, and learning to meet people where they are is the best way to accomplish real reforms.

I saw that manifested not just in highfalutin’ speeches, but also in the actions of individual activists within that group. Like the Parking Reform Network specifically, who had an excellent talk. They described in detail how they are achieving their goal of reducing restrictive parking mandates by actually going into these communities, hearing their objections, and finding a way to communicate their message to people who initially wrote them off as a bunch of hippies who hated cars. They were able to overcome these people’s objections and perceptions through humility and empathy, and the parking reforms passed.

In that spirit, I want to draw your attention to this pin on my shirt: 🔰. American Georgists have adopted this symbol as their own.

How many of you know what this means?

We know that it in America it means Georgism, but the mark itself is actually co-opted from an existing Japanese symbol, the shoshinsha mark (初心者マーク). In Japanese culture, the shoshinsha mark is primarily the emblem of a student driver. And it generally means: “Watch out! This guy doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

By Tokumeigakarinoaoshima - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29491774

So, why would the Georgists choose this as their emblem? Well for one, it was a convenient emoji—it’s green and gold, which are the traditional colors of our movement, and it looks like a shield. Also, not too many people know what’s going on in Japanese culture and aren’t going to immediately associate us with people who don’t know what they’re doing.

However, I would submit that this is actually the perfect symbol for our movement because of the other ways in which it is used in Japanese society.

The symbol is also known as the wakaba mark (若葉マーク), “wakaba” meaning new leaves, and you can clearly see that the symbol resembles a two-leafed seedling, just springing up out of the ground.

New employees sometimes wear this mark to signal to their company “I’m new at this, please be patient and understanding.” In Japanese video games, this or a similar sprout icon is used to indicate a tutorial or to mark new player status. In the city of Tochigi, new parents are issued a “first time parent” card bearing this symbol, indicating to care workers that they are new at this and might need extra help.

The deeper meaning of this symbol, consistent with its visual representation is, “I want to learn, with a humble heart, from the beginning, just as a new seedling sprouts from the earth.” I think this is the perfect symbol for our movement.

The Georgist movement has always been a welcoming “big tent,” with followers of many backgrounds, religious and secular. I happen to be an Orthodox Christian, and if you’ll indulge me for a moment I’d like to share a relevant note from own tradition. My favorite book on spirituality, written by Archbishop Anthony Bloom, is called Beginning to Pray. These are the first lines:

As we start learning to pray, I would like to make it clear that what I mean by ‘learning to pray’ is not an attempt to justify or explain this in a speculative way. Rather, I would like to point out what one should be aware of, and what one can do if one wishes to pray. As I am a beginner myself, I will assume that you are also beginners, and we will try to begin together.

It’s a book I have read many times, in no small part because it is a humble—and, importantly, short—book, about approaching the sacred again and again with the heart of a beginner. As somebody who constantly struggles with trying to be a better person, this is a very comforting thought for me—that it’s not just okay to go back and start from the beginning, it’s encouraged.

And this is the same way Georgism feels to me when it comes to political economy: we as a society have gotten it so wrong because of how much we think we know that just ain’t so. We must return to the beginning with humility and learn what we have forgotten.

But, we Georgists must not make the same mistake as other movements, which is to think that we have gotten everything 100% figured out, and now we are here to arrogantly tell others how to fall in line and get with the program. We must reckon with our weaknesses, learn from our mistakes and failures, and most importantly, learn to speak to others in their own language.

And so we have our mission—we have this transformative idea, but how do we get it into the world? I think we do it by humbling ourselves and learning from activists in the YIMBY and Strong Towns movements who are now seeing success. One attendee contrasted his group’s recent policy wins with it’s humble origins, “as just some cranky guys on the internet pissing everyone off”—something we ourselves can relate to—and I think they’ve charted a good path for us to follow.

For those reasons and more we should fully embrace both meanings of the 🔰 symbol, not just the ones we’ve attached to it, but also the ones that are native to Japan. (And also because we’re going to go international sooner or later, and one day I’ll have to give this speech in Japanese.)

I also want to personally embody the principles that I have just said, because I just came from another conference out west where I was instantly recognized on sight and celebrated as “Land Value Tax Lars.” I lost count of how many people told me my writings “changed their life,” or instantly converted them to the Georgist cause. As somebody who hasn’t gotten out much lately, it was quite a shock to me.

I’m not convinced I deserve too much credit here; I’m just some guy who wrote some articles. The ideas were Henry George’s, not mine, and all I did was to put them in a modern context and do some follow up research. What I am convinced of, however, is that had I written the same exact words fifteen years ago, nobody would have cared.

I believe things caught fire not because I’m such a big genius, but because of the timing. The material conditions under which Georgism first became the necessary and obvious solution have reproduced themselves now, in this time, a time people outside our movement are already calling, “The Second Gilded Age.”

What were those material conditions that first caused our movement to spring to life? And what happened in the century and a half that followed? To briefly summarize, it was the familiar paradox of Progress and Poverty. How can you have so much wealth, abundance, and material progress, and yet still have grinding poverty?

People forget that the late 1800’s were an advanced age; society had come a long way from the century prior. They had also just recovered from a devastating civil war only a few decades past, and were already seeing leaps and strides in both material and technological gains. We forget that there were already skyscrapers in the 1890’s, and that even then great cities like New York and Chicago already had millions of people living in them.

George’s insight was that the worst grinding poverty occurred right alongside magnificent progress, and that the two were in some way perversely linked—but not linked in the way the Marxists thought, but linked instead to the land problem and similar forms of monopoly. The socialists and the capitalists were making the same mistake—of treating land and other non-produced assets as merely another species of capital—a fact we know that just ain’t so.

How did we then get to today? The key to understanding America is to know that America is a frontier nation, with a frontier mentality, that now lacks a frontier.

John Gast, Public Domain https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=373152

The frontier was always America’s answer to the land problem. In the first stage, it was “Go west, young man!” That was the Jeffersonian ‘yeoman farmer’ solution to the land problem. And it worked! And it kept working, at least for a time (or unless you were an Indian, or a slave).

For those who were cut into this deal, such as my long-lost cousins up in Minnesota and North Dakota, America’s promise was real: get your own land, escape the grinding poverty of European peasantry, and make a fresh start in the New World. It was a godsend for them and other similar groups.

The problem was it didn’t last, because the frontier eventually closed.

And when it closed, we got the first Gilded Age, the rise of the labor movement, and a stark choice: Georgist reform, or Marxist revolution.

Then, something miraculous happened that surprised the Georgists and Marxists alike, and which delayed America from having to learn its lesson, which was the opening of a second frontier. And that second frontier was the automobile.

The effects of the automobile are actually perfectly predicted by George’s own theories, so perhaps the movement should have anticipated it. The automobile transformed previously worthless land into a vast new frontier of valuable settlements, by making it possible to have a job in the city without having to live there.

This took the pressure off, but came with its own costs—real costs, which we are still dealing with today. That said, it allowed America to kick the can down the road for a century, and anytime America has an opportunity to kick the can down the road for a century, you can be dang sure she’s going to take it. But eventually that century must come to an end, and then some other poor saps will have to deal with the original problem.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are those poor saps.

We stand here today at the closing of the second frontier. That is what a Gilded Age is. It is when the frontier and the opportunity that comes with it closes, and the poor saps are left sitting around asking themselves, “what shall we do about the paradox of Progress and Poverty?” And the answer is the same as it was in George’s time: we must find a way to share the land.

We’re all familiar with Land Value Tax, obviously, and we must continue to advocate for that. But if you pay attention, there are other expressions of our movement’s principles that actually made a pretty big splash over the last hundred years.

Let’s take the case of Norway, my mother’s homeland. First the bad news: like virtually all nations they never got around to reforming tax policy, they have tons of taxes on capital and labor and buildings, and not enough on land, and because of that and other poor choices, Oslo’s rent is too damn high and their housing crisis is as bad as ours. But the good news is not as well known either by the world at large or even Georgists themselves. The one big thing Norway got right, was their national resource management policy.

Norwegian Georgists in the early 1900’s established a hydropower system largely on Georgist principles, and in the 1970’s, with the help of a far-seeing Iraqi petroleum geologist, used similar principles to save the nation from the resource curse that plagues socialist and corporatist states alike.

I find whenever I look back over the last century, I see all these traces of the legacy of our own movement in places we don’t expect. The referendum, the secret ballot, the direct election of Senators, mass appraisal of real estate, were all policies the Georgists helped fight for.

Here we are at the end of the second Gilded age, and we ask ourselves—“well, we tried it once, and things didn’t turn out how we wanted, so what’s going to happen now?” Is Georgism going to go back to sleep for another hundred years, or are we finally going to get things right?

Well, one of three things will happen:

First, we could invent instant point-to-point matter teleportation, just like in Star Trek, that will give us an infinite frontier, and then we won’t have a land problem to worry about anymore. I do not think this will happen.

Some people predicted that the “third frontier” would be Zoom (meaning telecommuting), but that “frontier” closed in about five minutes, and anyone who has been paying attention to rising house prices in suburbs noticed those prices captured the arbitration difference you can get from moving to a suburb while keeping your tech job in the city. Also, I think Elon is going to take a little longer to get to Mars than people expect, and also a little longer for that to become a nice place anybody actually wants to live, for it to matter on our timeline.

As for the second possibility, history has a saying that rhymes with 1990’s anti-drug commercials: “Talk to your proletariat about land reform or somebody else will.”

This is the other thing that happened in the twentieth century, there were some other people that had ideas about what to do with land, and what to do with landlords. And these people’s names were Lenin, and Stalin, and Mao, and Pol Pot, and Mugabe. We spent an entire century—wasted an entire century—as two ideologies who treat land as a species of capital bitterly fought it out, and we can see where that’s gotten us. I certainly prefer one of those ideologies to the other, but we have to show the world that there is a third way, which is to not fall into the same exact trap for the next hundred years.

How do we do it?

I think it looks unglamorous. It starts with humility, and a bunch of boring, thankless jobs: writing, organizing, educating, political horse-trading, grappling with the quality of property assessments, passing bills, and so on, but ultimately it all starts with this symbol:

🔰

Humility. Two fragile leaves sprouting out of the damp earth. Learning from the beginning with the heart of a beginner. Understanding that everyone in this play we call life is in some way a beginner, and so we must come to them with the same spirit so that we can all make a new beginning together.

Thank you very much.