Tell Me About Henry George | Interview: Mike Bird

The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg

The Dispatch

Politics, News

4.6 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mike Bird, having unwittingly written a book about one of Jonah Goldberg’s greatest intellectual interests, finds himself on The Remnant fielding questions about communism, single taxes, leaseholding, and—most importantly—Henry George.Shownotes:—The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset—Financial Times review of Mike’s Book—Rousseau quote on land—Adam Smith quote on land—Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward—The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention.
0:18.0	Can you digger?
0:27.4	Greetings for listeners.
0:28.5	This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant podcast, brought you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media.
0:33.0	Very excited about today's guest.
0:35.0	He is the Wall Street editor at The Econom the economist. And so he goes to all
0:40.9	those fancy clubs and does all that cool stuff and knows all about the Freemasons. And, um, and he's got,
0:46.9	he was touting how he got a nice review in the financial times, um, for his new book, The Landtrap,
0:53.4	a new history of the world's oldest asset. And he was like, if everybody wants me to come on and talk about land as an asset, and I was like, actually, I'm really interested in this. I have a bit of an ulterior motive, which I'll surprise him with in a little bit. I haven't started the book yet. I've read a bunch of the reviews. Michael, first of all, or Mike, welcome to the remnant.
1:12.9	Thank you very much for having me. And I may stop you from time to time to explain things to non-financial geeks and non-land experts more than I normally would, like, but I just think it might be necessary. And as I warned you
1:29.9	and as listeners know, my first question is, what's your book about? So the book is a financial
1:36.5	history of land as an asset. I thought it was something that hadn't been well covered. It's a book that covers the last three or four hundred years, most of all,
1:48.8	and it engages with the development of land in finance,
1:54.0	how land became very tightly bound up with finance,
1:57.7	how that's applied itself in politics and banking and financial crises in various
2:05.7	parts of the world over that period from the development of land as an asset really in
2:11.8	colonial North America to how it's used in governing and fiscal policy in East Asia today, why it's such a big
2:22.4	problem for China, why it derailed, Japan's rise. Yeah, that is basically the potted history.
2:30.0	It's funny. When I was thinking about this, I'm not known to be a big Rousseau fan.
2:38.1	The famous quote from his second discourse on inequality is the first man who having enclosed
2:45.2	a piece of ground but thought himself of saying, this is mine and found people simple enough
2:50.5	to believe him him was the real
	...

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