Bill Batt says we’d have fairer taxes and a richer economy if we followed Henry George

GUILDERLAND — Bill Batt is a man of ideas — big ideas.

Right now, he’s organizing the annual Council of Georgist Organizations conference to be held this year in Albany, from July 15 to 17.

Batt’s signature sign-off on his emails is a line from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, “The fox knows many things — the hedgehog one big one.”

“I tend to see things in very global perspectives,” says Batt in the week’s Enterprise podcast.

Over his lifetime, he has embraced three paradigms to explain the world.

The first was the cognitive developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, understanding the stages of learning and moral development that people go through.

Soon after graduating from college, where he studied political science, Batt was among the very first Peace Corps volunteers. He lived in a small village in northern Thailand and didn’t speak English for two years.

“Their ways of thinking were very limited by their own experience ….,” he said of the villagers. “That led also to their cognitive limitations. But of course, those people who were more sophisticated were the ones that had exposure to cities and literature and history.”

In his thirties, Batt found a new way to look at things through the integrative psychology of Ken Wilbur. Wilbur’s integral theory maps human experience with a four-quadrant grid, along the axes of “individual-collective” and “interior-exterior.”

The paradigm that currently enthralls Batt is a modern take on the 19th-Century political economist Henry George. Batt became enamored of George’s theories after he stopped teaching as a university professor to serve for a decade on the New York State Legislative Tax Study Commission.

Read the full article at https://altamontenterprise.com/04012022/bill-batt-says-wed-have-fairer-taxes-and-richer-economy-if-we-followed-henry-george

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