The two men sat in the Moscow library's reading room, autumn light filtering through tall windows.
"Mr. George," Fyodorov began, adjusting his spectacles, "your analysis of land rent is compelling. You see clearly how private ownership of what God gave to all creates poverty amidst progress. But why stop at land? Death itself is the ultimate monopoly—it hoards all our ancestors, all human wisdom and love, in its private grave."
George leaned forward. "Death is nature's law, not man's institution. We can abolish private property in land through legislation, through the single tax. But death—"
"Is merely a problem we haven't solved," Fyodorov interrupted gently. "You write eloquently about how technological progress should benefit all. Yet we use our science to build weapons while our fathers rot in the earth. Imagine if instead of your land tax funding public works, it funded the great work—the resurrection of all who ever lived."
"With respect, Mr. Fyodorov, people need bread before they need immortality. Your 'common task' of resurrection—while it speaks to noble sentiments—distracts from immediate injustices. A child starves today because someone claims to own the earth beneath her feet."
"But that child's grandmother starved yesterday, and her great-grandmother before that," Fyodorov countered. "Your single tax would save the living, yes. But justice that forgets the dead is incomplete. Every generation exploits the labor and knowledge of those before. True communism must include the dead as citizens."
George smiled despite himself. "You would have me tax land to fund... resurrection research?"
"Why not? You already propose using it for libraries and schools—repositories of the dead's knowledge. I merely suggest we retrieve the teachers themselves. Your economic insight is profound, but it thinks too small. Property in land is theft, yes—but death is the ultimate theft."
"And yet death is certain, while land reform is possible. I fear that in reaching for heaven, we neglect the earth."
"Or in accepting death, we accept all other inequalities as natural," Fyodorov replied. "A man who believes his father must stay dead will more easily believe his neighbor must stay poor."
They sat in silence, each seeing in the other's system a truncated truth—George's stopping at the grave's edge, Fyodorov's beginning there.