This is what Henry George had to say about Robinson Crusoe in an 1885 speech on "The Crime of Poverty" in which he attempts to illustrate the Ricardian theory of rent (as earlier expounded in his _Progress and Poverty_ (1879) whereby unearned incomes arise from land rents that grow with the growth of population and industry:
      "Robinson Crusoe, as you know, when he rescued Friday from the cannibals, made him his slave. Friday had to serve Crusoe. But, supposing Crusoe had said, "O man and brother, I am very glad to see you, and I welcome you to this island, and you shall be a free and independent citizen, with just as much to say as I have except that this island is mine, and of course, as I can do as I please with my own property, you must not use it save upon my terms." Friday would have been just as much Crusoe's slave as though he had called him one."

Likewise, my old teacher, Lauchlin Currie, used to excoriate "the economics of Robinson Crusoe" among development economists who favoured the "sites-and-services" or "auto-construction" (self-build) approach to housing the urban poor on cheap land that was only cheap because poorly located. (Cf. his book _Taming the Megalopolis_, Pergamon 1976, the main background paper for the inaugural UN-Habitat meeting in Vancouver.) Meanwhile, better located land is high-rent land, but these Ricardian transfer payments should not cause us to restrict the fullest division of labour and specialisation in the places and ocupations where labour can earn, hence buy, most -- except insofar as their wages are squeezed by rising urban rents captured by other people. 

And thus thanks too to Michael Nuwer for drawing our attention to Bastiat's brilliant satires on Crusonian self-sufficiency.

Roger Sandilands