Born in Philadelphia, Henry George went to sea before the mast at the age of 15, was an unsuccessful gold miner in California, and then worked his way up through the newspaper industry, starting as a printer and ending up editor and owner.
progress and Poverty
On a visit to New York, george was struck by the paradox that the poor in that city were much worse off than the poor in less developed California. This insight led to his 1879 book Progress and Poverty, which was a huge success, selling over two million copies.
This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain. From it come the clouds that overhang the future of the most progressive and self-reliant nations. It is not the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization and which not to answer is to be destroyed. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent. The reaction must come. The tower leans from its foundations, and every new story but hastens the final catastrophe. To educate men who must be condemned to poverty, is but to make them restive; to base on a state of most glaring social inequality political intitututions under which men are theretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex. 1
George attempted to give an economic explanation for the growth of poverty in an age of massively increased industrial productivity. He argued that much of the wealth created by social and technological advances is captured by land owners an dothers who monopolise natural resources. The only remedy therefore was to bring about a fundamental change in the system of land ownership.
Poverty deepens as wealth increases, and wages are forced down while productive power grows, beacuse land, which is the source of all walth and the field of all labour, is monopolized. To extirpate poverty, to make wages what justice commands they should be, the full earnings of the laborer, we must therefore substitute for the individual ownership of land a common ownership. Nothing else will go to the cause of the evil - in nothing else is there the slightest hope.2
The question was how to achieve this? George considered the ideas of Herbert Spencer, who in Social Statics had proposed that land should be held in common, and leased in lots to the highest bidders (much as Thomas Spence had suggested a century before). But George was quick to recognise that such a solution would present a 'shock to present customs and habits of thought' and an 'extension of government machinery - which is to be avoided.'
George came up with an alternative. Believing that it was unjust that those who had appropriated natural resources were allowed to profit from them, while productive activity on the other hand was burdened by taxation, George's solution was both radical and simple. Landowners would be allowed to retain their land ownership, but all taxation should be replaced by a single tax on land value.
I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The first would be unjust; the second, needless. Let the individuals who now hold it still retain, if they want to, possession of what they are pleased to call their land. Let them continue to call it their land. Let them buy and sell, and bequeath and devise it. We may safely leave them the shell, if we take the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent.3
Not only, according to George, would a land value tax be the means to achieve a fairer distribution of wealth, but it would also encourgae and increase productivity, for both capitalists and labouring classes would receive their full reward. Productivity and justice could exist in harmony, and poverty would be ended.
Well may the community leave to the individual producer all that prompts him to exertion; well may it let the laborer have the full reward of his labor, and the capitalist the full return of his capital. For the more that labour and capital produce, the greater grows the common wealth in which all may share. And in the value or rent of land is this general gain expressed in a definite and concrete form. Here is a fund which the state may take while leaving to labor and capital their full reward. With increased activity of production this would commensurately increase. Goverment would change its character, and would become the administration of a great co-operative society. It would become merely the agnecy by which the common property was administered for the common benefit. 4
In 1886 George ran for mayor of New York, and polled second (ahead of Theodore Roosevelt). He ran again in 1897, but died four days before the election. An estimated 100,000 people attended his funeral.
George's ideas were partially adopted in SOuth Africa, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Australia, where state governments still levy a land value tax, but at a low level and with many exemptions. In the UK, an attempt by Lloyd George to implement his ideas in 1909 as part of his People's Budget caused a crisis which led indirectly to reform of the House of Lords.
A follower of george, Lizzie Maggie, created 'The Landlord's Game' in 1904 to popularise his theories. This led to the modern board game, Monopoly.
Sources
www.henrygeorgefoundation.org
1 Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879, I.15
2 Progress and Poverty, VII.II.2
3 Progress and Poverty, VII.II. 9, 10, 12
4 Progress and Poverty, IX, IV.6
