Henry George
Henry George
Henry Georgewas an American political economist, journalist, and philosopher. George is famous for popularizing the idea that land/resource rents be captured for public use or shared, in lieu of harmful taxes on labor and productive investment. The philosophy and reform movement were known in George's time as 'Single-Tax'. His immensely popular writing is credited with sparking several reform movements of the Progressive Era and ultimately inspiring the broad economic philosophy that is today often referred to as Georgism, the main...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth2 September 1839
CountryUnited States of America
As man is so constituted that it is utterly impossible for him to attain happiness save by seeking the happiness of others, so does it seem to be of the nature of things that individuals and classes can obtain their own just rights only by struggling for the rights of others.
How vainly shall we endeavor to repress crime by our barbarous punishment of the poorer class of criminals so long as children are reared in the brutalizing influences of poverty, so long as the bite of want drives men to crime.
Private ownership of land is the nether mill-stone. Material progress is the upper mill-stone. Between them, with an increasing pressure, the working classes are being ground.
Progressive societies outgrow institutions as children outgrow clothes.
A good, very good, not to say admirable schoolmaster, but then he is only a schoolmaster.
The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.
The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.
It is but a truism that labor is most productive where its wages are largest. Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.
That alone is wise which is just; that alone is enduring which is right.
Abolish all taxation save that upon land values.
How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?
Property in land is as indefensible as property in man.
The tolerance of wrong dulls our sense of its injustice. Men may become accustomed to theft, murder, even to slavery - that sum of all villainies - so they see no injustice in it, yet that which is unjust is unjust still.
Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.