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
Abolish all taxation save that upon land values.
Property in land is as indefensible as property in man.
For as labor cannot produce without the use of land, the denial of the equal right to the use of land is necessarily the denial of the labor to its own produce.
In all the new states of the Union, land monopolization has gone on at an alarming rate, but in none of them so fast as in California, and in none of them, perhaps, are the evil effects so manifest.
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.
The tax upon land values is the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive.It is the taking by the community for the use of the community of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by nature be attained.
The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right.
As it becomes more and more difficult to get land, so will the virtual enslavement of the laboring-classe s go on. As the value of land rises, more and more of the earnings of labor will be demanded for the use of land, until finally nothing is left to laborers but the wages of slavery -- a bare living.
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.