Henry George

Henry George was born in Philadelphia on 2 September 1839 and died in New York on 29 October 1897. He left school early, went to sea, and settled in California, where he worked as a typesetter, printer and journalist. Watching land speculation and railway grants in booming San Francisco convinced him that the rising value of land, not a shortage of capital or an excess of population, explained why wages stayed low while wealth grew.

Progress and Poverty (1879) sold millions of copies and made him one of the best-known intellectuals of his time. He lectured widely in Britain, Ireland and Australia. In 1886 he ran for mayor of New York for the United Labor Party and came second, ahead of the Republican Theodore Roosevelt; many of his supporters believed the winner, Abram Hewitt, had benefited from fraud. He ran again in 1897 against medical advice and died of a stroke four days before the election.

• The paradox of progress and poverty. As population and technology advance, the value of land rises. Because land is fixed in supply, landowners capture much of the gain as rent, squeezing wages and interest and encouraging speculative withholding of land, which George blamed for depressions.
• Land is a common inheritance. People have a right to what they produce, but no one produced land. Its value arises from nature and from the community's presence and investment, so the community has a claim to it.
• The single tax. George did not propose to nationalise land: 'It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent.' His practical proposal was 'to abolish all taxation save that upon land values'. Because a land-value tax does not fall on labour or capital and cannot be passed on by reducing the supply of land, he argued that it would raise revenue without discouraging production and would push idle land into use.
• Free trade and other reforms. He opposed tariffs (Protection or Free Trade, 1886) and was an early prominent advocate of the secret ballot in the United States, which Massachusetts adopted in 1888.

George's ideas gave rise to Georgism, a movement of single-tax clubs, journals and parties, and influenced figures as different as Leo Tolstoy, Sun Yat-sen and the British Liberal 'People's Budget' of 1909. Lizzie Magie designed The Landlord's Game (patented in 1904) to illustrate his argument; it was the ancestor of Monopoly. Single-tax enclaves such as Fairhope, Alabama, and Arden, Delaware, put the idea into practice on a small scale.

In contemporary governance design, land-value taxation is advocated by economists across the political spectrum as an efficient tax, and versions operate in Denmark, Estonia and some US municipalities with split-rate property taxes. George's argument that land rent belongs to the community underlies community land trusts, value-capture financing of infrastructure, charter-city proposals that fund services from rising land values, and the Harberger tax, which combines self-assessed valuation with a periodic levy. His idea of returning common rents to citizens also connects to dividend proposals for natural resources and, more speculatively, for AI-generated rents.

• Revenue adequacy. Critics argue that land rent alone cannot fund a modern state, so a single tax would have to be supplemented.
• Valuation. Separating the value of land from the value of buildings on it is difficult in practice, and assessments are politically contested.
• Fairness to current owners. Taxing away land rent imposes large losses on people who bought land at prices reflecting untaxed rent; George rejected compensation, which critics regarded as confiscatory.
• Economic theory. Marginalist economists, and later Marxists, disputed George's theory of distribution and his explanation of depressions. Some economists argue that land speculation is less harmful than he believed.

• Our Land and Land Policy (1871)
• Progress and Poverty (1879) — Project Gutenberg
• Social Problems (1883); Protection or Free Trade (1886)
• The Science of Political Economy (1898, posthumous)
• Overview: 'Henry George', Wikipedia