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Concept
Henry George
Summary
Henry George (September 2, 1839 – October 29, 1897) was an American political economist and journalist. His writing was immensely popular in 19th-century America and sparked several reform movements of the Progressive Era. He inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism, the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value of land (including natural resources) should belong equally to all members of society. George famously argued that a single tax on land values would create a more productive and just society.
His most famous work, Progress and Poverty (1879), sold millions of copies worldwide. The treatise investigates the paradox of increasing inequality and poverty amid economic and technological progress, the business cycle with its cyclic nature of industrialized economies, and the use of rent capture such as land value taxation: higher taxes for more valued land and other anti-monopoly reforms as a remedy for these and other social problems created by extreme avarice’s on behalf of the basic laborer who actually creates economic value by hours put into labor for production. Therefore, the goal of land-value taxation is to provide revenue from a systematically quantitative measure that reflects qualitative land values, using a procedure exacted and enforced by governments in democracies.
Other works by George defended free trade, the secret ballot, high taxation on land owners especially if they used land on expensive infrastructures, and public ownership of natural monopolies.
George was a journalist for many years, and the popularity of his writing and speeches brought him to run for election as Mayor of New York City in 1886. As the United Labor Party nominee in 1886 and in 1897 as the Jefferson Democracy Party nominee, he received 31 percent and 4 percent of the vote respectively and finished ahead of former New York State Assembly Minority Leader Theodore Roosevelt in the first race.
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