Henry George

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Henry George.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

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"An Optical Delusion," cartoon opposing the economic theories of Henry George that became popular with the labouring classes in the 1880s.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Henry George was a land reformer and economist who in Progress and Poverty (1879) proposed the single tax: that the state tax away all economic rent—the income from the use of bare land but not from improvements—and abolish all other taxes.

Leaving school before his 14th birthday, George worked for two years as a clerk in an importing house and then went to sea, sailing to Australia and India. Back in Philadelphia in 1856, he learned typesetting, and in 1857 he signed up as a steward on a lighthouse tender, the Shubruck, bound for service on the Pacific coast. He quit the ship in San Francisco to join the gold rush in Canada, where, however, he arrived too late. In 1858 he returned to California. There he worked for newspapers and took part in Democratic Party politics until 1880. In the process, he developed writing and oratorical skills but without achieving much financial success. After years of intermittent employment as a typesetter and five years as an editor for several newspapers, including the San FranciscoChronicle, in 1871 he and two partners started the San Francisco Daily Evening Post, but credit difficulties forced them to close it in 1875.

George had failed at several attempts to gain elective office,but in 1876 he secured a political appointment as state gas-meter inspector that enabled him to work on Progress and Poverty, which caught the spirit of discontent that had arisen from the economic depression of 1873–78. This popular book was translated into many languages. Its vogue was enhanced by George’s pamphlets, his frequent contributions to magazines (notably Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper), and his lecture tours in both the United States and the British Isles.

As he observed the American economy of the 1870s, George wondered why it was that the increasing wealth of the country seemed always to be accompanied by increasing poverty. In Progress and Poverty he wrote:

I mean that the tendency of what we call material progress is in nowise to improve the condition of the lowest class in the essentials of healthy, happy human life. Nay, more, that it is still further to depress the condition of the lowest class.… It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down.

He thought he had found the answer to his question in his study of price rises in California land as a result of the building of the transcontinental railroad. As a basis for his argument, George gave new meaning to the orthodox, or “Ricardian” (after English economist David Ricardo), doctrine of rent. He applied the law of diminishing returns and the concept of “margin of productivity” to land alone. He argued that since economic progress entailed a growing scarcity of land, the idle landowner reaped ever greater returns at the expense of the productive factors of labour and capital. This unearned economic rent, he held, should be taxed away by the state. George envisaged that the government’s annual income from this “single tax” would be so large that there would be a surplus for expansion of public works. His economic argument was reinforced and dominated by humanitarian and religious appeal.

George’s specific remedy had no significant practical result, and few economists of reputation supported it. Critics have observed that taxes on site values can reduce the incentive to make sites valuable, thereby weakening the intent of the tax. Nevertheless, George’s forceful emphasis on “privilege,” his demand for equality of opportunity, and his systematic economic analysis proved a stimulus to orderly reform.

George moved to New York City in 1880. In 1886 he became the mayoral candidate of the reform forces. In a spectacular contest, he barely lost to the Democratic candidate, Abram Stevens Hewitt, and finished substantially ahead of the Republican candidate, Theodore Roosevelt.

R.A. Sawyer, Henry George and the Single Tax (1926); Anna George de Mille, Henry George, ed. by D.C. Shoemaker (1950); S.B. Cord, Henry George: Dreamer or Realist? (1965).