Henry George

1839-1897 · American (born in Philadelphia; San Francisco, then New York) · Political Economy, Land Economics and Taxation, Social Philosophy, Natural-Rights Theory

This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times.

Henry George (1839 – 1897) left school in Philadelphia at fourteen, went to sea before the mast, and reached California in the gold-rush years, where he set type, failed as a miner, came close to starving and became a newspaper editor. In San Francisco he watched land values race ahead of the railroad while wages fell, and in New York in 1869 the contrast between monstrous wealth and debasing want struck him so hard that he vowed to find its cause.

Topics Henry George addresses

• single tax on land values
• private property in land as injustice
• equal right of all men to the use of land
• the enigma of poverty amid progress
• the wedge driven through society
• law of rent
• margin of production
• laws of distribution
• wages produced by labor, not drawn from capital
• critique of the wage-fund doctrine
• critique of Malthusian population theory
• speculative advance of land values
• industrial depressions and land speculation
• interest and the reproductive forces of nature
• the nature of capital
• canons of taxation
• confiscating rent, not land
• no compensation for landowners
• tariffs as taxes on the people
• true free trade
• public control of natural monopolies
• Chinese contract labor and servile class
• what the railroad will bring us
• the Mosaic law as social constitution

Questions to put to Henry George

The Enigma of Poverty Amid Progress

• What made you so certain that poverty and progress were bound together by a single cause?
• Why don't wages rise as a society becomes more productive and inventive?
• How does the margin of production determine what workers and landowners each receive?
• What's the connection between land speculation and the periodic collapses of industry?
• Why do you reject the idea that population growth is what drives workers into poverty?

Land, Rent, and the Single Tax

• What's the argument for saying the value of land belongs to the community rather than the owner?
• Why do you propose taxing rent rather than simply taking the land itself?
• Why do you think landowners are owed no compensation when rent is taxed away?
• How would abolishing all other taxes and taxing only land values change everyday life for workers?
• What's the difference between owning the products of your labor and owning a piece of land?

Wages, Capital, and the Critique of Political Economy

• What's wrong with the idea that wages are paid out of a fund of capital that employers have saved up?
• How do you defend interest as a fair return rather than a form of exploitation?
• Why do you say labor and capital are allies rather than enemies?
• What do you mean by capital, and what gets wrongly lumped in with it?
• How does your account of distribution differ from what the academic economists of your day taught?

Free Trade, Tariffs, and Natural Monopolies

• Why do you call the tariff a tax on ordinary people rather than a shield for workers?
• What do you mean when you say free traders stop only halfway?
• Why should the government own or control railroads and telegraphs but leave most other industries alone?
• How does access to land connect to the case against protective tariffs?

Natural Rights, the Creator's Bounty, and Social Progress

• What's the theistic argument behind your claim that all men have an equal right to the earth?
• How do you argue that property in the fruits of one's labor is sacred while property in land is not?
• What did you make of Herbert Spencer's decision to abandon his own earlier argument for equal land rights?
• Why do you think civilizations decline when inequality grows, and what does Rome have to do with it?
• How do you see the Mosaic law as a model for organizing society against the monopoly of land?
• You argued that conditions matter far more than heredity — how does that square with your opposition to Chinese contract labor?

George Against Socialism and the Church

• Where exactly do you part ways with socialists who also want to end the exploitation of workers?
• What was your objection to Pope Leo XIII's encyclical on labor and property?
• How do you argue from natural law that private property in land is unjust without also condemning private property in general?
• Why do you think putting industry under government control would fail where the single tax would succeed?

Converse with Henry George on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Henry George's own writing, cited to the page.