Thread by @GeorgistJoseph

Some people have been asking- "Who is this guy? Why should anyone care about someone with two first names?"

A thread on Henry George and the Single Taxers, the most important historical movement you've probably never heard of🧵

https://twitter.com/GeorgistJoseph/status/1531858416225775616

1/ Today, few people know who Henry George is. Yet during his own lifetime up through the early 20th century, he was a ubiquitous figure whose writing inspired a generation of political reformers across the world to fight for more democratic government and for a

2/ more just and equal economy, deeply influencing men as diverse as Sun Yat-Sen, Winston Churchill, and Leo Tolstoy.

George was born in 1839 in Philadelphia, but disliked formal schooling and went to sea at the age of 15. After several years spent sailing between

3/ Australia and India, he settled down in San Francisco, where he married and began working in the newspaper business as a printer- a precarious position that once left his family on the verge of starvation. Eventually, he worked his way up through the printing

4/ industry and became a well regarded editor and journalist, at one point running his own newspaper. During this entire time, he contemplated seriously the prospect of the closing frontier and the newly urbanizing west- during his own life, he had seen California

5/ turn from a land where a dirt-poor Irish refugee could make $500 a month (about $19,000 a month today) as a cook in the gold camps to one where workingmen were homeless because of unemployment. Eventually, he had an epiphany- the difference between the old California

6/ and the new California was the land. “Like a flash it came over me that there was the reason of advancing poverty with advancing wealth. With the growth of population, land grows in value, and the men who work it must pay more for the privilege.” High wages in

7/ the early gold rush were due to the fact that the deposits were on public land. Anyone could go to them and work them without having to pay an owner for the privilege. If the lands had been owned by somebody, it would have been land-values instead of wages that

8/ would have shot up (as did happen with the discovery of the Comstock Lode in Nevada), and high rents would have made laborers poorer rather than richer.

Eventually, George published his ideas in a book titled “Progress and Poverty,” an economics text which drew

9/ heavily on Adam Smith and David Ricardo. In it, George systematically laid out an argument based on the ideas of John Locke that the Earth and its natural resources belong to mankind in common. Men own what they create with their labor, no one created the land,

10/ and so the land belongs to men in common. When land is privately owned, the rents it produces enrich the landowner at the expense of society, and cause seemingly intractable poverty. This is why, despite the Industrial Revolution dramatically increasing American

11/ productive power, workers lived in slums in squalid conditions and poverty and inequality reached lows never before seen in the country’s poorer days. The remedy George suggested would come to be known as his signature proposal: a single tax on the value of land.

12/ The book hit a nerve, and sold millions of copies. Across the United States, Single Tax Leagues formed to advocate for the taxation of land and promote George’s ideas. George himself traveled to Ireland, in the throes of famine and rent poverty, to stump for the relief

13/ of the Irish people from landlordism. (wealthandwant.com/HG/irish_land_…) His speeches reverberated across the British Isles, influencing members of England’s Liberal Party as well as a young George Bernard Shaw.

Unlike the socialists, Henry George was fundamentally a liberal.

14/ His argument was simply that liberalism was incomplete: it had originally been formed in opposition to the landowning aristocracy, and to successfully achieve economic equality and justice it must finish the task of overturning the monopolies- on land, on business, and on

15/ trade- that prevented the individual worker from achieving their full potential. His steadfast advocacy and clear speaking won him many friends even from those who should have been his enemies: streetcar monopolist Tom Johnson and railroad executive George Peabody were

16/ convinced that their fortunes had been unfairly acquired, and chose to allocate their ill-gotten wealth to destroying the system by which they obtained it.

The Single Tax movement behind George pushed a revolution in American politics. They championed municipal

17/ government and home rule as a method of implementing Henry George’s ideas. Tom Johnson, elected Mayor of Cleveland, started a nationwide movement for the municipalization of utilities and transit. Elsewhere, Georgists like William S. U’Ren were the motivating

18/ force in creating the initiative and referendum, through which citizens could submit proposals for legislation directly for a popular vote, a tactic they attempted to use to pass land value taxation schemes. Mark Twain endorsed the cause, writing Single Tax themes

19/ into his book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. When Henry George visited Australia, he was hailed as “The Man of the Century.”

Georgists were particularly active in the burgeoning US labor movement. The Knights of Labor, led by Terrence Powderly,

20/ advocated for George’s Single Tax. Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, was an active Georgist and threw his support behind what would come to be the peak of the movement: Henry George’s run for mayor of New York City in 1886, as a candidate

21/ for the United Labor Party. George lost the election under suspicious circumstances: New York City was firmly under the thumb of the Tammany Hall political machine, which was caught throwing boxes of votes into the river. He had come within a hair's breadth, but

22/ fell short. He did, however, beat a young Teddy Roosevelt, who was also running in the mayoral election that year.

George continued to campaign for land reform, but his uncompromising nature made him a poor political ally and his influence waned, as he refused

23/ to toe the line of either party or to cooperate with socialists. He died of a stroke in 1897, campaigning one last time for mayor of New York City. His funeral attracted over 200,000 people, making it one of the largest funerals in US history.

24/ The Single Tax Movement lasted well past his death and influenced world leaders abroad. José Martí, the Cuban revolutionary, advocated for the Single Tax in his Caribbean home. Leo Tolstoy wrote a letter to the London Times stating, “People do not argue with the teaching of

25/ George; they simply do not know it.” Sun Yet-Sen, the founder of the Republic of China, incorporated Georgism into his Three Principles. Winston Churchill and the Liberal Party under William Lloyd George made the land tax one of their signature proposals, and

26/ in fact passed it under the People’s Budget of 1911 until WWI intervened. In the US, Georgists were, ironically, influential in passing the income tax under the Wilson Administration, a tool they intended to use to tax rental income.

Eventually the movement declined

27/ due to difficult circumstances. The postwar era pressed hard on Georgist criticism of the American economy, between the Red Scare on the one hand and the prosperity of the 20’s lulling people into complacency on the other. Georgist opposition to the New Deal,

28/ which they saw as monopolistic and counterproductive, finally killed the political influence of the movement, which dwindled into obscurity in the Cold War era that brooked no nuance in the existential struggle of communism and capitalism. But the impact of the

29/ movement remains: Georgists implemented the secret ballot system as part of their attempts to reform elections, popularized the initiative and referendum, passed home rule for cities across the country, and began the municipalization of utilities. Outside the

30/ US, Georgists passed land taxation in Australia and New Zealand, inspired land reform in China, Taiwan, and Japan, and helped boost Winston Churchill to political power, and sound Georgist economics backs up the success of countries as different as Norway and Singapore today

Sources:
Christopher England's excellent thesis: repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/hand…

Albert Jay Nock's biography: wealthandwant.com/docs/Nock_HGUA…

Progress & Poverty Substack:
progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/georgism-in-…

progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/norways-sove…

progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/singapore-ec…

College students interested in Georgism should check out @YoungGeorgists: younggeorgists.org