Henry George
Henry George
Henry Georgewas an American political economist, journalist, and philosopher. George is famous for popularizing the idea that land/resource rents be captured for public use or shared, in lieu of harmful taxes on labor and productive investment. The philosophy and reform movement were known in George's time as 'Single-Tax'. His immensely popular writing is credited with sparking several reform movements of the Progressive Era and ultimately inspiring the broad economic philosophy that is today often referred to as Georgism, the main...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth2 September 1839
CountryUnited States of America
As it is with an individual, so it is with a nation. One must produce to have, or one will become a have-not.
Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.
Whoever becomes imbued with a noble idea kindles a flame from which other torches are lit, and influences those with whom he comes in contact, be they few or many. How far that influence, thus perpetuated, may extend, it is not given to him here to see.
What would happen to the individual if all the functions of the body were placed under the control of the consciousness is what would happen to a nation in which all individual activities were directed by government.
At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that laborsaving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past... From Progress and Poverty, To those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state and would strive for its attainment.
The tolerance of wrong dulls our sense of its injustice. Men may become accustomed to theft, murder, even to slavery - that sum of all villainies - so they see no injustice in it, yet that which is unjust is unjust still.
Man must be doing something, or fancy that he is doing something, for in him throbs the creative impulse; the mere basker in the sunshine is not a natural, but an abnormal man.
The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.
A good, very good, not to say admirable schoolmaster, but then he is only a schoolmaster.
Progressive societies outgrow institutions as children outgrow clothes.
How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?
Abolish all taxation save that upon land values.
The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.
That alone is wise which is just; that alone is enduring which is right.