Wikipedia Deep Dive

Henry George

13 min read

The Man Who Almost Changed Everything

In 1886, a self-educated former sailor and typesetter came within a whisker of becoming mayor of New York City. He finished ahead of Theodore Roosevelt. The man who beat him, Tammany Hall's candidate, likely did so through fraud. Had things gone differently, American economic history might have taken a radically different turn.

His name was Henry George, and he had one big idea: tax land, not labor.

That might sound like a minor policy tweak. It wasn't. George believed this single change could eliminate poverty, prevent economic crashes, and create something approaching utopia. Millions of people agreed with him. His book Progress and Poverty, published in 1879, sold more copies worldwide than any economics book before or since. Workers, intellectuals, and reformers across the English-speaking world rallied to his cause.

Then he died during his second mayoral campaign, and his movement slowly faded from mainstream consciousness.

But his ideas never quite went away.

From Poverty to Philosophy

George didn't arrive at his economic theories through academic study. He arrived at them through hunger.

Born in Philadelphia in 1839 to a lower-middle-class family, George was the second of ten children. His father published religious texts and sent him to the Episcopal Academy, but George chafed against formal education. He left without graduating, convinced his father to hire a tutor instead, and spent his teenage years devouring books and attending public lectures at the Franklin Institute.

At fourteen, his formal education ended entirely. At fifteen, he shipped out as a cabin boy on a vessel bound for Australia and India.

By 1858, he'd washed up in San Francisco, briefly considered gold prospecting, and settled for work as a typesetter. It was there he met Annie Corsina Fox, an orphan from Sydney living with a disapproving uncle. The uncle thought George too poor to marry his niece. They eloped anyway, Henry in a borrowed suit, Annie carrying only a packet of books.

The poverty that followed was real and crushing. After the birth of their second child, George found himself with no work, no money, and a starving family. He walked the streets of San Francisco and approached a well-dressed stranger. George later admitted he had decided to rob the man if he wouldn't help.

The stranger gave him five dollars.

This wasn't an abstraction for George. When he later wrote about poverty amid plenty, he knew exactly what he was talking about.

The Revelation on the Hill

George worked his way up through journalism, eventually becoming managing editor of the San Francisco Times. He wrote editorials that became required reading in California schools for decades. But the intellectual breakthrough that would define his life came in 1871.

He was out on a horseback ride overlooking San Francisco Bay when he stopped to rest. A teamster passed by, and George, making idle conversation, asked what land was worth in the area.

The teamster pointed to some cows grazing in the distance, so far away they looked like mice. "I don't know exactly," he said, "but there's a man over there who will sell some land for a thousand dollars an acre."

George later described what followed as a flash of insight. Land was becoming more valuable as California's population grew. But who was creating that value? Not the landowners. The workers, the builders, the people flooding into the state—they were the ones making the land worth more. Yet it was the landowners who captured that value, while the workers who created it paid ever more for the privilege of living and working on it.

A visit to New York City deepened the puzzle. The poor in that long-established city were actually worse off than the poor in still-developing California. How could this be? If progress and development were supposed to lift all boats, why were people drowning?

Progress and Poverty

The answer became a 600-page book that would make George famous.

Progress and Poverty tackled what George saw as the central paradox of industrial civilization: why did poverty persist and even worsen as society became wealthier and more technologically advanced? The standard explanations—overpopulation, insufficient capital, moral failings of the poor—didn't satisfy him.

His answer centered on land.

Here's the logic, stripped to its essentials. When you work, you create value. When you build something, you create value. When you invent something, you create value. But land is different. Land is fixed in supply—they're not making any more of it, as Mark Twain supposedly quipped. When population grows and the economy develops, land becomes more valuable. But that value wasn't created by the landowner. It was created by everyone else—by the growth of the community, by public investments in roads and utilities, by the labor of workers who make the area productive and desirable.

George thought it profoundly unjust that landowners could sit back and collect this "unearned increment" while workers paid taxes on everything they produced. The solution seemed obvious: stop taxing labor and production. Instead, tax land values.

A land value tax, George argued, would be impossible to evade—you can hide income, but you can't hide land. It would discourage speculation, because holding vacant land and waiting for prices to rise would become expensive. It would encourage development, because improving your property wouldn't increase your tax bill. And it would capture for the community the value that the community created.

George believed you could fund the entire government this way—hence the term "single tax" that his followers adopted. He thought this one reform could do more to eliminate poverty than all the charity and welfare programs ever devised.

The Gospel Spreads

Modern readers might be surprised at just how popular this message proved.

George wasn't some marginal figure shouting into the void. Progress and Poverty sold over three million copies at a time when the United States population was around fifty million. The book was translated into dozens of languages. George undertook speaking tours across America, Britain, Ireland, and Australia. Crowds packed venues to hear him.

The labor economist George Soule later wrote that Henry George was "by far the most famous American economic writer" and "author of a book which probably had a larger world-wide circulation than any other work on economics ever written."

His ideas influenced an astonishing range of people. Leo Tolstoy was a devotee. Sun Yat-sen, father of the Chinese Republic, incorporated Georgist principles into his political philosophy. George Bernard Shaw said reading George converted him to socialism—though George himself emphatically rejected socialism and remained a champion of free markets and free trade.

This is one of the most interesting aspects of George's legacy: he appealed across ideological lines. He was a radical critic of inequality who believed in private property. He championed labor but opposed tariffs that many labor leaders considered essential. He was a journalist who befriended both Irish nationalist revolutionaries and English free traders.

The Political Campaigns

In 1886, labor organizations in New York City drafted George to run for mayor on the United Labor Party ticket.

The campaign electrified the city. George wasn't just running on abstract theory—he was offering a concrete program that promised to redistribute wealth from landlords to workers without confiscating private property or seizing the means of production. It was a radical message wrapped in respectable clothing.

He came in second place with about 31 percent of the vote, beating Theodore Roosevelt, who came in third. The winner, Tammany Hall's Abram Stevens Hewitt, almost certainly benefited from electoral fraud. George's supporters believed he had actually won.

The following year, George ran for New York Secretary of State and finished a distant third. The United Labor Party was fracturing. It contained Georgists who wanted to tax land, Marxists who wanted to abolish private property entirely, Catholics increasingly uncomfortable with George's relationship with the excommunicated priest Father Edward McGlynn, and protectionists who couldn't stomach George's passionate advocacy for free trade.

George made things harder for himself. He was principled to a fault, refusing to soften his positions to hold the coalition together. His attacks on tariffs alienated Terrence Powderly, president of the Knights of Labor, one of his most important allies.

By 1897, when George mounted another mayoral campaign, he was a diminished figure. He had suffered a stroke in 1890 during a speaking tour and never fully recovered. His doctors warned him that the strain of campaigning could kill him.

He campaigned anyway. On October 29, 1897, four days before the election, he suffered another stroke and died. He was fifty-eight years old. His son, Henry George Jr., replaced him on the ballot but finished a distant fourth.

The Complicated Legacy

Reading about Henry George today means confronting some deeply uncomfortable material.

His economic ideas may have been ahead of their time, but his racial views were very much of his time—or worse. His first nationally prominent writing was an 1869 essay arguing for an end to Chinese immigration before Chinese immigrants "overrun" the western United States. When California called a constitutional convention in 1878, George aligned himself with the virulently anti-Chinese Workingmen's Party led by Denis Kearney, though he later broke with Kearney personally.

His campaign rhetoric is jarring to read today. He asked audiences to imagine Chinese voters electing a "canting hypocrite from the East," filling the legislature with "Chinamen" and "whites from the Barbary Coast," creating "Chinese militia, Chinese policemen, Chinese judges and Chinese school directors." He cast Black Americans in the South and Chinese in the West as "tools of the corporations and the rich, and as threats to white manhood."

This was standard rhetoric in nineteenth-century California politics, but that doesn't make it less repellent. It's worth noting because George's followers often present him as a pure-hearted prophet of justice, and the historical record is considerably more complicated.

Why Land Taxes Failed (And Keep Trying)

If George's ideas were so popular, why didn't they triumph?

Part of the answer is simple: landowners didn't want them to. The people who owned the most valuable land—and who therefore would have paid the most under a land value tax—were also the people with the most political power. Railroad magnates, real estate speculators, and mining interests fought George tooth and nail. When he ran for the California State Assembly in 1871, the Central Pacific Railroad's executives personally worked to defeat him.

Part of the answer is theoretical. Critics argued that a "single tax" on land couldn't possibly fund modern government, that distinguishing land value from improvement value was impossible in practice, that capital and land weren't as different as George claimed. Mainstream economics moved in other directions—toward marginalist revolution, Keynesian macroeconomics, monetarism, and other frameworks that didn't place land at the center of the analysis.

Part of the answer is political. George's movement couldn't hold together. The coalition of labor unions, reformers, single-taxers, and progressives that briefly united behind him splintered over tariffs, religion, and the relationship between Georgism and socialism.

And part of the answer is tragic timing. George died young, at the height of a campaign that might have revived his movement. His followers carried on—Georgist communities were established in Delaware and Alabama, and his ideas influenced land policy in Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan—but without the charismatic founder, the movement gradually faded.

The Economist Everyone Ignores

Here's the strange thing about Henry George: mainstream economists largely agree with him about land value taxation, even though hardly anyone implements it.

Milton Friedman, the patron saint of free-market economics, called the land value tax "the least bad tax." It doesn't distort economic behavior the way income or sales taxes do. It can't be evaded. It captures value that would otherwise be pure windfall for landowners. In theory, it's exactly what you want in a tax.

Yet almost no jurisdiction relies primarily on land value taxation. Property taxes typically lump land and buildings together. Political attempts to shift the tax burden onto land and off of improvements have mostly failed or remained small experiments.

Why? The obvious answer is that landowners vote and lobby. The more interesting answer might be psychological. People understand taxes on income—you earned it, so you owe some of it. They understand taxes on purchases—you bought it, so you pay a bit more. But taxes on land value feel like taxes on something you already own, on wealth that's just sitting there. Never mind that George's whole point was that you didn't create that value. It feels unfair.

George's followers continue to push for land value taxation, and every few years some city or economist rediscovers his arguments. Pittsburgh experimented with split-rate taxation, taxing land at a higher rate than buildings, for decades before abandoning the system. Estonia uses a land value tax for most of its local government revenue. The idea keeps bubbling up in housing policy debates, especially in cities where land values have soared far beyond anything workers can afford.

The Prophet of Rent

In the end, Henry George was trying to answer a question that still haunts us: why does economic progress leave so many people behind?

His answer—that landowners capture an ever-growing share of society's wealth simply by owning something fixed and scarce—may not be the whole story. But it's clearly part of the story. Look at any major city where rents consume half of workers' incomes, where teachers and nurses can't afford to live in the communities they serve, where wealth increasingly means owning property rather than building things.

George saw all this coming in 1879. He watched California boom and asked why the workers building the railroads weren't sharing in the prosperity they created. He noticed that the people who got rich weren't the ones doing the work—they were the ones who owned the land the work was done on.

With the growth of population, land grows in value, and the men who work it must pay more for the privilege.

A century and a half later, we're still paying.