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Throughout history, great leaders have observed that taxing land is a much better idea than taxing other things. And great thinkers have said that the natural bounty of the land belongs to all. And throughout history, great land owners have opposed them. For details, see http://www.progress.org/geonomy/thinkers.html The greatest promoter of Land Rent was Henry George. His book Progress and Poverty (1879) outsold every book of its era but the Bible. But he didn’t invent the idea. Land rent is as old as the idea of justice, for they are really the same thing. Land rent is often called Georgism, Geoism, Land Value Taxation, or The Single Tax.
Churchill was probably the most famous Georgist besides Henry George himself. Before the war he often spoke on the subject of land rent, but then the war forced his attention onto other things. "I have made speeches by the yard on the subject of land value taxation, and you know what a supporter I am of that policy." But land Value Taxation is a lot older than Churchill...
“In the market places, charge land-rent, but don't tax the goods; or make concise regulations and don't even charge rent. Do this, and all the merchants in the realm will be pleased and will want to set up shop in your markets. At the borders, make inspections but don't charge tariffs, then all the travelers in the realm will be pleased and will want to traverse your highways."
"Land monopoly ruined Rome."
"The earth of which they are born is common to all and, therefore, the fruit that the earth brings forth belongs without distinction to all."
"The whole soil should be public property."
"If all men were so far tenants to the public that the superfluities of grain and expense were applied to the exigencies thereof, it would put an end to taxes".
Land rent would be a "social advance equal to the inventions of writing and money."
"The fruits of the earth are a common heritage of all, to which each man has equal right."
"You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to no one."
"When the 'sacredness' of property is talked of, it should be remembered that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property.”
"The earth is given as a common stock for men to labor and to live on... Wherever in any country there are idle lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. Everyone may have land to labor for himself, if he chooses; or, preferring the exercise of any other industry, may exact for it such compensation as not only to afford a comfortable subsistence, but wherewith to provide for a cessation from labor in old age." (Notes on Virginia, 1791)
"Men did not make the earth ... it is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property... Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds... from this ground-rent ... I ... propose ... to create a National Fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person ... (a) sum." (Agrarian Justice, 1795-6)
"Who can or who could sell us the earth? Actually the earth belongs to these two: the almighty God and all his children who have ever worked on it or who will ever have worked on it or who will ever have to work on it. No generation of men can or could with even the highest solemnity and exertion sell the earth according to any other principle."
"The land, the earth God gave to man for his home, sustenance and support, should never be the possession of any man, corporation, society or unfriendly government, any more than the air or water if as much... an individual or company or enterprise requiring land should hold no more than is required for their home and sustenance, and never more than they have in actual use in the prudent management of their legitimate business, and this much should not be permitted when it creates an exclusive monopoly." (Abraham Lincoln and the Men of His Time, Browne, Dr. Robert)
"Whenever the ownership of the soil is so engrossed by a small part of the community that the far larger part are compelled to pay whatever the few may see fit to exact for the privilege of occupying and cultivating the Earth, there is something very much like slavery."
Tolstoy kept a photo of Henry George on his desk. His dying words to passengers on a train were to tax land alone. He once said this to the Russian Czar: "People do not argue with the teachings of George, they simply do not know it. And it is impossible to do otherwise with his teaching, for he who becomes acquainted with it cannot but agree.”
"The earth belongs to the people. I believe in the gospel of the Single Tax."
"We ought to tax all idle land the way Henry George said – tax it heavily, so that its owners would have to make it productive."
"Men like Henry George are rare, unfortunately. One cannot imagine a more beautiful combination of intellectual keenness, artistic form, and fervent love of justice."
"Who reads shall find in Henry George's philosophy a rare beauty and power of inspiration, and a splendid faith in the essential nobility of human nature."
"Land should be taxed as much as possible and improvements as little as possible."
In 1991, 30 economists, including three then Nobel-prize winners (one signer, William Vickrey, [pictured] winning the prize later), signed a letter to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev advising him that “It is important that the rent of land be retained as a source of government revenue” (Tideman, 1991, p. 226). Had this prescription been heeded either by this last Soviet president or his Russian successor, along with secure and untaxed property rights to labor and investments, the massive capital flight and the financial crises in large part due to tax evasion in Russia may well have been avoided. Nevertheless, this letter demonstrates that rent-based public finance continues to have adherents among economists of diverse backgrounds.
It is largely thanks to Henry George that New Yorkers have their common land, their city’s heart and lungs, Central Park. It was a Georgist, Emma Lazarus, who wrote the words that are inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It was a Georgist, Lizzie Magie, who invented the game of Monopoly (or rather, its predecessor, "The Landlord's Game") as a way to explain how land monopoly impoverishes everybody except the rich. Georgist Daniel C. Beard founded the Boy Scouts of America. Scopes lawyer Clarence Darrow was a Georgist. George Bernard Shaw was a Georgist. John Dewey was a Georgist. And Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell and numerous political leaders and economists, right up to the present day.
SummaryDr. E. F. Goldman, Princeton historian, wrote, "For some years prior to 1952 I was working on a history of American reform and over and over again my research ran into this fact: an enormous number of men and women, strikingly different people, men and women who were to lead 20th century America in a dozen fields of humane activity, wrote or told someone that their whole thinking had been redirected by reading Progress and Poverty in their formative years. In this respect no other book came anywhere near comparable influence, and I would like to add this word of tribute to a volume which magically catalyzed the best yearnings of our fathers and grandfathers." For more details, see http://www.progress.org/geonomy/thinkers.html |
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Mencius (c. 371 BC-?), great Chinese philosopher 
Pliny the Elder (AD 23-79) 
Pope St. Gregory The Great (540-604) 
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) 
William Penn (1644-1718) 
Mirabeau the Elder (1715-1789) 
Voltaire (1694-1778) 
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) 
John Locke (1632-1704) 
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) 
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) 
Horace Greeley (1811-1872) abolitionist 
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Helen Keller (1880-1968) 
Four Nobel prize winning economists
More about Henry George |
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