Henry George

Henry George was born in Philadelphia, went to sea as a young man and worked as a printer and journalist in California, where he became managing editor of a San Francisco newspaper. Watching land values soar while poverty persisted, he wrote Progress and Poverty (1879), which became a bestseller and challenged widely accepted doctrines of property rights and laissez-faire. He moved to New York City, ran for mayor in 1886 as the United Labor Party nominee and finished second. He ran again in 1897 and died of a stroke four days before the election.

George's ideas, known as Georgism, inspired a political movement in the United States, land value tax campaigns and parties in several countries, and Sun Yat-sen's economic program for China. Economists including Milton Friedman have called a tax on unimproved land value the least bad tax. Critics argue that site values are themselves created by improvements to neighboring land, so the tax is not as neutral as George claimed, and that taxing the full value of resources such as minerals would discourage exploration and production. Defenders of private landholding opposed his plan as an attack on established property rights, while admirers see it as a way to share unearned wealth.