Henry George, a nineteenth century reformer who famously favored an finish to all taxes besides a levy on land, believed his system would permit us to “method” the “abolition of presidency” as a coercive power. He additionally wrote that his single tax might fund numerous public companies, remodeling the state into “a terrific co-operative society.” Relying on which manner you tilt your head, he can sound like he is both nearly an anarchist or nearly a social democrat.
In Land and Liberty, the Georgetown College historian Christopher William England reveals that each side of George’s pondering bore fruit after his dying.
Within the early twentieth century, George’s followers discovered houses in a bunch of progressive reform actions and progressive-run governments. However different followers—generally the identical followers—helped create up to date libertarianism. (Some even had a hand in up to date conservatism: He stored it low-key, however Nationwide Overview founder Invoice Buckley was a George fan.) By the point the New Deal arrived, Georgists generally discovered themselves lining up on reverse sides of the period’s debates.
Maybe as a result of he’s so laborious to categorise, George is commonly misremembered as a momentarily standard radical of the Gilded Age, his affect on later actions forgotten. England restores him to his place in political historical past, each within the U.S. and overseas. (George’s worldwide followers stretched from Cuba’s José Martí to China’s Solar Yat-sen—figures later honored in title however not in spirit by Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong.) And whereas England largely traces George’s affect on fashionable liberalism, he doesn’t ignore Georgism’s libertarian present. As he notes, even progressive-minded Georgists usually clashed with precise Progressives: Whereas the “dominant strands of Progressivism at the moment are seen versus individualism,” most Georgists “had been classically liberal, individualistic, and even libertarian on questions like vice enforcement and regulation.”
