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Wealth and Want | |||||||
... because democracy alone is not enough to produce widely shared prosperity. | |||||||
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Great
Minds Think Alike
Henry George read widely but was
largely self-educated. Progress and Poverty (self-published in
1879, published more widely beginning in the following year) is his
"working out" of what he observed in his travels. But other
people had arrived at many of these ideas long before George, and at
roughly the same time, the Bishop of Meath in Ireland wrote a long
letter to the clergy and laity of his diocese. George mentions in
his speech "The Land for the People"
that at the time he wrote it, Dr. Nulty had never heard of
George.
William Oglivie: An Essay on the Right of Property in Land (1782)
Wherever these
phenomena are to be seen the natural element on
which and from which all men must live, if they are to live at all,
is the property, not of the whole people, but of the few. We
point to
the adequate cure; the restoration to all men of their natural rights
in the soil — the assurance to every child, as it comes into the
world, of the enjoyment of its natural heritage — the right to
live, the right to work, the right to enjoy the fruits of its work;
rights necessarily conditioned upon the equal right to that element
which is the basis of production; that element which is indispensable
to human life; that element which is the standing place, the
storehouse, the reservoir of men; that element from which all that is
physical in man is drawn. For our bodies, themselves, they come from
the land, and to the land they return again; we, ourselves, are as
much children of the soil as are the flowers or the trees. We call
ourselves today Single Tax men. It is only recently, within a few
years, that we have adopted that title.
It is not a new title; over a
hundred years ago there arose in
France a school of philosophers and patriots — Quesnay, Turgot,
Condorcet, Dupont — most illustrious men of their time, who
advocated, as the cure for all social ills, the impôt unique,
the Single Tax. We here, on this western continent, as the nineteenth
century draws to a close, have revived the same name, and we find
enormous advantages in it. ... Read the entire article |
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Wealth
and Want
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www.wealthandwant.com
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... because democracy
alone hasn't yet led to a society in which all can
prosper
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