My gentle Georgist grandparents tried for years to turn my attention toward seeing that there was one underlying problem. While we agreed on the manifestations, I could not — would not — see what they were trying to tell me: that under most of the social, economic and justice problems we saw around us, there was a single underlying cause. It sounded like conspiracy theory to me, and just didn't register.

Now I've found myself circling back to see if I could see what they saw, and I've spent a number of years in a hypothesis-testing mode. Their hypothesis has held, and in the process, I've read many of the things that I found in their files and bookshelves, and I have come to the conclusion that they — and Henry George — had it right.

It isn't that all of our social, economic and justice problems will simply evaporate completely when we as a society enact the reform Henry George recommended. Rather, it is that the primary cause will be removed, and while there may still be come poverty, some injustice, some social problems, a huge thick layer of the structural cause of each will be gone. What will remain of these problems will be easily within our ability to ease. Today, the things we try to do to ease poverty's effects don't do much to reduce poverty. But with the underlying cause gone, those same efforts will be very effective.

By all means approach this skeptically. I certainly did. But don't ignore it.

Henry George: The Crime of Poverty  (1885 speech)

Did you ever think of the utter absurdity and strangeness of the fact that, all over the civilised world, the working classes are the poor classes? Go into any city in the world, and get into a cab and ask the man to drive you where the working people live. He won't take you to where the fine houses are. He will take you, on the contrary, into the squalid quarters, the poorer quarters. Did you ever think how curious that is? Think for a moment how it would strike a rational being who had never been on the earth before, if such an intelligence could come down, and you were to explain to him how we live on earth, how houses and food and clothing, and all the many things we need were all produced by work, would he not think that the working people would be the people who lived in the finest houses and had most of everything that work produces? Yet, whether you took him to London or Paris or New York, or even to Burlington, he would find that those called the working people were the people who live in the poorest houses.

All this is strange — just think of it. We naturally despise poverty; and it is reasonable that we should. I do not say — I distinctly repudiate it — that the people who are poor are poor always from their own fault, or even in most cases; but it ought to be so. If any good man or woman could create a world, it would be a sort of a world in which no one would be poor unless he was lazy or vicious. But that is just precisely the kind of a world this is; that is just precisely the kind of a world the Creator has made. Nature gives to labour, and to labour alone; there must be human work before any article of wealth can be produced; and in the natural state of things the man who toiled honestly and well would be the rich man, and he who did not work would be poor. We have so reversed the order of nature that we are accustomed to think of the workingman as a poor man.

We talk about over-production. How can there be such a thing as over-production while people want? All these things that are said to be over-produced are desired by many people. Why do they not get them? They do not get them because they have not the means to buy them; not that they do not want them. Why have not they the means to buy them? They earn too little. When the great masses of men have to work for an average of $1.40 a day, it is no wonder that great quantities of goods cannot be sold.

Now why is it that men have to work for such low wages? Because if they were to demand higher wages there are plenty of unemployed men ready to step into their places. It is this mass of unemployed men who compel that fierce competition that drives wages down to the point of bare subsistence. Why is it that there are men who cannot get employment? Did you ever think what a strange thing it is that men cannot find employment? Adam had no difficulty in finding employment; neither had Robinson Crusoe; the finding of employment was the last thing that troubled them.

If men cannot find an employer, why cannot they employ themselves? Simply because they are shut out from the element on which human labour can alone be exerted. Men are compelled to compete with each other for the wages of an employer, because they have been robbed of the natural opportunities of employing themselves; because they cannot find a piece of God's world on which to work without paving some other human creature for the privilege.

I do not mean to say that even after you had set right this fundamental injustice, there would not be many things to do; but this I do mean to say, that our treatment of land lies at the bottom of all social questions. This I do mean to say, that, do what you please, reform as you may, you never can get rid of wide-spread poverty so long as the element on which and from which all men must live is made the private property of some men. It is utterly impossible. Reform government — get taxes down to the minimum — build railroads; institute co-operative stores; divide profits, if you choose, between employers and employed-and what will be the result? The result will be that the land will increase in value — that will be the result — that and nothing else. Experience shows this. Do not all improvements simply increase the value of land — the price that some must pay others for the privilege of living?  ... read the whole speech

Men do not overwork themselves because they like it; it is not in the nature of the mother’s heart to send children to work when they ought to be at play; not of choice will laborers work in dangerous and insanitary conditions.

These things, like overcrowding, come from the sting of poverty. And so long as the poverty of which they are an expression is left untouched, such restrictions can have only partial and evanescent results. The cause remaining, repression in one place can only bring out its effects in other places, and the task assigned to the State is as hopeless as to ask it to lower the level of the ocean by bailing out the sea.  ...  read the whole article

Henry George: Progress & Poverty: Introductory: The Problem

Now, however, we are coming into collision with facts which there can be no mistaking. From all parts of the civilized world come complaints;

• of industrial depression;
• of labor condemned to involuntary idleness;
• of capital massed and wasting;
• of pecuniary distress among business men;
• of want and suffering and anxiety among the working classes.

All the dull, deadening pain, all the keen, maddening anguish, that to great masses of men are involved in the words "hard times," afflict the world today. This state of things, common to communities differing so widely in situation, in political institutions, in fiscal and financial systems, in density of population and in social organization can hardly be accounted for by local causes.

• There is distress where large standing armies are maintained, but there is also distress where the standing armies are nominal;
• there is distress where protective tariffs stupidly and wastefully hamper trade, but there is also distress where trade is nearly free;
• there is distress where autocratic government yet prevails, but there is also distress where political power is wholly in the hands of the people;
• in countries where paper is money, and
• in countries where gold and silver are the only currency.

Evidently, beneath all such things as these, we must infer a common cause.

That there is a common cause, and that it is either what we call material progress or something closely connected with material progress, becomes more than an inference when it is noted that the phenomena we class together and speak of as industrial depression, are but intensifications of phenomena which always accompany material progress, and which show themselves more clearly and strongly as material progress goes on. Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are most fully realized — that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed — we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most enforced idleness. ... read the entire chapter

H.G. Brown: Significant Paragraphs from Henry George's Progress & Poverty: 14 Liberty, and Equality of Opportunity (in the unabridged P&P: Part X: The Law of Human Progress — Chapter 5: The Central Truth)

Our primary social adjustment is a denial of justice. In allowing one man to own the land on which and from which other men must live, we have made them his bondsmen in a degree which increases as material progress goes on. This is the subtle alchemy that in ways they do not realize is extracting from the masses in every civilized country the fruits of their weary toil; that is instituting a harder and more hopeless slavery in place of that which has been destroyed; that is bringing political despotism out of political freedom, and must soon transmute democratic institutions into anarchy.

It is this that turns the blessings of material progress into a curse. It is this that crowds human beings into noisome cellars and squalid tenement houses; that fills prisons and brothels; that goads men with want and consumes them with greed; that robs women of the grace and beauty of perfect womanhood; that takes from little children the joy and innocence of life's morning. ... read the whole chapter

Weld Carter: A Clarion Call to Sanity, to Honesty, to Justice

Our problem today, as yesterday, and the days before, back to the earliest recorded times, is POVERTY.

There are times when this problem is lesser. We call these "booms." There are also times when the problem is greatly exacerbated. These are called "busts." But, as the Bible says, "the poor have ye always with ye."

The purpose of this paper is to explore the core of the problem. It is not the position that there is only one single error afoot in our social organizations. There may be several, there may be only a few things to remedy. The position is, as stated earlier, that there is one basic cause of the problem. Therefore, the removal of this one basic error is the first, the primary step, for the simple reason that, until this basic social evil is eradicated, no other reform will avail. We will simply continue the boom and bust cycles until the economies of the whole world are wrecked by inflation or by a nuclear war triggered by the ongoing economic disaster.

Let us begin this study of the likely causes of our troubles by asking two questions:

• Are we over-populated?
• Are the earth's resources inadequate for this population?  ...

In our economy, land is a ready object of speculation, and its value is constantly reflecting this evil. What happens in a rising market, the up side of a business cycle, is that investors see rising prices in land as indicative of a boom. Thereupon, they try to increase their holdings in such land, only to discover that their present returns will not pay for the present costs of land; the current price of land is not based on what the yield of that land is today, but on what it is projected to be two or three years from now. The difference tends to increase until a point is reached where the imarginal buyer of land suddenly finds himself unable to meet the rising costs to which he has subjected himself. With bankruptcy threatening him or having already been forced upon him, the land passes from his hands, and the market temporarily becomes overpriced. The bankruptcies increase, and ultimately land values are brought back to levels which represent current productivity, at which point the new boom will have started.

The wringing out of land speculation from the dynamics of economics will remove that unacknowledged offence which has so labored the economic profession and the public at large. As Henry George discovered and as Homer Hoyt so brilliantly depicted speculative land prices as the cause of this bitter cycle, so will its removal rid society of this hitherto hidden defect. It will put the land market on a current value basis and eliminate the terrible risks to which that market has always been subject in the past.

The reason for such speculation under the present practices is obvious. All products of labor are subject to increases or decreases depending on supply and demand. When an oversupply of any commodity begins to rear its ugly head, prices tend downward and production is thereby lessened until there is a contrary swing upward. Land, on the other hand, is of fixed supply. Nothing man does can increase or decrease the amount of land, and therefore that brake that operates in the field of production does not apply to land values and prices.

Just think of the social benefits that would accrue to a society that could, at a stroke, rid itself of the potential hazards to which all prior societies have been so subject. Production will then occur on a steadily rising level, demand increases as the well-being of society improves, new techniques develop, new inventions are made, and all these will be benefits to the community as a whole, and not just to the land-owners as in the past.

This occurs every day in this country. A new road is built, or a superhighway is constructed, which makes access to a particular site much easier. We tell ourselves that we justify this as an expenditure of public funds by the benefits that accrue to the traveling public; but the benefits go, in the form of higher land prices and rents, to the owners of the sites that are served by this new road. If you doubt this, consider the jockeying for the insider information or for influence over the selection.

... Any reader will recognize this chain of events and set of economic relationships as being the course of everyday life and business at the local, state and national level. The cynic would say that a primary motivation for entering local or even national politics would be the opportunity for personal gain offered daily by publicly financed improvements.

Thus, the benefits of a tax-supported public work accrued once more not to the benefit of the public at large, but to that of a very limited and narrowly defined class, those who were rich enough to own land in that location.

What is the law of human progress? 

George saw ours alone among the civilizations of the world as still progressing; all others had either petrified or had vanished. And in our civilization he had already detected alarming evidences of corruption and decay. So he sought out the forces that create civilization and the forces that destroy it.

He found the incentives to progress to be the desires inherent in human nature, and the motor of progress to be what he called mental power. But the mental power that is available for progress is only what remains after nonprogressive demands have been met. These demands George listed as maintenance and conflict.

In his isolated state, primitive man's powers are required simply to maintain existence; only as he begins to associate in communities and to enjoy the resultant economies is mental power set free for higher uses. Hence, association is the first essential of progress:

And as the wasteful expenditure of mental power in conflict becomes greater or less as the moral law which accords to each an equality of rights is ignored or is recognized, equality (or justice) is the second essential of progress.

Thus association in equality is the law of progress. Association frees mental power for expenditure in improvement, and equality, or justice, or freedom -- for the terms here signify the same thing, the recognition of the moral law -- prevents the dissipation of this power in fruitless struggles.

He concluded this phase of his analysis of civilization in these words: "The law of human progress, what is it but the moral law? Just as social adjustments promote justice, just as they acknowledge the equality of right between man and man, just as they insure to each the perfect liberty which is bounded only by the equal liberty of every other, must civilization advance. Just as they fail in this, must advancing civilization come to a halt and recede..." 

However, as the primary relation of man is to the earth, so must the primary social adjustment concern the relation of man to the earth. Only that social adjustment which affords all mankind equal access to nature and which insures labor its full earnings will promote justice, acknowledge equality of right between man and man, and insure perfect liberty to each.

This, according to George, was what the single tax would do. It was why he saw the single tax as not merely a fiscal reform but as the basic reform without which no other reform could, in the long run, avail. This is why he said, "What is inexplicable, if we lose sight of man's absolute and constant dependence upon land, is clear when we recognize it."... read the whole article