AbstractsEconomics

Henry George, the champion of the single tax movement in the United States, was born in Philadelphia, September 2, 1839. After a brief schooling he tried sailoring for one voyage, and then became an apprentice printer. At the age of eighteen he migrated to California in search of better work and higher pay. He became an itinerant printer, then later gave up this end of the work to become a reporter and editor. The fact that he was in San Francisco during the boom period and saw the coming of the transcontinental railroad, led to his first economic writinJS. The article, "What the Railroad Will Bring Us," was published in the Overland Monthly, and shows his power of inductive inference, although it was not a literary masterpiece. On a business trip to New York, he was struck by the sight of filth and poverty so rampant, side by side with great wealth . Years before he had been curious as to the reason that wages are higher in new sections or countries, than they are in older sections. The two questions were combined and answered in his pamphlet Our Land and Land Policy which he published in 1871. He proposed to solve the problem of "advancing poverty with advancing wealth," by absorbing the "unearned increment" of John Stuart Mill, through a land tax. After a number of years of mulling over the pamphlet in his mind, between his job as an editor and his work as a political orator, he amplified this essay into Progress and Poverty, published in 1880. After a slow beginning, the book caught the attention of the public, and George was famous. He had moved to New York, meanwhile, and the rest of his life was spent lecturing and writing, both here and abroad. He was associated with the Irish Land Reform movement, and made two lecture tours of Great Britain in its behalf. He was a great orator, one of the best of his day. In 1886, he ran for the mayoralty of New York, on a coalition ticket, but lost by a narrow margin. He entered politics twice again, once in the race for the Secretary of the State of New York, and, just before his death, again for the mayoralty. He was not successful at any time. In the middle of his last campaign he died; the date was October 28, 1897. The chief problem always in Henry George's mind was poverty. He felt that the "wage -fund" theory (which maintained that wages tended to a minimum because there was a fixed fund of capital set aside for the payment of wages, and every increase in the number of laborers decreased the individual share of each laborer) was wrong, for he said that wages are not paid out of capital but out of product. George regarded labor and capital as but different forms of the same thing – human exertion. Only these two are productive. Rent is an unearned increment, and it reduces wages and interest by its total amount. His problem, in the final analysis, was to find the best method of freeing the real producers of wealth by dispossessing the holders of the unearned increment. The solution of the problem, as advanced by Henry George, was to remove the cause of the…