Henry George

Henry George
Born	(1839-09-02)September 2, 1839 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	October 29, 1897(1897-10-29) (aged 58) New York City, U.S.
Notable work	Progress and Poverty (1879) Protection or Free Trade (1886)
Spouse	Annie Corsina Fox ​ (m. 1861)​
Children	Henry George Jr. Anna George de Mille
Era	Modern philosophy 19th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy American philosophy
School	Georgism
Main interests	Economics Comparative Ethics Land Philosophy Ethics Politics
Notable ideas	Citizen's dividend Free public goods from land value capture Georgism Land value tax Municipalization Monetary sovereignty Single tax Spaceship Earth Theory of land monopoly Unearned income

Henry George (September 2, 1839 – October 29, 1897) was an American political economist and journalist. His writing was immensely popular in 19th-century America and sparked several reform movements of the Progressive Era. He inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism, the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value of land (including natural resources) should belong equally to all members of society. George famously argued that a single tax on land values would create a more productive and just society.

His most famous work, Progress and Poverty (1879), sold millions of copies worldwide.^[1] The treatise investigates the paradox of increasing inequality and poverty amid economic and technological progress, the business cycle with its cyclic nature of industrialized economies, and the use of rent capture such as land value taxation and other anti-monopoly reforms as a remedy for these and other social problems.

Other works by George defended free trade, the secret ballot, free (at marginal cost) public utilities/transportation provided by the capture of their resulting land rent uplift, Pigouvian taxation, and public ownership of other natural monopolies.

George was a journalist for many years, and the popularity of his writing and speeches brought him to run for election as Mayor of New York City in 1886.^[2] As the United Labor Party nominee in 1886 and in 1897 as the Jefferson Democracy Party nominee, he received 31 percent and 4 percent of the vote respectively and finished ahead of former New York State Assembly minority leader Theodore Roosevelt in the first race. After his death during the second campaign, his ideas were carried forward by organizations and political leaders through the United States and other Anglophone countries. The mid-20th century labor economist and journalist George Soule wrote that George was by far "the most famous American economic writer" and "author of a book which probably had a larger world-wide circulation than any other work on economics ever written."^[3]