The Last Tax: Henry George and the Social Politics of Land Reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

In the aftermath of one of the nation's worst economic disasters---the economic depression of the 1870s---the California journalist Henry George strived to understand a distinctive dilemma of modern industrial capitalism: how could an era of unprecedented economic growth and industrial output produce widespread poverty, unemployment, financial panic, and acute inequality of wealth? The result of George's investigation was Progress and Poverty (1879). The book challenged widely accepted doctrines of property rights and laissez-faire and changed the way many people thought about and understood the political economy.;George proposed a deceptively simple solution to the problems of economic inequality and industrial depression. In contrast to other social commentators of his era, who attributed economic disruptions to overproduction or unsound monetary policies, George singled out one of the most cherished institutions of liberal capitalist societies: private property in land. He called for the replacement of all federal, state, and local taxes with one tax on the full value, or market price of land---a proposal that became known as "the single tax." Unlike the general property tax which taxed the value of land and buildings, the single tax only applied to the value of land. Furthermore, the single tax only reached land upon which value had attached as a result of location and natural fertility.;Although the single tax was never fully implemented anywhere in the world, George's concept inspired and animated many of the most notable social reform movements of the era of high industrialism including socialism, labor activism, and the Social Gospel. More than any other late-nineteenth century reformer, George reintroduced land and the concept of economic rent into political economic debates that had in recent years become heavily focused on the clash of capital versus labor. As a result, the issues of land ownership and land distribution remained important components of Gilded Age and Progressive Era reforms and policies.