63 Facts About Henry George

Henry George was an American political economist and journalist.

Henry George's writing was immensely popular in 19th-century America and sparked several reform movements of the Progressive Era.

Henry George 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 should belong equally to all members of society.

Henry 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.

Henry George's father was a publisher of religious texts and a devout Episcopalian, and he sent George to the Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia.

Henry George chafed at his religious upbringing and left the academy without graduating.

Henry George ended up in the American West in 1858 and briefly considered prospecting for gold but instead started work the same year in San Francisco as a type setter.

In California, Henry George fell in love with Annie Corsina Fox from Sydney, Australia.

Henry George had been orphaned and was living with an uncle.

Henry George was raised as an Episcopalian, but he believed in "deistic humanitarianism".

Henry George was able to immediately submit editorials for publication, including the popular What the Railroads Will Bring Us, which remained required reading in California schools for decades.

Henry George climbed the ranks of the Times, eventually becoming managing editor in the summer of 1867.

Henry George worked for several papers, including four years as editor of his own newspaper, the San Francisco Daily Evening Post, and for a time running the Reporter, a Democratic anti-monopoly publication.

Henry George experienced four tough years of trying to keep his newspaper afloat and was eventually forced to go to the streets to beg.

The Henry George family struggled, but Henry George's improving reputation and involvement in the newspaper industry lifted them from poverty.

Henry George began as a Lincoln Republican, but then became a Democrat.

Henry George was a strong critic of railroad and mining interests, corrupt politicians, land speculators, and labor contractors.

One day in 1871 Henry George went for a horseback ride and stopped to rest while overlooking San Francisco Bay.

Henry George later wrote of the revelation that he had:.

Henry George was in a position to discover this pattern, having experienced poverty himself, knowing many different societies from his travels, and living in California at a time of rapid growth.

In 1880, now a popular writer and speaker, Henry George moved to New York City, becoming closely allied with the Irish nationalist community despite being of English ancestry.

In 1886, Henry George campaigned for mayor of New York City as the candidate of the United Labor Party, the short-lived political society of the United Labor Party.

Henry George polled second, more than the Republican candidate Theodore Roosevelt.

The election was won by Tammany Hall candidate Abram Stevens Hewitt by what many of Henry George's supporters believed was fraud.

In 1897, Henry George again ran for mayor of New York City.

Henry George is best known for his argument that the economic rent of land should be shared by society.

Henry George believed it would remove existing incentives toward land speculation and encourage development, as landlords would not suffer tax penalties for any industry or edifice constructed on their land and could not profit by holding valuable sites vacant.

However, in Progress and Poverty, Henry George did not favor the idea of nationalization.

Henry George considered businesses relying on exclusive right-of-way land privilege to be "natural" monopolies.

Henry George advocated that these systems of transport along "public ways" should usually be managed as public utilities and provided for free or at marginal cost.

In some cases, it might be possible to allow competition between private service providers along public "rights of way," such as parcel shipping companies that operate on public roads, but wherever competition would be impossible, Henry George supported complete municipalization.

Henry George said that these services would be provided for free because investments in beneficial public goods always tend to increase land values by more than the total cost of those investments.

Henry George used the example of urban buildings that provide free vertical transit, paid out of some of the increased value that residents derive from the addition of elevators.

In Henry George's view, owning a monopoly over specific arrangements and interactions of materials, governed by the forces of nature, allowed title-holders to extract royalty-rents from producers, in a way similar to owners of ordinary land titles.

Henry George later supported limited copyright, on the ground that temporary property over a unique arrangement of words or colors did not in any way prevent others from laboring to make other works of art.

Henry George was opposed to tariffs, which were at the time both the major method of protectionist trade policy and an important source of federal revenue, the federal income tax having not yet been introduced.

Henry George argued that tariffs kept prices high for consumers, while failing to produce any increase in overall wages.

Henry George believed that tariffs protected monopolistic companies from competition, thus augmenting their power.

Henry George was one of the earliest and most prominent advocates of the secret ballot in the United States.

Harvard historian Jill Lepore asserts that Henry George's advocacy is the reason Americans vote with secret ballots today.

Henry George supported the use of "debt free" currency, such as the greenback, which governments would spend into circulation to help finance public spending through the capture of seigniorage rents.

Henry George opposed the use of metallic currency, such as gold or silver, and fiat money created by private commercial banks.

Henry George advocated a citizen's dividend paid for by a land value tax in an April 1885 speech at a Knights of Labor local in Burlington, Iowa titled "The Crime of Poverty" and later in an interview with former US House Representative David Dudley Field II from New York's 7th congressional district published in the July 1885 edition of the North American Review.

Henry George proposed to create a pension and disability system, and an unconditional basic income from surplus land rents.

Henry George noted that most debt, though bearing the appearance of genuine capital interest, was not issued for the purpose of creating true capital, but instead as an obligation against rental flows from existing economic privilege.

Henry George therefore reasoned that the state should not provide aid to creditors in the form of sheriffs, constables, courts, and prisons to enforce collection on these illegitimate obligations.

Henry George did not provide any data to support this view, but in today's developed economies, much of the supply of credit is created to purchase claims on future land rents, rather than to finance the creation of true capital.

Henry George acknowledged that this policy would limit the banking system but believed that would actually be an economic boon, since the financial sector, in its existing form, was mostly augmenting rent extraction, as opposed to productive investment.

Henry George was an important and vocal advocate of women's political rights.

Henry George's ideas gave rise to the economic philosophy now known as Georgism.

Henry George's self-published Progress and Poverty was the first popular economics text and one of the most widely printed books ever written.

Henry George is a man who could have towered above all his equals in almost any line of literary or scientific pursuit.

Henry George had all the popular gifts of the American orator and journalist, with something more.

George Bernard Shaw, who created socialist organizations such as the Fabian Society, claims that Henry George was responsible for inspiring 5 out of 6 socialist reformers in Britain during the 1880s.

The controversial People's Budget and the Land Values Bill were inspired by Henry George and resulted in a constitutional crisis and the Parliament Act 1911 to reform of the House of Lords, which had blocked the land reform.

Henry George retired from the printing business in 1906 in order to dedicate his life to public service, then traveled the United States and Europe while studying various systems of taxing property.

Henry George returned to Houston and served as Houston Tax Commissioner from 1911 through 1917.

Henry George introduced his "Houston Plan of Taxation" in 1912: improvements to land and merchants' inventories were taxed at 25 percent of appraised value, unimproved land was taxed at 70 percent of appraisal, and personal property was exempt.

Henry George reconciled the issues of efficiency and equity, showing that both could be satisfied under a system in harmony with natural law.

Henry George showed that Ricardo's Law of Rent applied not just to an agricultural economy, but even more so to urban economics.

Henry George developed what he saw as a crucial feature of his own theory of economics in a critique of an illustration used by Frederic Bastiat in order to explain the nature of interest and profit.

Later, Henry George argued that the role of time in production is pervasive.

Huxley used the scientific principles of energy to undermine Henry George's theory, arguing that, energetically speaking, labor is unproductive.