Henry George Quotes
There is and can be no just title to an exclusive possession of the soil.
Henry George, 1839-1897, Political economist, Unsuccessful Candidate for New York Mayor, Progress and Poverty
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In Burundi, family land is divided among the male children of a family. The average Burundian woman has 6.3 children at that time, nearly triple the international fertility rate. With this population growth rate, the plots of land for each person inevitably get smaller and smaller over time. At 10,745 square miles, Burundi is slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Maryland, but it holds nearly twice as many people: about 10 million. The small plots of land are inefficient to farm and provide subsistence. So the nation was in a crises as there was little industrialization and land was essential for existence for most Burundians. See {35807} and {35808}.
Use included renting it. What he opposed was simply holding land when whites were driving Indians off their lands because all the unused land outside of the reservation was owned by someone and the asking price was very high. Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
The Romans were very organized regarding land ownership. When they conquered Africa, defeating Carthage, they found no written records of land ownership, no deeds, no bills of sale. Therefore, they opened up the entire land mass of Africa for what amounted to public colonization where the land could be worked and claimed legally. Illiterate Africans had no written records, and most areas where under the control of a strongman who “owned” all of the land with no notion of private ownership of land.
In every society where there had been past unjust ownership of land, all efforts of land reform were faced with the problem of having to dispossess the current “owners” who themselves had not been guilty of the crimes of their ancestors in unjustly obtaining the land originally. In America land reform was unworkable in most cases and the solution was usually a large monetary payment as compensation for the land.
Rack-Renting was the term for a Landlord charging the Tenant farmer an exorbitant rent per year for the right to farm and live on the land. Often the rent for a single year would be an amount equal to the fair market value of the purchase of the entire property, but the Landlords would never sell. The tenant farmers rarely had any alternative as that land had their home such as it was and provided their meager living which generally was only slightly more than the Rack Rent. The Irish National Land League was created to reform the land use and allocation system of Ireland.
His bill introduced in the House of Representatives. It did not pass.
While the economics of land is described accurately, immigrants from most of the world would never in their home country ever be able to earn enough in a few years to acquire that much land. So the prospect of land ownership was a fundamental selling point and was a major spur to immigration to America where land was and is plentiful.
Henry George 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 derived from land (including natural resources) should belong equally to all members of society. He argued that a single tax on land would create a more productive, more just society.
