Progress and Poverty, Volumes I and II: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of WealthGeorge, Henry
General
Progress and Poverty, Volumes I and II: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth
George, Henry
Economics; Single tax
We have traced the unequal distribution of wealth which is the curse
and menace of modern civilization to the institution of private
property in land. We have seen that so long as this institution
exists no increase in productive power can permanently benefit the
masses; but, on the contrary, must tend still further to depress their
condition. We have examined all the remedies, short of the abolition of
private property in land, which are currently relied on or proposed for
the relief of poverty and the better distribution of wealth, and have
found them all inefficacious or impracticable.
There is but one way to remove an evil—and that is, to remove its
cause. Poverty deepens as wealth increases, and wages are forced down
while productive power grows, because land, which is the source of
all wealth and the field of all labor, is monopolized. To extirpate
poverty, to make wages what justice commands they should be, the
full earnings of the laborer, we must therefore substitute for the
individual ownership of land a common ownership. Nothing else will go
to the cause of the evil—in nothing else is there the slightest hope.
This, then, is the remedy for the unjust and unequal distribution of
wealth apparent in modern civilization, and for all the evils which
flow from it:
_We must make land common property._
We have reached this conclusion by an examination in which every step
has been proved and secured. In the chain of reasoning no link is
wanting and no link is weak. Deduction and induction have brought us
to the same truth—that the unequal ownership of land necessitates the
unequal distribution of wealth. And as in the nature of things unequal
ownership of land is inseparable from the recognition of individual
property in land, it necessarily follows that the only remedy for the
unjust distribution of wealth is in making land common property.
But this is a truth which, in the present state of society, will arouse
the most bitter antagonism, and must fight its way, inch by inch. It
will be necessary, therefore, to meet the objections of those who,
even when driven to admit this truth, will declare that it cannot be
practically applied.
In doing this we shall bring our previous reasoning to a new and
crucial test. Just as we try addition by subtraction and multiplication
by division, so may we, by testing the sufficiency of the remedy, prove
the correctness of our conclusions as to the cause of the evil.
The laws of the universe are harmonious. And if the remedy to which we
have been led is the true one, it must be consistent with justice; it
must be practicable of application; it must accord with the tendencies
of social development and must harmonize with other reforms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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