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
The cases are perfectly analogous. We arrive and we depart, guests
at a banquet continually spread, spectators and participants in an
entertainment where there is room for all who come; passengers from
station to station, on an orb that whirls through space—our rights to
take and possess cannot be exclusive; they must be bounded everywhere
by the equal rights of others. Just as the passenger in a railroad car
may spread himself and his baggage over as many seats as he pleases,
until other passengers come in, so may a settler take and use as much
land as he chooses, until it is needed by others—a fact which is shown
by the land acquiring a value—when his right must be curtailed by the
equal rights of the others, and no priority of appropriation can give
a right which will bar these equal rights of others. If this were not
the case, then by priority of appropriation one man could acquire and
could transmit to whom he pleased, not merely the exclusive right to
160 acres, or to 640 acres, but to a whole township, a whole State, a
whole continent.
And to this manifest absurdity does the recognition of individual right
to land come when carried to its ultimate—that any one human being,
could he concentrate in himself the individual rights to the land of
any country, could expel therefrom all the rest of its inhabitants; and
could he thus concentrate the individual rights to the whole surface of
the globe, he alone of all the teeming population of the earth would
have the right to live.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account