Henry George (1839–1897)
Born 1839 CE, died 1897 CE.
Henry George (September 2, 1839 – October 29, 1897) was an American political economist, social philosopher and journalist. His writing was 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 of land (including natural resources) should belong equally to all members of society. George famously argued that a single tax on land values would create a more productive and just society. His most famous work, Progress and Poverty (1879), sold millions of copies worldwide. The treatise investigated the paradox of increasing inequality and poverty amid economic and technological progress, the business cycle with its cyclic nature of industrialized economies, and the use of rent capture such as land value taxation and other anti-monopoly reforms as a remedy for these and other social problems.
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