Henry George Quotes
What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power.
George, Henry. Progress and Poverty. W. M. Hinton & Co., 1879, p. 473.
This was his most famous speech.
Chesterton preceded by almost half a century much of the intellectual dispute of the War on Poverty of the 1960’s where much of the middle and upper class tried to change a variety of behavior patterns and customs and values of the poor.
1st Earl of Beaconsfield. See Thomas Jefferson for a similar view.
After Roosevelt, most eras of American politics more or less followed the pattern Roosevelt described herein as a “calamity”, with the anger becoming more or less intense. Jefferson thought that these were natural divisions of politics in all societies--{604810}. The thing that masked this for years was race and slavery. In Lincoln’s time there were liberals and conservatives in both parties if race were ignored. In Theodore Roosevelt’s era, he, Taft and others were generally liberal reformers, while a large number of Republicans were conservative supporters of the status quo. Some democrats were radical reformers like William Jennings Bryan while others were arch conservatives. Until 1964 and the Civil Rights Act there were many conservatives in the Democratic Party, but almost all switched to the Republican Party in anger. The Republican conservatives tended to drive the Republican liberals out of the party and for the last part of the 20th century Roosevelt’s “calamity” well described the American political scene, and the anger increased carrying partisan bitterness into the 21st century.
The same greatest issue was still before the people a century later. See {633217} , {635104} & {630538}.
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.
