The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political, and consequently the intellectual and moral condition of a people.
Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879) was among the most important and widely read books published in the 19th century, but George’s work and the single tax movement it spawned had largely faded common knowledge by the 1930s. George’s central idea was that a single tax on land values was sufficient to fund the government, and that private appropriation of land’s value was the cause of the persistence of severe poverty even in the richest and most developed cities in the world.
