Free Republic

As I have written in the past, Progressivism would not exist at all if not for Henry George. John Dewey was influenced by George, many of the British Fabians, Margaret Sanger; one of the most proud proclaimations of progressive achievement in the early 20th century is Initiative, Referendum, and Recall - that entire movement was based on Georgist ideals (and dishonest ones at that.) The early unions, many of them were not socialist, they were Georgist. The Knights of Labor, Samuel Gompers, and others. But understanding the link between big government and Henry George is not well understood. The fact...

Everywhere you look in early progressivism, the influence of Henry George and his ideals as espoused in the book Progress and Poverty can be found. So when doing some digging around this morning, I was surprised to learn that Sanger's father Michael was ardently in favor of George's ideas. My surprise was only in the individual,(my reaction was more like "Oh wow - now, that figures. It makes perfect sense.") for in the aggregate it is impossible to have progressive ideology without Henry George. The Higgins family was so impacted by the work of George that one of Margaret's brothers...

Henry George And The Beginnings Of Revolutionary Socialism In The United States.Part two of "Recent American Socialism", by Richard Theodore Ely Henry George's work, "Progress and Poverty," was published in 1879. In 1885, not six years later, it is possible to affirm without hesitation that the appearance of that one book formed a noteworthy epoch in the history of economic thought both in England and America. It is not simply that the treatise itself was an eloquent, impassioned plea for the confiscation of rent for the public good as a means of abolishing economic social evils, but rather that the...