Henry George

“ That as land is necessary to the exertion of labour in the production of wealth, to command the land that is necessary to labour is to command all the fruits of labour save enough to enable labour to exist. ”

“ For land is the habitation of man, the storehouse upon which he must draw for all his needs, the material to which his labour must be applied for the supply of all his desires; for even the products of the sea cannot be taken, the light of the sun enjoyed, or any of the forces of nature utilized, without the use of land or its products. ”

“ You may sit down and smoke your pipe; you may lie around like the lazzaroni of Naples or the leperos of Mexico; you may go up in a balloon, or down a hole in the ground; and without doing one stroke of work, without adding one iota to the wealth of the community, in ten years you will be rich! In the new city you may have a luxurious mansion ”

“ It is not in the relations of capital and labour, it is not in the pressure of population against subsistence, that an explanation of the unequal development of our civilization is to be found. The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. ”

“ The productiveness of labour did not decrease, on the contrary it increased; but out of what it produced, labour had to pay rent. As the placer deposits were exhausted, labour had to resort to the deeper ones and to agricultural land, but monopolization of those resources being permitted, men walked the streets of San Francisco ready to go to work for almost anything - for natural opportunities were no longer free to labour. ”

“ The rise in wages would be at the expense of rent.
Take now the same man or another - some hard-headed business man, who has no theories, but knows how to make money. Say to him: "Here is a little village; in ten years it will be a great city - in ten years it will abound with all the machinery and improvements that so enormously multiply the effective power of labour, will, in ten years, interest be any higher?" ”

“ Suppose there should arise from the English Channel or the North Sea a No-man's Land, on which common labour to an unlimited amount should be able to earn twice or thrice its present wage, the land remaining unappropriated and of free access, like the commons which once comprised so large a part of English soil. What would be the effect upon wages in England? ”

“ This simple truth, in its application to social and political problems, is hid from the great masses of men partly by its very simplicity, and in greater part by widespread fallacies and erroneous habits of thought that lead them to look in every direction but the right one for an explanation of the evils that oppress and threaten the civilized world. ”

“ And back of these elaborate fallacies and misleading theories is an active, energetic power, a power that in every country, be its political forms what they may, writes laws and moulds thought - the power of a vast and dominant pecuniary interest. ”