by Nomad
Outside of the academic world perhaps, few people have heard of the name of Henry George. That's a real pity since his observations about economic inequality are as timely as they are essential to our own day.
A Pyramid On Its Apex
So long as all the increased wealth, which modern progress brings, goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent. The reaction must come. The tower leans from its foundations, and every new story but hastens the final catastrophe. To educate men who must be condemned to poverty, is but to make them restive; to base on a state of most glaring social inequality, political institutions under which men are theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex.
The life of Henry George reads like a novel from another age. George was born into a large, lower-middle class and devout Episcopalian family in Philadelphia in 1839 . His father was a publisher of religious texts and insisted on a religious education for his son.
By 14, George had left the religious academy and was seized with a wanderlust. In April 1855, young George at 15 went to sea as a foremast on the Hindoo, bound for Melbourne and Calcutta.
By 14, George had left the religious academy and was seized with a wanderlust. In April 1855, young George at 15 went to sea as a foremast on the Hindoo, bound for Melbourne and Calcutta.
After 14 months at sea, he returned to Philadelphia and began working as a printer. Ever restless, George traveled to California where he married and started a family. Despite marital and familial happiness, times were not easy and according to his own admission, there were times his family was close to starvation.
He tried unsuccessfully to become a gold miner in British Columbia before finding work as a newspaper printer, journalist and eventually editor and newspaper owner.
Politically, George initially leaned toward the Republican party of Lincoln but later, after viewing how corporations and industrialists were corrupting the party, switched to the Democratic party. He was a staunch opponent of the railroads which as he saw it were benefited only those fortunate enough to have a financial interest. Everybody else, he said, was being thrown into poverty. Such a stand proved to be his undoing when he attempted to run for politics in the California State Assembly. Executives from the powerful Central Pacific Railroad apparently went to some lengths to ensure George's electoral defeat.
Incidentally it was from a minor- seemingly unimportant railroad case in California from around that time - along with a few precedents built upon that original case- which provided the Supreme Court a basis for its outlandish Citizen United decision. The Court somehow decided that corporations possess rights equality to citizens, that is, as the Republican candidate in the last election famously said, corporations are people.
