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Primary sources: the historical texts of the land question, from Paine and George onward, presented with context on what they argue and how they were received.
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Paine's 1797 pamphlet proposing a National Fund financed by a 10% levy on inherited property, paying every person £15 at age 21 and £10 a year from age 50 — 'not charity but a right.' Grounds the scheme in land as 'the common property of the human race' and a ground-rent owed to the community: th...
Henry George's lecture reading Moses not as a myth but as the greatest of social reformers — a lawgiver whose institutions (the Jubilee, the inalienability of land, the release of debts) were built to prevent a permanent division of society into rich and poor. The moral-religious statement of Geo...
Mill's 1871 manifesto for the Land Tenure Reform Association — the founding document of unearned-increment taxation, claiming 'for the benefit of the State, the interception by taxation of the future unearned increase of the rent of land.' Full text of the ten-article Programme and Mill's Explana...
Adam Smith's complete Book V article on taxing rent — the source of 'Ground-rents are a still more proper subject of taxation than the rent of houses' and the argument that a tax on ground-rents discourages no industry and falls wholly on the owner. The classical antecedent of the LVT efficiency...
Churchill's Commons defence of the People's Budget land taxes, 4 May 1909 — the parliamentary companion to his Edinburgh 'Mother of All Monopolies' speech. Contains his answer to the 'why not tax the unearned increment on stocks?' objection: the land increment 'arises from a wholly sterile proces...
Alvin S. Johnson's January 1914 Atlantic Monthly essay — the Progressive Era's most prominent mainstream-press case against the single tax. Johnson concedes George's premises but argues the single tax is 'a propaganda for the universal confiscation of land' that would chiefly despoil the middle c...
Henry George's 1891 open letter to Pope Leo XIII, written in response to Rerum Novarum. George argues that Catholic social teaching's condemnation of socialism is correct, but that its defence of landed property confuses God-made land with man-made capital — and that the land question is the true...
Henry George's most famous popular lecture (Burlington, Iowa, 1885): poverty amid plenty is not natural or the fault of the poor but 'a crime' — the socially produced result of monopolised land. The accessible, moral-rhetorical companion to Progress and Poverty, distributed as a Knights of Labor ...
George's 1881 Land War pamphlet arguing that the Irish land question is simply the universal land question — 'the great social problem of the age' — that peasant proprietorship and the Three F's are inadequate remedies, and that the only settlement is to abolish private property in land by taxing...
Lloyd George's 30 July 1909 mass-meeting speech defending the People's Budget's land value duties - the 'golden swamp', the Duke of Northumberland's school site, the Gorringe case, and the warning that landowners who neglect their duties will see 'the conditions under which land is held' reconsid...
The land-monopoly passage of Churchill's 17 July 1909 Edinburgh speech — 'the mother of all other forms of monopoly,' the landlord who 'sits still' while the community enriches him, and the Thames toll-bridge whose removal was absorbed into rents. The full text of the most-quoted single-tax-adjac...
David Lloyd George's 1909 budget speech introducing the People's Budget, which included a land value duty, an undeveloped land duty, and an increment value duty — the most serious legislative attempt to tax land values in British history.
Herbert Spencer's 1851 chapter arguing, from the law of equal freedom, that 'equity does not permit property in land' — the natural-rights case Henry George adopted and whose later retraction George attacked in A Perplexed Philosopher. The full chapter.
The core of the September 5, 1890 Saratoga single-tax debate before the American Social Science Association: E. R. A. Seligman's academic case against the single tax, Henry George's reply on compensation and the moral claim to land, and Seligman's rebuttal on tax incidence, capitalization, and 'a...
Henry George's 1889 Glasgow sermon on the Lord's Prayer: 'Thy kingdom come' is a call to build justice on earth, not to await reward in heaven — and the earth is the All-Father's common gift, so its rising value should be taken for all. The devotional statement of the land value tax, held in full.