Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Progress and Poverty (1879)*

"This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times.  It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain. . .It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed.
"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."  Introductory:  The Problem

~ HENRY GEORGE (1839 - 1897) American economist, single tax proponent.

*"Few other American books and certainly no other economic treatise exercised a comparable influence in the world at large/" ~ Henry Steele Commager, Living Ideas in America.