Part 03, Chapter 19 : "Simplifying Government"

[Liberty, September 10, 1887.]

Henry George’s correspondents continue to press him regarding the fate of the man whose home should so rise in value through increase of population that he would be taxed out of it. At first, it will be remembered, Mr. George coolly sneered at the objectors to this species of eviction as near relatives of those who objected to the abolition of slavery on the ground that it would deprive the widow Smith of her only nigger. Liberty made some comments upon this, which Mr. George never noticed. Since their appearance, however, his analogy between property in niggers and a man’s property in his house has lapsed, as President Cleveland would say, into a condition of innocuous desuetude, and a new method of settling this difficulty has been evolved. A correspondent having supposed the case of a man whose neighborhood should become a business center, and whose place of residence, therefore, as far as the land was concerned, should rise in value so that he could not afford or might not desire to pay the tax upon it, but, as far as his house was concerned, should almost entirely lose its value because of its unfitness for business purposes, Mr. George makes answer that the community very likely would give such a man a new house elsewhere to compensate him for being obliged to sell his house at a sacrifice. That this method has some advantages over the nigger argument I am not prepared to deny, but I am tempted to ask Mr. George whether this is one of the ways by which he proposes to simplify government.(117 ¶ 1)