Chapter Nine - Who Backed It

CHAPTER NINE

Who Backed It

YOU KNOW WHO backed Georgism?

Not just cranks and college kids.

Einstein. Churchill. MLK. Tolstoy. Friedman.

This wasn’t some fringe fantasy.
It was an idea backed by giants.

Albert Einstein called Henry George one of the greatest Americans ever.

He said his ideas were genius.
He said they made moral sense.

“Men like Henry George are rare, unfortunately. One cannot imagine a more beautiful combination of intellectual keenness, artistic form, and fervent love of justice.”

You keep what you build.
You pay for what you take.
It clicked.

Winston Churchill, not exactly a Marxist, called landlords thieves.

Real quote:

“Roads are made, streets are made, railway services are improved… and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people.”

And he was right.

When the city grows, the landowner profits just by being there.

Georgism called bullshit.
So did Churchill.

Martin Luther King Jr. drew heavily from Georgist ideas. He said poverty wasn’t natural. It was designed.

He called out unjust land ownership.
He called out wealth hoarding.

To him, civil rights and economic rights were the same fight.

Leo Tolstoy, the novelist-sage of Russia, thought Georgism was the answer to everything.

He wrote whole essays on it and called Henry George a prophet.
He said land was a gift from God and nobody should own it.

To him, this wasn’t just politics.
It was faith.

FDR didn’t go full Georgist, but his crew was crawling with them.

New Deal reformers.
Land tax whisperers.

He once said the land belongs to the people. He didn’t always act like it. But he said it.

And half the New Deal looked like a Henry George remix.

Milton Friedman tiptoed in. The Chicago economist. Advisor to Reagan. Champion of the free market.

He wasn’t a fan of taxes, but he called land value tax the “least bad” one.

Because it couldn’t be dodged, distorted, or offshored.
Because it taxed what nobody made, just what grew around you.

Friedman wasn’t alone.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz proved it in math: LVT is the most efficient tax system.
It was called the Henry George Theorem.

And Paul Samuelson, another Nobel winner, backed the idea too.

This isn’t fringe.
It’s fundamentals.

Sun Yat-Sen was the father of modern China. Revolutionary. Statesman. Philosopher.

He was all-in.
He wanted land value tax built into the new republic.
He said without it, true liberty was impossible.

This wasn’t a club of ten guys with pamphlets in a basement.
Georgism was backed by minds that shaped the century.
And every time the system breaks, George comes back.

Because he was right.