George asked why deepening poverty accompanied industrial progress, and answered that the gains were absorbed by landowners as rising rent. Because land value is created by the presence and effort of the whole community rather than by the owner, he proposed to tax that value away - a single tax on land values, replacing taxes on labour and capital, with buildings left untaxed. He argued this would end the speculative withholding of vacant land and damp the boom-and-bust cycles he had watched in California. The book sold in the millions and made land the central political question of the 1880s and 1890s in the English-speaking world.
Georgism supplied the moral case for land value capture, betterment levies, site-value rating and public leasehold, and shaped Howard's garden-city finance as well as reformers in Japan, China, Denmark and Australasia. The claim that the community should recapture the uplift it creates remains the standard justification for infrastructure value capture.
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