For whose benefit was the world created? Are some of us more entitled to it than others? If so, what entitles us? What do we owe to our fellow human beings? Henry George saw the creator as supremely generous, and sought the reasons why there should be poverty under such conditions. The question is still with us today, and few who are not now Georgists have sought out the answers George found.

Henry George: The Land for the People (1889 speech)

Weld Carter: A Clarion Call to Sanity, to Honesty, to Justice

Our stage, of course, for making this study will be this world of ours, for it is upon this world that the drama of human living is played out, with all its joys and all its sorrows, with all its great achievements and all its failures, with all its nobilities and all its wickedness.

Regardless of its size relative to other planets, with its circumference of about twenty-five thousand miles, to any mere mortal who must walk to the station and back each day, it is huge. Roughly ninety-six million miles separate the sun from the earth on the latter's eliptical journey around the sun. At this distance, the earth makes its annual journey in its elliptical curve and it spins on its own canted axis. Because of this cant, the sun's rays are distributed far more evenly, thus minimizing their damage and maximizing their benefits.

Consider the complementarity of nature in the case of the two forms of life we call vegetable and animal, in their respective uses of the two gases, oxygen and carbon dioxide, the waste product of each serving as the life-giving force of the other. Any increase in the one will encourage a like response in the other.

Marvel at the manner in which nature, with no help from man or beast, delivers pure water to the highest lands, increasing it as to their elevation, thus affording us a free ride downstream and free power as we desire it. Look with awe at the variety and quantity of minerals with which this world is blessed, and finally at the fecundity nature has bestowed so lavishly throughout both animal and vegetable life: Take note of the number of corn kernels from a single stalk that can be grown next year from a single kernel of this year's crop; then think of the vastly greater yields from a single cherry pit or the seeds of a single apple, or grape or watermelon; or, turning to the animal world, consider the hen who averages almost an egg a day and the spawning fish as examples of the prolificacy that is evident throughout the whole of the animal world, including mankind.

If this marvelous earth is as rich in resources as portrayed in the foregoing paragraph, then the problem must be one of distribution:

• how is the land distributed among the earth's inhabitants, and
• how are its products in turn distributed?

Land is universally treated as either public property or private property. Wars are fought over land. Nowhere is it treated as common property.

George has described this world as a "well-provisioned ship" and when one considers the increasingly huge daily withdrawals of such provisions as coal and petroleum as have occurred say over the past one hundred years, one must but agree with this writer. But this is only a static view. Consider the suggestion of some ten years ago that it would require the conversion of less than 20% the of the current annual growth of wood into alcohol to fuel all the motors then being fueled by the then-conventional means. The dynamic picture of the future is indeed awesome, and there is every indication that that characteristic has the potential of endless expansion. So how is it that on so richly endowed a Garden of Eden as this world of ours we have only been able to make of it a hell on earth for vast numbers of people?

The answers are simple: we have permitted, nay we have even more than that, encouraged, the gross misallocation of resources and a viciously wicked distribution of wealth, and we choose to be governed by those whom we, in our ignorance, have elected. ... Read the whole essay

 
The Most Rev. Dr Thomas Nulty, Roman Catholic Bishop of Meath (Ireland): Back to the Land (1881) 

It would seem as if Providence had destined the land to serve as a large economical reservoir, to catch, to collect and preserve the overflowing streams of wealth that are constantly escaping from the great public industrial works that are always going on in communities that are progressive and prosperous.

Besides the permanent improvements that are made in the land itself, and which increase its productiveness and value, there are other industrial works not carried out on the land itself, but on its surroundings and in its vicinity, and which enhance its value very considerably. A new road is made for the accommodation of a district; a new bridge is thrown across a river or a stream to make two important localities accessible to each other; a new railway passes close by and connects it with certain large and important centres of industry; a new factory or a new mill is erected, or a new town is built in the neighbourhood.

Industrial works like these add very materially to the value of all the land in their vicinity. It is a well-known fact that a new railway has in several instances doubled the value of the land through which it passed, in consequence of the increased facilities it had afforded for the sale of its agricultural products.

In every state of society, which is progressive and improving, such industrial works are continually going on, and hence the value of the land is rising also everywhere. But its value rises enormously with the enlarged growth of the population of a nation, and with the increased productiveness of its industry.   Read the whole letter