The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt, #1)

by Edmund Morris

Henry George argued that because it takes many poor men to make one rich man, progress in fact creates poverty. The only way to solve this, “the great enigma of our times,” was to have a single tax on land, as the most ubiquitous form of wealth. Thus, the more a landlord speculated on Property, the more he would enrich Government, and the more Government would repay Labor, which had produced the wealth in the first place.5

It is right and proper that the power of government should increase to counteract “the mercilessness of private commercial warfare.” As

weighty cudgels, and aim his blows shrewdly against “the combination of business with politics and the judiciary which has done so much to enthrone privilege in the economic

franchise-holding syndicates kept every dollar of their profits. “A corporation which derives its power from the State,” he declared, “should pay the State a just percentage of its earnings as a return for the privileges it enjoys.”