The Fairest Tax of All

Arden, Delaware, is a village of a few hundred houses under oak and tulip poplar, a few miles north of Wilmington. Nobody there owns the ground under a house. Since 1900 residents have leased their lots from trustees and paid a yearly rent set by what the site is worth, not by what stands on it. The trustees pay the county’s property taxes out of that rent and spend the rest on roads, greens and woods held in common. On a summer evening the Gild Hall is busy with a Shakespeare rehearsal, a folk dance or a town meeting, and the village has kept up something like that schedule for more than a century.

The founders, sculptor Frank Stephens and architect Will Price, called Arden a Single Tax enclave. They did not call it Georgist, and that is the word this collection has been using, through dozens of essays, for the idea Arden was built to try. From this essay on we use the older name, the Single Tax. The change is more than spelling.

What an ism carries

An ism turns a tool into an identity. Once a person is a Georgist, the conversation shifts from whether a tax on land value works to whether that person is loyal to Henry George. Loyalty to a man brings his whole bundle along: his free-trade politics, his 1886 run for mayor of New York, his reading of Ricardo, and his worst work. In 1869 George wrote a long article for the New York Tribune arguing that Chinese immigration to California should be stopped. John Stuart Mill wrote back to him about it. A movement that names itself after its founder inherits that article along with Progress and Poverty, and has to spend its time defending or explaining away both.

Irreconcilable Differences showed how “progressive,” “conservative,” “left” and “right” each fold several independent questions into one word, and how the folding hides where people stand. Isms fold the same way. “Libertarian” settles the property question before the argument starts. “Socialist” settles who provides. “Georgist” settles that a nineteenth-century economist got the important things right. Social liberty is a practice of keeping those questions apart, so that each can be answered on its own evidence and answered again when the evidence changes. A label that answers several of them at once works against that practice even when the label is a friendly one.

So we are not Georgists in fact or in effect. We draw on George where he is right, as we draw on Paine, Jefferson, Ostrom, Bookchin, Hayek, Plato, Laotzi - we live for great ideas, not for Isms.

Older than George

The idea also isn’t his. States were raising most of their revenue from land, and setting the charge by what the ground could yield rather than by what its holder made of it, thousands of years before Progress and Poverty appeared in 1879.

In Egypt the land tax rose and fell with the Nile. Officials read the height of the annual flood on nilometers, stone stairways and wells marked in cubits, the oldest of them pharaonic, the best known built on Roda Island at Cairo in 861. A flood near sixteen cubits meant a full harvest and a full assessment; a low one meant fields left dry and a lighter charge. The tax followed what the river gave the land that year, measured in public on a scale anyone could visit, and not what any one farmer managed to grow.

In Mughal India in the 1580s, Akbar’s finance minister Raja Todar Mal built the zabt system on the same base. Fields were measured with a standard rod, sorted by how often they could bear crops, from land cropped every year down to land fallow for five years or more, and charged a share of the average yield of their class over the previous ten years, paid in cash. A cultivator who worked a field harder than the average kept the difference. In Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s land surveys of the 1580s and 1590s assessed every village by its kokudaka, the rice its fields were judged able to produce. Domains, ranks and taxes were all counted in that number for the next two and a half centuries, and where yields rose between surveys the gain stayed largely with the village.

None of these were free societies, and a tax on land can serve a despot as well as a republic. What they share with the Single Tax is the base: the charge falls on the productive capacity of the ground, not on effort, trade or improvement.

The argument for making land rent the whole of public revenue came later, and in Europe. In the 1750s and 1760s François Quesnay and the French Physiocrats held that only land yields a true surplus, and that the state should take its revenue from that surplus alone in one levy, the impôt unique, abolishing the tolls and excises that choked French trade. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot tried to move toward it as intendant at Limoges and later as finance minister, and fell from office in 1776 for his trouble. Adam Smith, who knew the Physiocrats in Paris, wrote in The Wealth of Nations the same year that ground-rents were a still more proper subject of taxation than the rent of houses, since a tax on them would discourage no industry. In Newcastle in 1775 Thomas Spence lectured that each parish should own its land and pay for its own government out of the rents, with no other tax at all. In 1797 Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice argued that every holder of cultivated land owes the community a ground-rent for the land itself, and proposed paying it out as a stake to every person at twenty-one.

George read many of these writers and credited some of them. What he added was an American audience, a gift for the sentence, and his name.

Why “Single Tax”

The older name has a better pedigree than it looks. Thomas G. Shearman, a New York lawyer, coined “single tax” in 1887, an English echo of the Physiocrats’ impôt unique, and George took it up without much enthusiasm, because it describes a fiscal plan rather than his whole philosophy. That is exactly its merit. It names a mechanism: raise public revenue from the rental value of land, and lift taxes off labor, buildings and trade. It doesn’t name a man, and it promises nothing about anyone’s other opinions.

It is also a present-tense commitment, not a creed. We support the Single Tax today because the record in Actual Modern Single Tax Experiments, Transitioning to LVT and Three Blind Assessors says it works where assessment is current and the public understands it. If a better instrument turned up, or the record turned, the position would move. A tool held that way can be put down; an identity can’t.

The name has costs too. “Single” reads to a modern ear as a promise that no other levy will exist, which few of its advocates now claim, and it says nothing about land. Alternatives are worth trying out. “Universal Tax” stresses that every holder of ground pays, though it sounds like a tax on everything. “Unified Tax” stresses one levy in place of many, though it sounds like consolidation of existing levies. Others name the base instead of the count: ground rent, common rent, site rent. Until one of them earns its place we keep Single Tax, the name Arden and Fairhope used.

Land Stewardship Focused Government

The tax implies a shape for government, and we name that shape a Land Stewardship Focused Government. Its first task is keeping the conditions under which land is cared for: a clear title, a current and public assessment, collection of the rent the community creates, and keeping common ground common. Most of what else a government does is downstream of those tasks or belongs to persons and associations.

The phrase can be misread as government acting as steward of land. The Myth of the Public Steward found that distant agencies make poor stewards, because the party deciding isn’t the party living with consequences. A Land Stewardship Focused Government keeps those two questions apart. It collects the rent and leaves the stewarding to whoever holds the site: an owner, a lessee, a land trust, a village like Arden. Its job is that the price of holding ground be right, and that holder bear the cost of neglect and keep the return on care.

Affordable housing is a land problem

The argument about housing costs usually runs through buildings: construction wages, lumber, permits, how many units a developer may stack. Those matter, but in the cities where housing is least affordable, the building is the smaller part of the price. A modest house in San Jose or Boston costs about what the same house costs to build in Wichita; the gap between their prices is mostly the lot. Over the last half century land has carried most of the rise in American home prices, and in the costliest metros the site is now well over half of what a buyer pays.

That makes affordability a land problem before it is a construction problem. Subsidies for buyers and builders raise what people can bid, and in a place where good sites are scarce, much of the extra bid ends up in the price of ground. Zoning limits how many homes a site can hold, and a property tax that rises with every improvement makes the owner of a well-located lot better off holding it lightly used. The Single Tax works on the other side. A holder pays the same rent on a site whether it carries one house or six, so the cost of keeping a downtown lot as a parking lot or a single bungalow rises to its true scale, and a sale or a denser use becomes the cheaper choice. Rent collected from the land also stops being capitalized into the selling price: a buyer pays less up front for a site whose rental value goes to the public each year, and a first home costs closer to what the house is worth. Pro-Housing, Not Pro-(or Anti-) Development put the house position as “tax land, not buildings.” The Single Tax is that position followed to its base.

What a land focus sets loose

A tax on buildings, wages and sales falls hardest on effort. A tax on site value falls on location, which no one can increase by working or shrink by idling. Moving the burden from the first to the second changes behavior, and the changes are more interesting than the revenue.

Idle ground stops paying for itself. A lot held empty for a future sale costs the same as one in use, so the holder looks for something to put on it, even something temporary. Interim uses appear that would never pencil out under a building tax: a market on a parking lot, a plant nursery on a lot waiting for a tower, a ball court on a corner, a workshop in a shed on a ground lease. In Pittsburgh, during the years its rate fell far more heavily on land than on buildings, building activity rose well above that of comparable cities. Speculation doesn’t vanish, it changes form: a holder who can’t wait out the market rents ground out instead of sitting on it, and a ground-lease business grows where a land-banking one used to be.

Improvement stops drawing a penalty. Under a building tax a new porch, a second unit, a better roof or a restored barn raises the bill. Under the Single Tax it doesn’t, so upkeep and additions happen that a homeowner would otherwise defer. The small, incremental building that zoning reformers want, an apartment over a garage or a shop at a corner, gets cheaper to try.

Stewardship acquires a price. Single Tax for the Living World followed a proposal in which a parcel’s rate falls as its owner closes the gap between what the land could do for its ecosystem and what it does now. Restoring a creek bank or turning lawn into habitat becomes a line in the household budget, not only a hobby. Three Blind Assessors asked for the same treatment of soil built up over decades. Behaviors that markets now ignore, because no one is paid for them, start to show up in the books.

Neighbors acquire a shared stake. When the rent a place generates comes back to the place, every improvement nearby, a park, a cleaner river, a better school, shows up in land value and therefore in revenue. A town has a standing reason to make itself worth living in, and its residents have a reason to argue about how. Assessment itself becomes civic activity. Early in the last century William A. Somers, an assessor in St. Paul, held public meetings at which residents agreed on the value of a front foot along each street before any figure went into the books. In a single tax town the value of a corner lot is a matter of public discussion, not a number in a sealed office.

And the rent pays for things that otherwise find no sponsor. Fairhope, Alabama, was founded in 1894 by single taxers from Iowa, and its Single Tax Corporation still leases much of downtown. In 1907 Marietta Johnson opened her School of Organic Education there, with no grades, no tests and a great deal of time outdoors, and John Dewey wrote about it in Schools of To-Morrow. In Arden the rent kept forests and greens in common, while guilds of players, craftsmen and singers grew up around the Gild Hall. Neither town planned those institutions as outputs of a tax. They grew where people had settled ground at a fair price and a common fund that answered to them.

None of that is guaranteed, and both towns have had their share of feuds over rent rolls. Arden’s founders were also of more than one mind about liberty: in 1911 several residents, Upton Sinclair among them, were arrested for playing tennis and baseball on a Sunday, on the complaint of a neighbor. The rent was the same for the tennis players and the complainant. What the village argued about that summer was conduct, not ground, and the land had already been settled at a price everyone could see.

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Sources

• Arden, Delaware, village history and leasehold arrangements (Arden Archives)
• Henry George, “The Chinese on the Pacific Coast,” New York Tribune (May 1, 1869), and John Stuart Mill’s letter to George of October 1869
• Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879)
• William Popper, The Cairo Nilometer (1951)
• Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963)
• Abu’l-Fazl, Ain-i-Akbari (c. 1590s)
• Philip C. Brown, Central Authority and Local Autonomy in the Formation of Early Modern Japan (1993), on the Taikō land surveys
• François Quesnay, Tableau économique (1758)
• Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth (1766)
• Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book V, chapter 2
• Thomas Spence, “Property in Land Every One’s Right” (lecture, Newcastle, 1775)
• Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797)
• Thomas G. Shearman, Natural Taxation (1895), and his 1887 coinage of “single tax”
• Morris A. Davis and Jonathan Heathcote, “The Price and Quantity of Residential Land in the United States,” Journal of Monetary Economics (2007), and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s land price data
• Wallace E. Oates and Robert M. Schwab, “The Impact of Urban Land Taxation: The Pittsburgh Experience,” National Tax Journal (1997)
• Dakota Walker et al., ecological-impact-weighted land value tax study (University of Vermont, 2024)
• William A. Somers and the Somers system of land valuation
• Fairhope Single Tax Corporation, history of the colony (founded 1894)
• Marietta Johnson Museum, School of Organic Education (1907)
• John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey, Schools of To-Morrow (1915)
• Contemporary press accounts of the 1911 Arden Sunday arrests

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A note on how this piece was written: every argument, source, and structural decision in this essay is ours. We chose the examples, worked out the logic connecting them, and directed what each paragraph needed to say. The sentences themselves were drafted with AI assistance from that outline and then edited by hand. We’d rather say that plainly than have a reader guess at it.