The crime of poverty

The Crime of Poverty is a famous speech by Henry George, the American political economist and social reformer who lived from 1839 to 1897 and who is best known as the author of Progress and Poverty of 1879. The speech was delivered in Burlington, Iowa, in 1885 and was subsequently published as a pamphlet that was widely distributed by the various organizations supporting George’s economic and political program in the United States and abroad.

George had developed in Progress and Poverty the central argument that has come to be known as the single tax theory. He held that the growing concentration of land ownership in modern industrial societies was the principal cause of the persistent poverty that disfigured what should have been an era of unprecedented material progress. His proposed solution was to abolish all existing taxes and to replace them with a single tax on the unimproved value of land, on the ground that landowners were claiming as private wealth what was actually created by the labour and the social organization of the entire community.

The Crime of Poverty speech presents George’s central thesis in its most accessible form. He argues that poverty in a country as productively wealthy as the United States is not a natural condition but a moral crime, the product of specific institutional arrangements that allow some to monopolize the natural opportunities that should belong to all. He develops the argument through a series of vivid examples drawn from American economic life of the 1880s and through a sustained moral appeal to his audience to recognize that the existing arrangements are neither natural nor inevitable.

The speech is one of the most powerful examples of late nineteenth century American reform rhetoric. George was an enormously effective public speaker and the speech captures the combination of moral seriousness, economic argument, and democratic faith that made his movement one of the major political forces in American and international reform politics during the 1880s and 1890s.

The pamphlet is short and reads as a single speech delivered with substantial moral force. For readers interested in late nineteenth century American reform movements, this is one of the essential primary documents. It pairs naturally with Progress and Poverty and with The Land Question.