George has maintained a loyal (if marginal) following since his death in 1897. Today, he is rarely encountered outside of history of economics courses — and urbanist Twitter. But during the Gilded Age, he was one of the world’s foremost critics of inequality, and he is generally invoked in the same spirit today.
Notable, then, is the praise George has also received from Peter Thiel. How did an elitist libertarian come to favorably cite an egalitarian populist? The alignment is not unprecedented. Through a tradition that stretches from early Zionists at the turn of the 20th century to the Old Right in the interwar period and the first advocates for charter cities in the 1950s, the Georgist ideology persisted long after it was dropped by the American left. A libertarian turn to George is not a departure, but a homecoming.
Progress and Poverty in San Francisco
Like many of his modern followers, George moved to San Francisco for work. He arrived in 1858, the closing days of the Gold Rush, and finding no luck as a prospector, began work as a typesetter and journalist. From the beginning, George was driven by a universal sense of justice, and in his editorials, he attacked the corruption and poverty of his adopted city.
He rose to local prominence with “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” an essay that would prove prophetic. In 1868, San Francisco was “fast rising to the rank of a great metropolis.” With the expansion of the railroad, it was, George believed, destined to become “the great financial and commercial centre of all the Pacific coasts and countries.” But the wealth brought by the tracks would not be distributed equally." Most of the profits would flow to landowners; the city’s tenantry would receive only higher rents.
This idea that economic growth could worsen the condition of the poor was compounded when George visited New York City in the early 1870s. New York was the richest city in the country, yet the street poverty that George saw there was far worse than anything in young San Francisco. George returned to the Bay, troubled by the disparity, but it was only on a ride through the Oakland foothills that he realized the cause:
A decade earlier, it would have been unthinkable that Oakland farmland could cost even a hundredth of the price George was quoted; under the Homestead Act of 1862, frontier land sold for $1.25 per acre. The land had not been altered, but what surrounded it had changed completely. Hills once nearly uninhabited were now the site of a growing city. Speculators had taken notice.