The Georgist roots of American Libertarianismn

Few thinkers have been championed by such a wide range of political players, from Sam Altman to Peter Thiel to American Progressives to Taiwanese anti-communists, to early zionists to the global Green Party. So how did American libertarianism come to embrace Henry George, too?

Excerpt: "In 2023, Sam Altman embarked on a world tour, meeting with heads of state to discuss AI regulation. According to Time’s CEO of the Year Profile, he was also quietly promoting a more obscure cause — the ideas of the nineteenth-century political economist Henry George.

As Altman explained in a 2021 blog post: If AI eventually automates most jobs, wealth will increasingly derive from the ownership of capital. To prevent runaway inequality, he proposed that the United States create a universal dividend, funded with taxes on large firms and — following George — the unimproved value of land.

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.1 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."