The tariff question, the labor question, and Henry Georges triangulation

Henry George’s answer to the late nineteenth-century US tariff question was a work of “triangulation.†George believed the essential policy problem, that which caused widespread poverty and inequalities of wealth and income amidst general material progress, was private ownership of land. So he had concluded in his 1879 magnum opus, Progress and Poverty. By the middle of the next decade he determined that, in order to address that problem, he had to strike at another one: the public’s undue attention to different problems. A restive labor class was agitating against low wages, poor work conditions, and immigration. Meanwhile, persistently high duties on imported goods in competition with domestic production gave growing force to the tariff question. George’s Protection or Free Trade (PFT), published shortly before his New York City mayoral campaign of 1886, was his attempt to demonstrate that the labor question and the tariff question could be answered only by addressing the land question. Studying the content and context of PFT shows how his free-trade treatise was a work of political and doctrinal positioning to achieve a different policy end. It also shows the contrast between George’s politics and ideas with those of the Progressive-era reformers who succeeded him.