All it is necessary to do is to abolish all other forms of taxation until the weight of taxation rests upon the value of land irrespective of improvements, and take the ground-rent for the public benefit.
~ Henry George, http://www.wealthandwant.com/HG/SP/SP19_The_First_Great_Reform.htm
A hundred and fifty years ago, a journalist, sociologist, and economist from San Francisco asked a simple question. Why does wealth seem to create poverty? Henry George figured out the underlying economic limitations and corrupting social influence of the English Model of internal revenue. Roughly, this is a taxation system based on nationalizing the resources of the productive and the “sinful” (whatever that means to you), which works really well when your principle form of expansion is inter-continental colonialism, but not so much when it evolves into urban industrialization. He proposed a simple, logical alternative: a single tax on Economic Rent, which is the value added to land by the growth of society as opposed to the contributions of labor and capital. Unfortunately for the United States, he died before he could be elected Mayor of New York.
The United States is now too culturally polarized to collectively realize that the basic inefficiency of our internal revenue system exaggerates healthy asymmetry to a point of desperate conflict. When the right wing deregulates markets and cuts social programs, they ignore the tyranny of the monopoly, giving established industry free reign over individuals. When the left wing steals from the rich and restricts property and trade according to committee morality, they fail to differentiate between productive and unproductive application of capital, and create perverse incentives for the wealthy to insulate themselves from the reach of the public. Both of these political paradigms are characterized by subjective justifications for violations of individual rights.
Henry George did not invent anything. He simply put aside the cultural fervor of his day and looked deep into the system, at the underlying purposes for the components of the system. As the United States evolves into the post-industrial era, we have an opportunity to do the same.