After the establishment of the Railroad System and the expansion of big business, the role of business and its’ influence became the central debate among the influential thinkers of that time. Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), just 40 years prior advocated that let nature run its’ course and whoever survives is the better organism. This same thinking was advocated in big business; where even the European concept of governmental noninterference suggested that, let the workings of the economy take its own course. Professor Francis Bowen of Harvard wrote this same sentiment in his American Political Economy (1870).1 Concepts such as, “let the buyer beware,” and “you cannot wet-nurse people from the time they are born until the time they die.”2 These were actually recipes of disaster to come because big business was in full control of the workers. Adam Smith, the famous economist’s Wealth of Nations (1776) referenced this very notion as well, cloaked behind the “invisible hand” concept, where he explained why free competition among businesses advanced the common good of the people as a whole.3 These sentiments of the time met strong intellectual opposition in the pens of influentials like Henry George (1879), and Edward Bellamy (1888). Henry George was a California journalist, who wrote Progress and Poverty, in direct opposition to how the wealth was unevenly distributed.4 George suggested that we should tax property owners who are sitting idly and collecting money just because they own land. His “single tax” would later bring in so much money that no other taxes would come close.
Footnotes
1. Mark C. Carnes and John A. Garraty, The American Nation: A History of the United States, 2008, 471.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4.