Jill Lepore: Forget 9-9-9. Here’s a Simple Plan: 1

Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of “The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History.”

...Lately, Mr. Cain has risen in the polls, buoyed by Tea Party populism, which is curious because when the word “populism” was coined, in 1890, it meant opposition to a monopoly on wealth held by businessmen and bankers.

Henry George, the most popular American economic thinker of the 19th century, was a populist before populism had a name. His economic plan was known as the Single Tax. His plan wasn’t 9-9-9; it was just: 1....

In 1879, George finished a draft of his most important book. “Discovery upon discovery, and invention after invention, have neither lessened the toil of those who most need respite, nor brought plenty to the poor,” George wrote. He thought the solution was to abolish all taxes on labor and instead impose a single tax, on land. He sent the manuscript to New York. When no one would publish it, he set the type himself and begged publishers simply to ink his plates. The book, “Progress and Poverty,” sold three million copies....

George was neither a socialist nor a communist; he influenced Tolstoy but he disagreed with Marx. He saw himself as defending “the Republicanism of Jefferson and the Democracy of Jackson.”... [H]e thought that speculative, industrial capitalism was destroying democracy by making economic equality impossible. A land tax would solve all....