Margaret Thatcher, Libertarianism, and the Etherization of the Single Tax

“Margaret Thatcher was a self-described libertarian from that era. She did something quite different with the single tax problem; she altered the class structure of the country.”

“No single piece of legislation has enabled the transfer of so much capital wealth from the State to the people.” – MP Michael Heseltine on the sale of publicly owned housing (“Right to Buy”), UK (1980)

“The introduction of the ‘Right to Buy’ policy in the 1980s can be considered one of the greatest intergenerational injustices in recent political history.”– David Kingman at the Intergenerational Foundation, UK (2017)

The Single Tax broke through in elections on two occasions. In 1886, Henry George ran for mayor of New York, leading a party of labour unions, Catholics, and Georgites with a land value tax platform. The Pope himself took part in stopping him. Then, in 1906, in Great Britain, the Liberal Party, propelled by an historic re-emergence of the land reform movement, won a landslide general election victory. The House of Lords sacrificed its legislative veto to halt land value taxation. Two elections, two crises.

The single tax (i.e. the shifting of taxes from labor and capital onto land value) had met formidable opposition. The single tax as something one can vote for ended in Great Britain soon after the Great War—at that time of revolution, imperial dissolution, regicide, epidemic and economic dislocation. Very close to home, Ireland, where the land question had raged for decades, was at war with the British Empire. From London’s point of view, it was not a time for experiments.