When we talk about concentration in land ownership, it is crucial to distinguish between land area and land value; the two are seldom synonymous. In the United States, the largest landholding entities, in terms of area, are are oil and timber companies, holding many millions of acres. However, land in major cities is often worth millions of times as much per acre. Indeed, in terms of market value, the world's most valuable natural resource is not oil, or water or strategic minerals, but urban locations.

Nevertheless, the US has a large number of individual landholders; some two-thirds of all American families have title to some land. Of course, many have long-term mortgages -- and therefore they actually own only a small portion of their land’s value. Still, many people are accustomed to seeing themselves as "landowners" -- and resent any threat to their "property."

In "less developed" countries, especially in Asia and Latin America, land ownership is often extraordinarily concentrated. In these societies the land problem is not masked and diffused as it is in wealthier nations. A small group controls nearly all the land in a nation, and the need for land reform is keenly felt.

At the turn of the 20th century, a worldwide movement emerged for the implementation of George's remedy, called the Single Tax. In this 1898 cartoon from the Australian magazine The Beacon, the Land Monopolist, aided by his vicious mutt "Protection," locks labor out from the natural opportunities.

This reform -- which has often engendered bitter controversy -- usually consists of breaking up large estates, often with compensation to landlords, and making small holdings available to tenants on supposedly favorable terms. Thus several small owners — and private collectors of rent -- are substituted for a few large owners. The rights of all are not established. Besides the injustice of paying compensation to landowners, this measure does not take into account the changes in society, such as fluctuating populations, changes from generation to generation or the tendency of rural workers to move into urban areas. In many cases, the tendency to monopolization asserts itself and smaller holdings are taken over and absorbed into large estates.

If, on the other hand, a popular revolution -- whose original goal may have been land reform — succeeds in installing a socialist regime, the result has often been the seizing of nearly all the land and capital in the nation. The rights of wealth producers are not upheld when their capital goods are seized and held as government property.

Henry George’s brand of land reform, on the other hand, establishes equal land rights for all. It gives people the freedom to take as much 0r as little land as they can productively use -- provided the obligation to society is paid. Thus, it enables the economy to progress under free conditions.

Henry George proposes to "abolish all taxation save that upon land values." (This has been called the "Single Tax.") Many nations already take some rent in taxation -- directly, in the form of the real property tax. They would only have to make some changes in our modes of taxation to take it all. Many less-developed nations, however, lack systems for registering land ownership and assessing values. Establishing these procedures is often touted as the first necessary step to joining the modern world economy. A nation could modernize, while avoiding the modern world’s chronic economic problems, by simply retaining the rent of land for public revenue.

We must realize that the present system of "property taxation" is a tax on real estate, and real estate is comprised of two very different elements: wealth (buildings and improvements) as well as land. The first step toward implementing Henry George’s remedy would be to increase the levy on land and simultaneously decrease the tax on improvements.

Simply removing the tax burden on buildings would be an instrument of growth in both urban and rural economies -- but George’s remedy would not stop there. Its ultimate goal would be to remove all taxation on the production of wealth, substituting the collection of the full rental value of land for public revenue.

Here's how George's remedy compares with other ideologies.