Land has always had a financial element to it across basically any civilization, with attempts to turn land into financial assets by borrowing against it, lending against it, and exploiting its value to turn land into money now.

Henry George fell between libertarian and socialist worlds ideologically—with strong egalitarian/redistribution commitments alongside free trade and anti-tax libertarian impulses—a contradiction that became much more difficult in the 20th century.

Milton Friedman's favorite quote about free trade—'protectionism does to us in times of peace what our enemies do to us in times of war'—is originally a Henry George quote.

The supply of land is pretty much fixed, which is why people treat it differently from other commodities—once someone owns it and utilizes it, it's not available for someone else to use, making it quite different from other assets and goods.

The real value of land is the intangible capital of the people associated with it and the resources that can be allocated to it—owning land near economic activity is like owning a small stake in that economic activity.

Henry George was born in 1839 in Pennsylvania to a relatively lower middle class family, experienced extreme poverty during the financial crises of the mid-19th century, moved west, ended up in San Francisco journalism, and spent a decade thinking about land before publishing Progress and Poverty in 1879.

Henry George's central argument was that everyone in the industrializing world could see technological progress (trains, electricity, telephone, medical technology) alongside crushing urban poverty, and George's explanation was that land concentration allowed landowners to mop up all the gains of these technologies and all economic surplus.

The growth of intangible/digital technology can paradoxically bolster land as an asset because land remains the easiest thing for banks and lenders to value and lend against, compared to difficult-to-value tech assets.

In early 20th century Britain, David Lloyd George as Chancellor introduced the People's Budget in 1909 with a small tax on land values—meant as a foot in the door that would later increase—but the valuation process was an administrative nightmare that stretched on for years and essentially halted during World War I, never to be properly resumed.

Hardcore Georgists tried to set up utopian communes like Arden in Delaware and Fairhope in Alabama based on Georgist principles, which had vague success for a few years before becoming normal towns as the system leaked away over time.

The shift from agricultural to industrial economies dramatically changed land value from being based on what you could grow or mine from it to being based around cities, which created a much more fixed supply because cities can only grow so large based on transportation technology available at the time.

Arthur C. Clarke predicted in the early 1960s that communication technology would transform society more dramatically than any transport technology and that cities would cease being necessary as an organizing mode of human civilization—but this prediction proved dramatically wrong.

English colonial North America went from a land-scarce (Europe) to a land-rich society, making land seem plentiful and creating an enormous drive to exploit its value, turn it into money, and encourage economic activity—a major fracture point with the British Empire and early US independence.

Singapore and Hong Kong inherited leasehold systems from the UK and used them to finance government spending and infrastructure, with the colonial government owning land and leasing it for productive use to raise money for roads and basic government operations.

In the UK, the leasehold problem is primarily around apartments and concerns about who is responsible for upkeep, with some landlords abusing the system to charge ridiculous fees to tenants, though leasehold is now a minority system with most homes being freehold.

In China, the central government changed the tax and spending system in 1994, shifting revenue collection to central government while keeping spending obligations local, leaving local governments with only 60-70% of their funding needs and forcing them to turn to land sales to fill the gap.

Chinese households rationally believe the government won't let house prices go down significantly and that this path must continue, so buying multiple apartments even if three are left empty remains the right investment strategy.

Very low rental yields (often 1% or lower) in expensive cities like China indicate exuberant bubble-like behavior, because rental yields should align with property prices over time given the asset's risk profile.

George's explanation was particularly appealing in the US because the frontier was closing—people could no longer head west and carve out homesteads as their ancestors had done 50-100 years earlier.

George wrote like a lay preacher using biblical language to describe economic injustices, which made his ideas dramatically more engaging to ordinary American, British, and European readers than academic economic writing.