Thomas Paine

I've always been a huge fan of Thomas Paine. I've read everything that I could get my hands on that he wrote. A true libertarian - a defender of individual rights. He came here from England, did his part to support our Revolution, then went to France to do it all over again. Not content to battle man's tyranny over other men, he went on to fight against religious tyranny over men's souls.
Yet, one of his writings, Agrarian Justice, always seemed a little out of place. I never made proper sense of it until I read Henry George's Progress and Poverty. Only then did I truly understand the fund that Paine felt should be subject to taxation - the same fund George outlined so clearly. The same fund that Adam Smith and a host of other classical economists considered to be rightfully subject to taxation. LVT is not a tax that punishes, but a tax that corrects an ongoing wrong. Better yet, for free-market advocates, it is a tax that does not burden exchange.
In Paine's words, "Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.
"In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for. But it is that kind of right which, being neglected at first, could not be brought forward afterwards till heaven had opened the way by a revolution in the system of government. Let us then do honor to revolutions by justice, and give currency to their principles by blessings."
A century later, George showed how this applied, not just to agricultural lands, but to all land subject to exclusive ownership, especially in the cities and centers of commerce. Further, as much an advocate of individual rights as Paine, George wanted to end all other forms of taxation. What you produce is yours to do with as you wish. You are free to earn all you can from your physical and intellectual labors. The product of your labor is yours to save, use, sell, or bequeath as you choose. No one, and no government, has any right to any part of what is rightfully yours.
To the extent that any one, or any government, lays claim to the product of another's labor, slavery still exists.