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Joseph Fels and the Single-tax Movement

出版	Temple University Press, 1971
主題	Biography & Autobiography / GeneralBusiness & Economics / Taxation / General
ISBN	08772201079780877220107
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=_v7sAAAAMAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋"We cannot get rich under present conditions without robbing somebody. I have done it, you are doing it, and i am still doing it ; but I propose to spend the damnable money to wipe out the system by which I made it. ". This startling declaration was made by Joseph Fels, the Philadelphian who built his fortune on the once-familiar yellow laundry soap, fels- Naptha. A man of instincts both messianic and quixotic, he thereafter became obsessed with the idea that a tax on the social value of land would initiate a peaceful revolution that would abolish poverty and create full employment. Inspired by this belief, he became, in the decade before his death in 1914, the leader of the worldwide single-tax, land reform movement of Henry George. Dudden's engrossing biography of this most eccentric of the legendary pre - World War 1 industrialist/ philanthropists is also a picture of the young liberal intellectual circles of the day. The causes Fels championed were richly diverse - even Lenin and Trotsky once benefited from the capitalist's naive generosity. His extravagant outlays alienated his brother and sisters and, more than once, nearly bankrupted his firm; but these causes also brought him and his wife into touch with such fighters as Zionist playwright Isreal Zangwill, Walt Whitman, and in the Fels decade in London, with Fabians George Landsbury, Keir Hardie, the Wabbs, and H. G Wells. As Dundden writes, Fels was, like Theodore Roosevelt and Willaim Jennings Bryan, one of a small group of Americans "whose deeds, energy, and personality were manifest in every corner of the world. "- Publisher