Please read Henry George’s 1868 essay about the Bay Area and the completion of the transcontinental railroad[1]. It was required reading in California schools f

Please read Henry George’s 1868 essay about the Bay Area and the completion of the transcontinental railroad[1]. It was required reading in California schools for decades, but generations of attacks by successive capitalists who hated his “Single Tax” proposal has rendered him an unknown figure in the 21st century. An excerpt: >And as California becomes populous rich, let us not forget that the character of a people counts for more than their numbers; that the distribution of wealth is even a more important matter than its production. Let us not imagine ourselves in a fools' paradise, where the golden apples will drop into our mouths; let us not think that after the stormy seas and head gales of all the ages, our ship has at last struck the trade winds of time. The future of our State, of our nation, of our race, looks fair and bright; perhaps the future looked so to the philosophers who once sat in the porches of Athens-to the unremembered men who-raised the cities whose ruins lie south of us. Our modern civilization strikes broad and deep and looks high. So did the tower which men once built almost unto heaven. [1] http://www.grundskyld.dk/1-railway.html http://www.grundskyld.dk/1-railway.html