In "Progress and Poverty", George examines various proposed strategies to prevent business depressions, unemployment and poverty, but finds them unsatisfactory. As an alternative he proposes his own solution: a single tax on land values. George defines land as "all natural materials, forces, and opportunities," as everything "that is freely supplied by nature." George's primary fiscal tool was a land value tax on the annual value of land held as private property. It would be high enough to end other taxes, especially upon labor and production, to provide limitless beneficial public investment in services such as transportation, since public investment is reflected in land value, and to provide social services such as a basic income. George argued that a land value tax would give landowners an incentive to use well located land in a productive way, thereby increasing demand for labor and creating wealth. This shift in the bargaining balance between resource owners and laborers would raise the general level of wages and ensure no one need suffer poverty. A land value tax would, among other things, also end urban sprawl, tenant farming, homelessness, and the cultivation of low value monoculture on high value land.