This is the full criticism from Marx:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marxists.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;marx&#x2F;works&#x2F;1881&#x2F;letters&#x2F;81_06_20.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.marxists.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;marx&#x2F;works&#x2F;1881&#x2F;letters&#x2F;81_...</a><p>I doubt he was afraid it would work:<p>&gt;  I said of it in 1847, in my work against Proudhon: “We can understand that economists like Mill” (the elder, not his son John Stuart, who also repeats this in a somewhat modified form) “Cherbuliez, Hilditch and others have demanded that rent should be paid to the state in order that it may serve as a substitute for taxes. This is a frank expression of the hatred which the industrial capitalist dedicates to the landed proprietor, who seems to him a useless and superfluous element in the general total of bourgeois production.”<p>Basically, the concept of paying land&#x2F;ground rents was well established in many European countries, only usually the recipients would be land owners that were often the nobility, rather than the state. So replacing ground rents to one of the large estates with taxes to the state to replace other taxes was naturally attractive to the capital-owners in countries where this was widespread. Marx recognised elsewhere that George and others were going further, but saw it basically de-facto as a means for the capitalists to rip the rug out under the last of the landed nobility and make them rather than the bourgeoisie the source of funding for the state. So yes, a delay for socialism, and that may be one reason for Marx to dislike it, but I read his criticism more as disdain over basically dragging up an old idea as a halfway house when in his eyes there were already far better alternatives on the table.<p>But this history of ground rents also gives you the reason it has not and will not be enacted anytime soon: Many of these land owners were, and still are, tremendously powerful. And many new large land-owners have arisen. In the UK, for example, large parts of central London is in the hands of a handful of large estates which still collects ground rent or rents out land on a shorthold basis, after they eventually managed to reverse the decline that followed the introduction of estate taxes. Many of these major London estates are still in the original family ownership (e.g. Grosvenor, Portman, Cadogan, Bedford) - and you will find similar estates if not often of the same age - all over the place. The vested interests in fighting such a tax regime is in most countries vast and extremely well connected. It is a fight few would want to take.