Germany and lived in the vegetarian commune Obstbausiedlung Eden, which was founded by Franz Oppenheimer in Oranienburg, north of Berlin. There, he founded the magazine Der Physiokrat together with Georg Blumenthal. It folded in 1914 due to censorship as World War I began. In 1915, Gesell left Germany to return to his farm in Les Hauts-Geneveys. In 1919, he was asked to join the Bavarian Soviet Republic by Ernst Niekisch. The republic offered him a seat on the Socialization Commission and then appointed him the People's Representative for Finances. Gesell chose the Swiss mathematician Theophil Christen and the economist Ernst Polenske as his assistants and immediately wrote a law for the creation of Freigeld, a currency system he had developed. His term of office lasted only seven days. After the violent end of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, Gesell was detained for several months until being acquitted of treason by a Munich court. Because of his participation with the Soviet Republic, Switzerland denied him return to his farm in Neuchâtel. Gesell then relocated first to Nuthetal, Potsdam-Mittelmark, then back to Oranienburg. After another brief stay in Argentina during 1924, he returned to Oranienburg in 1927. There, he died of pneumonia on 11 March 1930. He promoted his ideas in German and in Spanish. Villa Gesell, a seaside town in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina was founded by his son, Don Carlos Idaho Gesell, who named it after his father. Economic philosophy Gesell considered himself a world citizen and was inspired by Henry George to believe that the earth should belong to all people, regardless of race, class, wealth, religion, or age, and that borders should be made obsolete. But his land reform proposal was different from Georgism. He believed that taxes could not solve the problem of rent on land, as taxes could be transferred to tenants. He thought we must abolish the private ownership of land and put free-land reform, a sort of public lease of land, into effect. According to Silvio Gesell, it is not effective to establish welfare systems without abolishing private ownership of land, because the proceeds of the labor of workers are determined by the proceeds of labor that they can obtain on free land. The benefits gained by the welfare system are not to increase the proceeds of labor that workers can obtain on free land, but rather to increase the proceeds of labor that they