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Air, Water,
Land
William Ogilvie: An Essay on the Right
of Property in Land (Scotland, 1782)
All Right of property is founded either in
occupancy or labour. The earth having been given to
mankind in common occupancy, each individual seems to
have by nature a right to possess and cultivate an
equal share. This right is little different from that
which he has to the free use of the open air and
running water; though not so indispensably requisite
at short intervals for his actual existence, it is
not less essential to the welfare and right state of
his life through all its progressive stages. ...
Read the entire
essay
D. C. MacDonald: Preface (1891?) to
Ogilvie's
Essay (circa 1782)
Professor Ogilvie, who came after Locke,
devotes himself in this treatise to one subject -
Birthright in land, it may be
called. And the Author may be justly styled - The
Euclid of Land Law Reform. He has left little or
nothing unsolved in connection with the Land
Question. He has given us a true base line --
man’s equal right to the raw material of the
earth, to the air, to the water, to the rays of the
sun, and all natural products -- from which we can
work out any problem, and by which we can test the
“title and measure” of every man’s
property. Resting on this baseline -- man’s
natural rights -- he represents to us the
perpendicular line of man's right to labour,
“with security of reaping its full produce and
just reward.” Here we have the question in a
nutshell. Take away the base line, and you have no
right to labour, and no produce or reward, except
what may be meted out by the usurper of your natural
rights. You have to beg for leave to toil! We thus
see clearly how the robbery of labour may be
prevented, and how impossible it is to put a stop to
such robbery while the industrial classes neglect to
claim and exercise their natural right -- their right
to an equal share in the earth, and all its natural
products. ... Read the entire preface
Arthur J. Ogilvy: A Colonist's Plea
for Land Nationalization (about 1890)
But in the case of this unearned increment on land
there is no pretence of any exchange. I offer for it
neither labour nor the produce of labour. All I do is
to place my hand on a certain portion of the earth's
surface, and say, "No one shall use this without
paying me for the mere permission to use it." I am
rendering no more service in return for this extra
pound, either to the purchaser or to society, than if
I had acquired exclusive title to the air, and
charged people for permission to breathe. And if,
instead of selling my land for an additional pound, I
let it at a proportionately additional rent the
principle would be the same. ... read the whole
paper.
Robert H. Browne: Abraham Lincoln and
the Men of His Time
“Christ knew better than we that 'No man
having put his hand to the plow and looking back is
fit for the kingdom of God;' nor is many man doing
his duty who shrinks and is faithless to his
fellow-men. Now a word more about Abolitionists and
new ideas in Government, whatever they may be: We are
all called Abolitionists now who desire any
restriction of slavery or believe that the system is
wrong, as I have declared for years. We are called
so, not to help out a peaceful solution, but in
derision, to abase us, and enable the defamers to
make successful combinations against us. I never was
much annoyed by these, less now than ever. I favor
the best plan to restrict the extension of slavery
peacefully, and fully believe that we must reach some
plan that will do it, and provide for some method of
final extinction of the evil, before we can have
permanent peace on the subject. On other questions
there is ample room for reform when the time comes;
but now it would be folly to think that we could
undertake more than we have on hand. But when
slavery is over with and settled, men should never
rest content while oppressions, wrongs, and
iniquities are in force against them.
“The land, the earth that God gave
to man for his home, his sustenance, and support,
should never be the possession of any man,
corporation, society, or unfriendly Government, any
more than the air or the water, if as much. An
individual company or enterprise requiring land
should hold no more in their own right than is needed
for their home and sustenance, and never more than
they have in actual use in the prudent management of
their legitimate business, and this much should not
be permitted when it creates an exclusive monopoly.
All that is not so used should be held for the free
use of every family to make homesteads, and to hold
them as long as they are so occupied.
“A reform like this will be worked
out some time in the future. The idle talk of foolish
men, that is so common now, on 'Abolitionists,
agitators, and disturbers of the peace,' will find
its way against it, with whatever force it may
possess, and as strongly promoted and carried on as
it can be by land monopolists, grasping landlords,
and the titled and untitled senseless enemies of
mankind everywhere.” ... read extended
excerpts
Henry George: The Wages of
Labor
Man, physically, can live only on and from
land, and can use elements such as air, sunshine, and
water, only by the use of land. ... read the whole
article
Henry George: The Condition of
Labor — An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII in
response to Rerum Novarum (1891)
Your use, in so many passages of your Encyclical,
of the inclusive term “property” or
“private” property, of which in morals
nothing can be either affirmed or denied, makes your
meaning, if we take isolated sentences, in many
places ambiguous. But reading it as a whole, there
can be no doubt of your intention that private
property in land shall be understood when you speak
merely of private property. With this interpretation,
I find that the reasons you urge for private property
in land are eight. Let us consider them in order of
presentation. You urge:
1. That what is bought with rightful property is
rightful property. (RN, paragraph 5) ...
2. That private property in land proceeds from
man’s gift of reason. (RN, paragraphs 6-7.)
...
3. That private property in land deprives no one of
the use of land. (RN, paragraph 8.) ...
4. That Industry expended on land gives ownership
in the land itself. (RN, paragraphs 9-10.)
...
5. That private property in land has the support of
the common opinion of mankind, and has conduced to
peace and tranquillity, and that it is sanctioned
by Divine Law. (RN, paragraph 11.) ...
6. That fathers should provide for their children
and that private property in land is necessary to
enable them to do so. (RN, paragraphs 14-17.)
...
7. That the private ownership of land stimulates
industry, increases wealth, and attaches men to the
soil and to their country. (RN, paragraph 51.)
...
8. That the right to possess private property in
land is from nature, not from man; that the state
has no right to abolish it, and that to take the
value of landownership in taxation would be unjust
and cruel to the private owner. (RN, paragraph 51.)
...
3. That private property in land deprives
no one of the use of land. (8.)
Your own statement that land is the inexhaustible
storehouse that God owes to man must have aroused in
your Holiness’s mind an uneasy questioning of
its appropriation as private property, for, as though
to reassure yourself, you proceed to argue that its
ownership by some will not injure others. You say in
substance, that even though divided among private
owners the earth does not cease to minister to the
needs of all, since those who do not possess the soil
can by selling their labor obtain in payment the
produce of the land.
Suppose that to your Holiness as a judge of morals
one should put this case of conscience:
I am one of several children to whom our
father left a field abundant for our support. As he
assigned no part of it to any one of us in
particular, leaving the limits of our separate
possession to be fixed by ourselves, I being the
eldest took the whole field in exclusive ownership.
But in doing so I have not deprived my brothers of
their support from it, for I have let them work for
me on it, paying them from the produce as much
wages as I would have had to pay strangers. Is
there any reason why my conscience should not be
clear?
What would be your answer? Would you not tell him
that he was in mortal sin, and that his excuse added
to his guilt? Would you not call on him to make
restitution and to do penance?
Or, suppose that as a temporal prince your
Holiness were ruler of a rainless land, such as
Egypt, where there were no springs or brooks, their
want being supplied by a bountiful river like the
Nile. Supposing that having sent a number of your
subjects to make fruitful this land, bidding them do
justly and prosper, you were told that some of them
had set up a claim of ownership in the river,
refusing the others a drop of water, except as they
bought it of them; and that thus they had become rich
without work, while the others, though working hard,
were so impoverished by paying for water as to be
hardly able to exist?
Would not your indignation wax hot when this was
told?
Suppose that then the river-owners should send to
you and thus excuse their action:
The river, though divided among private
owners, ceases not thereby to minister to the needs
of all, for there is no one who drinks who does not
drink of the water of the river. Those who do not
possess the water of the river contribute their
labor to get it; so that it may be truly said that
all water is supplied either from one’s own
river, or from some laborious industry which is
paid for either in the water, or in that which is
exchanged for the water.
Would the indignation of your Holiness be abated?
Would it not wax fiercer yet for the insult to your
intelligence of this excuse?
I do not need more formally to show your Holiness
that between utterly depriving a man of God’s
gifts and depriving him of God’s gifts unless
he will buy them, is merely the difference between
the robber who leaves his victim to die and the
robber who puts him to ransom. But I would like to
point out how your statement that “the earth,
though divided among private owners, ceases not
thereby to minister to the needs of all”
overlooks the largest facts.
From your palace of the Vatican the eye may rest
on the expanse of the Campagna, where the pious toil
of religious congregations and the efforts of the
state are only now beginning to make it possible for
men to live. Once that expanse was tilled by thriving
husbandmen and dotted with smiling hamlets. What for
centuries has condemned it to desertion? History
tells us. It was private property in land; the growth
of the great estates of which Pliny saw that ancient
Italy was perishing; the cause that, by bringing
failure to the crop of men, let in the Goths and
Vandals, gave Roman Britain to the worship of Odin
and Thor, and in what were once the rich and populous
provinces of the East shivered the thinned ranks and
palsied arms of the legions on the simitars of
Mohammedan hordes, and in the sepulcher of our Lord
and in the Church of St. Sophia trampled the cross to
rear the crescent!
If you will go to Scotland, you may see great
tracts that under the Gaelic tenure, which recognized
the right of each to a foothold in the soil, bred
sturdy men, but that now, under the recognition of
private property in land, are given up to wild
animals. If you go to Ireland, your Bishops will show
you, on lands where now only beasts graze, the traces
of hamlets that, when they were young priests, were
filled with honest, kindly, religious people.*
* Let any one who wishes visit this diocese and
see with his own eyes the vast and boundless extent
of the fairest land in Europe that has been
ruthlessly depopulated since the commencement of
the present century, and which is now abandoned to
a loneliness and solitude more depressing than that
of the prairie or the wilderness. Thus has this
land system actually exercised the power of life
and death on a vast scale, for which there is no
parallel even in the dark records of slavery.
— Bishop
Nulty’s Letter to the Clergy and Laity of the
Diocese of Meath.
If you will come to the United States, you will
find in a land wide enough and rich enough to support
in comfort the whole population of Europe, the growth
of a sentiment that looks with evil eye on
immigration, because the artificial scarcity that
results from private property in land makes it seem
as if there is not room enough and work enough for
those already here.
Or go to the Antipodes, and in Australia, as in
England, you may see that private property in land is
operating to leave the land barren and to crowd the
bulk of the population into great cities. Go wherever
you please where the forces loosed by modern
invention are beginning to be felt and you may see
that private property in land is the curse, denounced
by the prophet, that prompts men to lay field to
field till they “alone dwell in the midst of
the earth.
To the mere materialist this is sin and shame.
Shall we to whom this world is God’s world
— we who hold that man is called to this life
only as a prelude to a higher life — shall we
defend it? .. read the whole
letter
Bill Batt: How
Our Towns Got That Way (1996
speech)
As land came to be
transferred to other nobility and usurped under title
in fee simple rather than in usufruct, it came to be
regarded as a private financial asset. Earlier it was
regarded as part of nature, much like air, water,
wind and weather. Accounting practices now
listed land as an asset "owned" in fee simple, and as
a liability on the other side of balance sheets in
money "owed" to banks. This tendency
has been extended today so that we have privatized
much of our air, water, wind, and even
sunlight. Land came to be simply one kind of
capital, nothing special, nothing requiring further
treatment. Ricardo's Law of Rent became an artifact
of intellectual history. The conflation of land into
capital to create two-factor economics is one of the
greatest paradigm shifts in the evolution of social
philosophy. How the premises and terms of economic
discourse have been changed has been documented for
the first time in a new book by a California
professor of economics, Mason Gaffney. The account is
put forth in fascinating detail entitled, The
Corruption of Economics. It was indeed a
corruption of a discipline, a deliberate putsch by
powerful economic forces with an interest in seeing
such definitions changed, and we have all been paying
the price since that time. This revealing thesis is
what I really want to relate to you, and to explain
the dire consequences it has had for us in our
contemporary world. I have come to believe it; it
makes sense to me, both historically and in
contemporary analysis, from several perspectives. ...
read the whole article
Nic Tideman:
The Constitutional Conflict Between Protecting
Expectations and Moral Evolution
Perhaps, a general recognition of a right of
secession will need to wait for another component of
moral evolution: a recognition that all persons have
equal claims on the value of natural opportunities.
If this were recognized, then any nation or region
with disproportionately great natural resources would
be seen to have an obligation to share the value from
using those resources with those parts of the world
that have less than average resources per capita.
This would eliminate the desire to appropriate
natural resources as a reason for secession and as a
reason for opposing secession. Signs of a recognition
of the equal claims of all persons on the use of
natural opportunities are slim. One can point to John
Locke:
Whether we consider natural Reason, which tells
us, the Men, being once born, have a right to their
Preservation, and consequently to Meat and Drink,
and such other things, as Nature affords for their
Subsistence: Or Revelation, which gives us an
account of those Grants God made of the World to
Adam, and to Noah, and his Sons, 'tis very clear,
that God, as King David says, Psal. CXV. xvi. has
given the Earth to the Children of Men, given it to
Mankind in common.2
Locke goes on to say that every person has a right to
himself, and therefore to the things of value that
are created by combining his efforts with natural
opportunities, "at least where there is as much and
as good left in common for others." He then argues
that with so much unclaimed land in America, no one
can justly complain if all of Europe is privately
appropriated. Locke does not address the question of
how rights to land should be handled if there is no
unclaimed land.
Thomas Jefferson, writing on the subject of patents,
said,
But while it is a moot question whether the origin
of any kind of property is derived from nature at
all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even
an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by
those who have seriously considered the subject, that
no individual has, of natural right, a separate
property in an acre of land, for
instance.3
Henry George said,
The equal right of all men to the use of land is
as clear as their equal right to breathe the air --
it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their
existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have
the right to be in this world and others no
right.
If we are all here by the equal permission of the
creator, we are all here with an equal title to the
enjoyment of his bounty--with an equal right to the
use of all that nature so impartially offers. This is
a right which is natural and inalienable; it is a
right which vests in every human being as he enters
the world, and which during his continuance in the
world can be limited only by the equal rights of
others.4
General recognition of the equal rights of all to the
use of land and other natural opportunities is hard
to find. When the powerful nations of the world got
together to eject Iraq from Kuwait, very little was
heard of the bizarreness of supposing that Emir of
Kuwait and his relatives had a right to all the oil
that lay under Kuwait. Some recognition of equal
rights to the use of natural opportunities can be
found in the proposed Law of the Sea Treaty, which
would have had all nations benefiting from the
granting of franchises to extract minerals from the
sea. From an economic perspective, the treaty was
flawed by the fact that it would have created an
artificial scarcity of seabed mining activities in
order to raise revenue, and it was opposed by the
U.S. and not implemented. But it did suggest general
recognition of global equal rights to at least those
natural opportunities that no one has yet begun to
use.
One impediment to the recognition of equal rights to
the use of natural opportunities is that some system of
assessment would be needed to identify the transfers
that would compensate for unequal access to natural
opportunities. Another impediment is that a system of
rewards for those who discover new opportunities would
be needed. But if there were a will to address them,
these technical difficulties could be solved
adequately, as they are in jurisdictions such as
Alberta, Canada, that claim all mineral rights for the
government....
read the whole article
Weld Carter: An
Introduction to Henry George
George is largely remembered for the single tax.
But the single tax came at the end of a long trail as a
means -- the means, he said -- by which to
remedy ills previously identified and diagnosed. Behind
the single tax lay a closely knit system of thought. To
understand George, it is necessary to go behind the
single tax and explore that system for its major
characteristics.
Notable in George's work is the
emphasis he laid on the relation of man to the earth.
"The most important of all the material relations of man
is his relation to the planet he
inhabits."
George might well be called a land
economist, indeed, the foremost land economist. For
George, the basic fact of man's physical existence is
that he is a land animal, "who can live only on and from
land, and can use other elements, such as air, sunshine
and water, only by the use of land." "Without
either of the three elements, land, air and water, man
could not exist; but he is peculiarly a land animal,
living on its surface, and drawing from it his
supplies."
So man not only lives off land,
levying on it for its materials and forces, but he also
lives on land. His very life depends on land. ". ..land
is the habitation of man, the store-house upon which he
must draw for all his needs, the material to which his
labor must be applied for the supply of all his desires;
for even the products of the sea cannot be taken, the
light of the sun enjoyed, or any of the forces of nature
utilized, without the use of land or its products. On the
land we are born, from it we live, to it we return again
- children of the soil as truly as is the blade of grass
or the flower of the field. Take away from man all that
belongs to land, and he is but a disembodied
spirit."
Land and man, in that order! These
two things are the fundamentals. They are, for instance,
the fundamentals of production. It is said that without
labor, certainly, there can be no production. Similarly,
without land, clearly there can be no agricultural
production or mining production. It was just as clear to
George that there could be no production of any kind
without land. There could be no factory production, no
trade, no services rendered, and none of the
multitudinous operations of town and city.
All these processes require land: a
place, a spot, a site, a location, so many acres or
square feet of the earth's surface on which to be
performed. "In every form ...the exertion of human labor
in the production of wealth requires space; not merely
standing or resting space, but moving space -- space for
the movements of the human body and its organs, space for
the storage and changing in place of materials and tools
and products. This is as true of the tailor, the
carpenter, the machinist, the merchant or the clerk, as
of the farmer or stock-grower, or of the fisherman or
miner."
The office building, the store, the
bank, as well as the factory, need land just as do the
farm and mine. Land is needed as sites on which to build
structures. Likewise, businesses need land as the
locations on which to perform their subsequent
operations.
George adds: "But it may be said,
as I have often heard it said, 'We do not all want land!
We cannot all become farmers!' To this I reply that we do
all want land, though it may be in different ways and in
varying degrees. Without land no human being can live;
without land no human occupation can be carried on.
Agriculture is not the only use of land. It is only one
of many. And just as the uppermost story of the tallest
building rests upon land as truly as the lowest, so is
the operative as truly a user of land as is the farmer.
As all wealth is in the last analysis the resultant of
land and labor, so is all production in the last analysis
the expenditure of labor upon land."
The railroad needs land, not just
for its terminals and depots but for its very roadbeds;
whoever uses the railroad uses the land that the railroad
occupies, as well as the improvements the railroad
affords. The State needs land not only for parks and
reservoirs but for schools and courts, for hospitals and
prisons, and for roads and highways with which to link
its residents together.
Our homes require land, whether the
home is a country estate, a city apartment, or a room in
hotel or tenement. Our diversions require land, whether
for a ride in the country, a round on the golf course, a
seat at the theatre, or a chair in the library or before
the television set. "Physically we are air-breathing,
light-requiring land animals, who for our existence and
all our production require place on the dry surface of
our globe. And the fundamental perception of the concept
land -- whether in the wider use of the word as that term
of political economy signifying all that external nature
offers to the use of man, or in the narrower sense which
the word usually bears in common speech, where it
signifies the solid surface of the earth -- is that of
extension; that of affording standing-place or
room."
In George's view, man's dependence
on land is universal and endless, "...for land is the
indispensible prerequisite to life." "What is
inexplicable, if we lose sight of man's absolute and
constant dependence upon land, is clear when we recognize
it."
Here then is the main element, the distinctive
characteristic, of George's work. In George's view,
man's relation to the earth is his primary material
relation. All other influences, therefore, must be
appraised as to how they affect, or are affected by,
this basic relation. It is perhaps this to which Soule
refers when he says, of Progress and Poverty,
"This book expounded a theory developed with superb
logic." ... read the
whole article
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