I'm led to think of the story about the fellow stranded
by a flood, who wondered why God didn't rescue him ...
What more can God do to provide for all his
people?
Our postulates are all stated or implied in your
Encyclical. They are the primary perceptions of human
reason, the fundamental teachings of the Christian
faith:
We hold: That —
This world is the creation of God.
The men brought into it for the brief period of their
earthly lives are the equal creatures of his bounty, the
equal subjects of his provident care.
By his constitution man is beset by physical wants, on
the satisfaction of which depend not only the maintenance
of his physical life but also the development of his
intellectual and spiritual life.
God has made the satisfaction of these wants dependent
on man’s own exertions, giving him the power and
laying on him the injunction to labor — a power
that of itself raises him far above the brute, since we
may reverently say that it enables him to become as it
were a helper in the creative work.
God has not put on man the task of making bricks
without straw. With the need for labor and the power to
labor he has also given to man the material for labor.
This material is land — man physically being 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.
Being the equal creatures of the Creator, equally
entitled under his providence to live their lives and
satisfy their needs, men are equally entitled to the use
of land, and any adjustment that denies this equal use of
land is morally wrong. ...
God’s laws do not change. Though their
applications may alter with altering conditions, the same
principles of right and wrong that hold when men are few
and industry is rude also hold amid teeming populations
and complex industries. In our cities of millions and our
states of scores of millions, in a civilization where the
division of labor has gone so far that large numbers are
hardly conscious that they are land-users, it still
remains true that we are all land animals and can live
only on land, and that land is God’s bounty to all,
of which no one can be deprived without being murdered,
and for which no one can be compelled to pay another
without being robbed. But even in a state of society
where the elaboration of industry and the increase of
permanent improvements have made the need for private
possession of land wide-spread, there is no difficulty in
conforming individual possession with the equal right to
land. For as soon as any piece of land will yield to the
possessor a larger return than is had by similar labor on
other land a value attaches to it which is shown when it
is sold or rented. Thus, the value of the land itself,
irrespective of the value of any improvements in or on
it, always indicates the precise value of the benefit to
which all are entitled in its use, as distinguished from
the value which, as producer or successor of a producer,
belongs to the possessor in individual right.
To combine the advantages of private possession with
the justice of common ownership it is only necessary
therefore to take for common uses what value attaches to
land irrespective of any exertion of labor on it. The
principle is the same as in the case referred to, where a
human father leaves equally to his children things not
susceptible of specific division or common use. In that
case such things would be sold or rented and the value
equally applied.
It is on this common-sense principle that we, who term
ourselves single-tax men, would have the community
act.
We do not propose to assert equal rights to land by
keeping land common, letting any one use any part of it
at any time. We do not propose the task, impossible in
the present state of society, of dividing land in equal
shares; still less the yet more impossible task of
keeping it so divided.
We propose — leaving land in the private
possession of individuals, with full liberty on their
part to give, sell or bequeath it — simply to levy
on it for public uses a tax that shall equal the annual
value of the land itself, irrespective of the use made of
it or the improvements on it. And since this would
provide amply for the need of public revenues, we would
accompany this tax on land values with the repeal of all
taxes now levied on the products and processes of
industry — which taxes, since they take from the
earnings of labor, we hold to be infringements of the
right of property.
This we propose, not as a cunning device of human
ingenuity, but as a conforming of human regulations to
the will of God.
God cannot contradict himself nor impose on his
creatures laws that clash.
If it be God’s command to men that they should
not steal — that is to say, that they should
respect the right of property which each one has in the
fruits of his labor;
And if he be also the Father of all men, who in his
common bounty has intended all to have equal
opportunities for sharing;
Then, in any possible stage of civilization, however
elaborate, there must be some way in which the exclusive
right to the products of industry may be reconciled with
the equal right to land.
If the Almighty be consistent with himself, it cannot
be, as say those socialists referred to by you, that in
order to secure the equal participation of men in the
opportunities of life and labor we must ignore the right
of private property. Nor yet can it be, as you yourself
in the Encyclical seem to argue, that to secure the right
of private property we must ignore the equality of right
in the opportunities of life and labor. To say the one
thing or the other is equally to deny the harmony of
God’s laws.
But, the private possession of land, subject to the
payment to the community of the value of any special
advantage thus given to the individual, satisfies both
laws, securing to all equal participation in the bounty
of the Creator and to each the full ownership of the
products of his labor. ...
That the value attaching to land with social growth is
intended for social needs is shown by the final proof.
God is indeed a jealous God in the sense that nothing but
injury and disaster can attend the effort of men to do
things other than in the way he has intended; in the
sense that where the blessings he proffers to men are
refused or misused they turn to evils that scourge us.
And just as for the mother to withhold the provision that
fills her breast with the birth of the child is to
endanger physical health, so for society to refuse to
take for social uses the provision intended for them is
to breed social disease. ...
That the value attaching to land with social growth is
intended for social needs is shown by the final proof.
God is indeed a jealous God in the sense that nothing but
injury and disaster can attend the effort of men to do
things other than in the way he has intended; in the
sense that where the blessings he proffers to men are
refused or misused they turn to evils that scourge us.
And just as for the mother to withhold the provision that
fills her breast with the birth of the child is to
endanger physical health, so for society to refuse to
take for social uses the provision intended for them is
to breed social disease.
For refusal to take for public purposes the increasing
values that attach to land with social growth is to
necessitate the getting of public revenues by taxes that
lessen production, distort distribution and corrupt
society. It is to leave some to take what justly belongs
to all; it is to forego the only means by which it is
possible in an advanced civilization to combine the
security of possession that is necessary to improvement
with the equality of natural opportunity that is the most
important of all natural rights. It is thus at the basis
of all social life to set up an unjust inequality between
man and man, compelling some to pay others for the
privilege of living, for the chance of working, for the
advantages of civilization, for the gifts of their God.
But it is even more than this. The very robbery that the
masses of men thus suffer gives rise in advancing
communities to a new robbery. For the value that with the
increase of population and social advance attaches to
land being suffered to go to individuals who have secured
ownership of the land, it prompts to a forestalling of
and speculation in land wherever there is any prospect of
advancing population or of coming improvement, thus
producing an artificial scarcity of the natural elements
of life and labor, and a strangulation of production that
shows itself in recurring spasms of industrial depression
as disastrous to the world as destructive wars. It is
this that is driving men from the old countries to the
new countries, only to bring there the same curses. It is
this that causes our material advance not merely to fail
to improve the condition of the mere worker, but to make
the condition of large classes positively worse.
It is this that in our richest Christian
countries is giving us a large population whose lives are
harder, more hopeless, more degraded than those of the
veriest savages. It is this that leads so many men to
think that God is a bungler and is constantly bringing
more people into his world than he has made provision
for; or that there is no God, and that belief in him is a
superstition which the facts of life and the advance of
science are dispelling. ...
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.)
2. That private property in land proceeds from
man’s gift of reason. (6-7.)
In the second place your Holiness argues that man
possessing reason and forethought may not only acquire
ownership of the fruits of the earth, but also of the
earth itself, so that out of its products he may make
provision for the future.
Reason, with its attendant forethought, is indeed the
distinguishing attribute of man; that which raises him
above the brute, and shows, as the Scriptures declare,
that he is created in the likeness of God. And this gift
of reason does, as your Holiness points out, involve the
need and right of private property in whatever is
produced by the exertion of reason and its attendant
forethought, as well as in what is produced by physical
labor. In truth, these elements of man’s production
are inseparable, and labor involves the use of reason. It
is by his reason that man differs from the animals in
being a producer, and in this sense a maker. Of
themselves his physical powers are slight, forming as it
were but the connection by which the mind takes hold of
material things, so as to utilize to its will the matter
and forces of nature. It is mind, the intelligent reason,
that is the prime mover in labor, the essential agent in
production.
The right of private ownership does therefore
indisputably attach to things provided by man’s
reason and forethought. But it cannot attach to things
provided by the reason and forethought of God!
To illustrate: Let us suppose a company traveling
through the desert as the Israelites traveled from Egypt.
Such of them as had the forethought to provide themselves
with vessels of water would acquire a just right of
property in the water so carried, and in the thirst of
the waterless desert those who had neglected to provide
themselves, though they might ask water from the
provident in charity, could not demand it in right. For
while water itself is of the providence of God, the
presence of this water in such vessels, at such place,
results from the providence of the men who carried it.
Thus they have to it an exclusive right.
But suppose others use their forethought in pushing
ahead and appropriating the springs, refusing when their
fellows come up to let them drink of the water save as
they buy it of them. Would such forethought give any
right?
Your Holiness, it is not the forethought of carrying
water where it is needed, but the forethought of seizing
springs, that you seek to defend in defending the private
ownership of land!
Let me show this more fully, since it may be worth
while to meet those who say that if private property in
land be not just, then private property in the products
of labor is not just, as the material of these products
is taken from land. It will be seen on consideration that
all of man’s production is analogous to such
transportation of water as we have supposed. In growing
grain, or smelting metals, or building houses, or weaving
cloth, or doing any of the things that constitute
producing, all that man does is to change in place or
form preexisting matter. As a producer man is merely a
changer, not a creator; God alone creates. And since the
changes in which man’s production consists inhere
in matter so long as they persist, the right of private
ownership attaches the accident to the essence, and gives
the right of ownership in that natural material in which
the labor of production is embodied. Thus water, which in
its original form and place is the common gift of God to
all men, when drawn from its natural reservoir and
brought into the desert, passes rightfully into the
ownership of the individual who by changing its place has
produced it there.
But such right of ownership is in reality a mere right
of temporary possession. For though man may take material
from the storehouse of nature and change it in place or
form to suit his desires, yet from the moment he takes
it, it tends back to that storehouse again. Wood decays,
iron rusts, stone disintegrates and is displaced, while
of more perishable products, some will last for only a
few months, others for only a few days, and some
disappear immediately on use. Though, so far as we can
see, matter is eternal and force forever persists; though
we can neither annihilate nor create the tiniest mote
that floats in a sunbeam or the faintest impulse that
stirs a leaf, yet in the ceaseless flux of nature,
man’s work of moving and combining constantly
passes away. Thus the recognition of the ownership of
what natural material is embodied in the products of man
never constitutes more than temporary possession —
never interferes with the reservoir provided for all. As
taking water from one place and carrying it to another
place by no means lessens the store of water, since
whether it is drunk or spilled or left to evaporate, it
must return again to the natural reservoirs — so is
it with all things on which man in production can lay the
impress of his labor.
Hence, when you say that man’s reason puts it
within his right to have in stable and permanent
possession not only things that perish in the using, but
also those that remain for use in the future, you are
right in so far as you may include such things as
buildings, which with repair will last for generations,
with such things as food or fire-wood, which are
destroyed in the use. But when you infer that man can
have private ownership in those permanent things of
nature that are the reservoirs from which all must draw,
you are clearly wrong. Man may indeed hold in private
ownership the fruits of the earth produced by his labor,
since they lose in time the impress of that labor, and
pass again into the natural reservoirs from which they
were taken, and thus the ownership of them by one works
no injury to others. But he cannot so own the earth
itself, for that is the reservoir from which must
constantly be drawn not only the material with which
alone men can produce, but even their very bodies.
The conclusive reason why man cannot claim ownership
in the earth itself as he can in the fruits that he by
labor brings forth from it, is in the facts stated by you
in the very next paragraph (7), when you truly say:
Man’s needs do not die out, but recur; satisfied
today, they demand new supplies tomorrow. Nature,
therefore, owes to man a storehouse that shall never
fail, the daily supply of his daily wants. And this he
finds only in the inexhaustible fertility of the
earth.
By man you mean all men. Can what nature owes to all
men be made the private property of some men, from which
they may debar all other men?
Let me dwell on the words of your Holiness,
“Nature, therefore, owes to man a storehouse that
shall never fail.” By Nature you mean God. Thus
your thought, that in creating us, God himself has
incurred an obligation to provide us with a storehouse
that shall never fail, is the same as is thus expressed
and carried to its irresistible conclusion by the
Bishop of
Meath:
God was perfectly free in the act by which He
created us; but having created us he bound himself by
that act to provide us with the means necessary for our
subsistence. The land is the only source of this kind
now known to us. The land, therefore, of every country
is the common property of the people of that country,
because its real owner, the Creator who made it, has
transferred it as a voluntary gift to them.
“Terram autem dedit filiis
hominum.” Now, as every individual in that
country is a creature and child of God, and as all his
creatures are equal in his sight, any settlement of the
land of a country that would exclude the humblest man
in that country from his share of the common
inheritance would be not only an injustice and a wrong
to that man, but, moreover, be AN IMPIOUS RESISTANCE TO
THE BENEVOLENT INTENTIONS OF HIS CREATOR.
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