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The Landless
... The story goes on to describe how the roads of
heaven, the streets of the New Jerusalem, were filled
with disconsolate tramp angels, who had pawned their
wings, and were outcasts in Heaven itself.
You laugh, and it is ridiculous. But there is a moral in it that is worth serious thought. Is it not ridiculous to imagine the application to God’s heaven of the same rules of division that we apply to God’s earth, even while we pray that His will may be done on earth as it is done in Heaven? Really, if we could imagine it, it is impossible to think of heaven treated as we treat this earth, without seeing that, no matter how salubrious were its air, no matter how bright the light that filled it, no matter how magnificent its vegetable growth, there would be poverty, and suffering, and a division of classes in heaven itself, if heaven were parcelled out as we have parceled out the earth. And, conversely, if people were to act towards each other as we must suppose the inhabitants of heaven to do, would not this earth be a very heaven? “Thy kingdom come.” No one can think of the kingdom for which the prayer asks without feeling that it must be a kingdom of justice and equality — not necessarily of equality in condition, but of equality in opportunity. And no one can think of it without seeing that a very kingdom of God might be brought on this earth if people would but seek to do justice — if people would but acknowledge the essential principle of Christianity, that of doing to others as we would have others do to us, and of recognising that we are all here equally the children of the one Father, equally entitled to share His bounty, equally entitled to live our lives and develop our faculties, and to apply our labour to the raw material that He has provided. ... Read the whole speech Henry George: The Wages of Labor
The organisation of man is such, his relations to
the world in which he is placed are such – that is
to say, the immutable laws of God are such that it is
beyond the power of human ingenuity to devise any way by
which the evils born of the injustice that robs men of
their birthright can be removed otherwise than by opening
to all the bounty that God has provided for all!
Since man can live only on land and from land since land is the reservoir of matter and force from which man’s body itself is taken, and on which he must draw for all that he can produce – does it not irresistibly follow that to give the land in ownership to some men and to deny to others all right to it is to divide mankind into the rich and the poor, the privileged and the helpless?
Does it not follow that those who have no rights
to the use of land can live only by selling their labor
to those who own the land?
Does it not follow that what the Socialists call “the iron law of wages,” what the political economists term “the tendency of wages to a minimum,” must take from the landless mass of mere laborers – who of themselves have no power to use their labor – the benefits of any advance or improvement that does not alter this unjust division of land? Having no Power to employ themselves, they must, either as labor-sellers or land-renters, compete with one another for permission to labor; and this competition with one another of men shut out from God’s inexhaustible storehouse, must ultimately force wages to their lowest point, the point at which life can just be maintained. ...
Land being necessary to life and labor, where
private property in land has divided society into a
landowning class and a landless class, there is no
possible invention or improvement, whether it be
industrial, social, or moral, which, so long as it does
not affect the ownership of land can prevent poverty or
relieve the general conditions of mere laborers.
For, whether the effect of any invention or improvement be to increase what labor can produce or to decrease what is required to support the laborer, it can, so soon as it becomes general, result only in increasing the income of the owners of land, without benefiting the mere laborers. ... 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:
Louis Post: Outlines of Louis F. Post's Lectures, with Illustrative Notes and Charts (1894)
Nic Tideman: Basic Tenets of the Incentive Taxation Philosophy
Applications Abroad as Well as at
Home As important as our ideas are for the justice and efficiency of the American economy, their application is even more important in less developed countries, where often 80% of the land is held by 3% of the population. To give all the citizens of these countries chances to make something of their lives, it is extremely important to equalize access to land, not by redividing the land (which inevitably winds up putting land into the hands of people who cannot use it well) but by requiring any one who uses land to pay according to the unimproved value of the land that he or she uses. To bring this message to the world, we must first apply it to ourselves. ... Read the whole article Mason Gaffney: Full Employment, Growth And Progress On A Small Planet: Relieving Poverty While Healing The Earth Lands with open access (e.g. parks, and public rights-of-way) are already common property, and should not be taxed. Land taxes are needed only to compensate the landless for tenure – the right to exclude others – that society grants to the landed in preference to the landless. Common carriers, with rates regulated to reasonable levels, would seem to be a form of open access. In practise, the last point means that public utilities should be rate-regulated, instead of being taxed and then allowed to shift the taxes forward to customers. ... Alternatively, if we accept the income and sales taxes as “givens,” we must allow that they are both outrageously favorable to owner-occupants, so there is no overall merit in jiggering the local property tax the same way. On the contrary, owner-occupied housing is an unpreempted tax base that localities should seize, to redress the balance. By focusing on gains to “homeowners,”
Georgist campaigners are misstating the revolutionary
implications of their own reform, and confusing their
audiences. George spoke for the
landless, the tenants, the young, the upwardly mobile,
orphans with nothing to inherit (as opposed to the
mythical orphans who own all the property in the
country), the students and trainees, the exploited
workers, the innovators and entrepreneurs and adventurers
who turn their capital and turn the wheels of capitalism
– not so much for stolid settled burghers and
retirees who own land. Their buildings, yes, he
would exempt. But if those buildings
rest on land of high social utility, they are playing the
role of land speculators. Call them Type #3
speculators: the “passive-aggressive” type.
(For Types #1 and #2, see item 9, below.) ...
Read the whole
article
I. Historical overview II. The problem of sprawl III. Affordable and efficient public transport IV. Agricultural benefits V. Financial concerns VI. Conclusion: A greater perspective Appendix: "Natural Capitalism" -- A Case Study in Blindness to Land Value Taxation For reasons similar to those we've seen with the example of landowners benefiting from investment in infrastructure, much aid to developing countries does little to alleviate the plight and environmentally-destructive practices of the desperate landless, who can only work on the conditions demanded by the landowners because of the aforementioned monopolistic qualities of land. Improvements to infrastructure simply boost land values and the rents demanded of the landless. Furthermore, as Banks notes, "Canceling part of the debt amounts to the infusion of billions of dollars into these less developed countries which, under the existing tenure and tax regimes, would benefit the price of land rather than provide work for the landless." read the entire article The Most Rev. Dr Thomas Nulty, Roman Catholic Bishop of Meath (Ireland): Back to the Land (1881)
The Landlord the Greatest Burden on
the Land. a synopsis of Robert V. Andelson and James M. Dawsey:
From Wasteland to
Promised land: Liberation Theology for a Post-Marxist
WorldThe land is a commodity that strictly belongs to this class. It is limited in extent, and no human power can enlarge or extend its area. The competition for it is excessive, the competitors struggling for its attainment -- not for the purpose of satisfying a taste for the fine arts, or to gratify a passion for the rare or beautiful, but to secure a necessary means of existence: for they must live on and by the land, or they cannot live at all. The owner, therefore, of that land can put on it any rent he pleases, and the poor people competing for it have no choice but to accept his terms or die in a ditch or a poorhouse. Under the present system of Land Tenure, the owners are not only enabled, but actually exact for the use of the land the last shilling the tenant is able to pay, leaving him only what is barely sufficient to keep him from dying. Mr. Mill, who is the highest of all authorities on this subject, thus writes on the letting of land as it is actually carried out in Ireland: "With individual exceptions (some of them very honourable ones) the owners of Irish estates do nothing for the land but drain it of its produce. What has been epigrammatically said in the discussions on 'peculiar burdens' is literally true when applied to them, that the greatest 'burden' on the land is the landlords. Returning nothing to the soil, they consume its whole produce, minus the potatoes strictly necessary to keep the inhabitants from dying of famine." ... Read the whole letter
In How the Other Half Dies, Susan George wrote
that "The most pressing cause of the
abject poverty which millions of people in this world
endure is that a mere 2.5% of landowners with more than
100 hectares control nearly three quarters of all the
land in the world - with the top 0.23% controlling
half." To recognize this social plague for what it
is, and to avert a backlash of despair, requires a clear
understanding of two great themes: the Promised Land and
the Wasteland. ...
The point of departure of liberation theology is the recognition of the awful fact that millions lead subhuman lives. The rural landless seek refuge in cities, often becoming squatters in barrios or favelas with open sewage and no safe water supply. They may earn fifteen dollars a month if they find work at all. Children live in the streets and go to bed hungry. Illness and drought, and even complaining of their lot, may lead to premature death. And they can see the Mercedes behind the iron gates of walled mansions. (Ironically, mercedes is also a Spanish legal term denoting title to a large grant of land.) Like poor Lazarus in the parable of Jesus (Luke 16:19-31), they survive on the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table. When judgement comes to the rich man, he receives no mercy because he had shown none. ... Read the whole synopsis
Today, as the last census reports show, the
majority of American farmers are rack-rented tenants, or
hold under mortgage, the first form of tenancy; and
the great majority of our people are
landless men, without right to employ their own labor and
without stake in the land they still foolishly speak of
as their country. This is the reason why the army
of the unemployed has appeared among us, why by pauperism
has already become chronic, and why in the tramp we have
in more dangerous type the proletarian of ancient
Rome. Read the entire
article Dan Sullivan: Are you a Real Libertarian, or a ROYAL Libertarian?
When the state granted land titles to a fraction
of the population, it gave that fraction devices with
which to levy, and pocket, tolls on the fruits of the
labor of others. Those without land privileges must
either buy or rent those privileges from the people who
received the grants or from their assignees. Thus the
state titles enable large landowners to collect a
transfer payment, or "free lunch" from the actual land
users. ... Read the
whole piece Bill Batt: The
Compatibility of Georgist Economics and Ecological
Economics
The focus of Henry George’s inquiry, and of
his disciples, is the pursuit of justice. Economic
justice is an agenda which ecological economists also
subscribe to, even though their immediate focus is
concern about the earth’s survival at all, let
alone the distribution of its fruits. Here, however, is
where the Georgist tradition is able to contribute most
to the environmental justice program. There is a broad
appreciation, particularly among ecological economists
that have worked in poorer nations, that natural
resources are endangered every bit as much by the
scarcity of basic necessities as by overpopulation. Urban
elites usurp high value lands and retain land rents
growing out of their production; poor
people are marginalized and left to fend for themselves.
They often survive by taking what little environmental
resources are left on ravaged land sites, further
reducing the resiliency of these local ecologies.
Collection and redistribution of land rents, either in
the form of public services or in the form of a
citizens’ dividends, offers a way to restore equity
without redistribution of land titles and without all the
dislocations this might entail. Many third world leaders
at the present time see solutions to poverty and economic
inequality in the redistribution of land titles.
Georgists argue that this is not necessary; all that is
necessary is to recover the land rent and assure its
equitable distribution to rightful claimants. ...
read the
whole article Mason Gaffney: 18 Fallacies
4. "If property falls, America
falls"
Wrong, at least in my opinion. Property is not an end in itself; it is a means of getting resources put to their best use for the general good. To secure that end, property rights are instituted among men, deriving their just standing from the consent of the unpropertied. Whenever any form of property becomes destructive of that end, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new principles most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Consent of the unpropertied? That means property must work for the benefit of all, not just those who own property. But abolish property!? That is a red flag indeed, but note I said alter or abolish, and it is our own Declaration of Independence I am paraphrasing. Like Jefferson, I generally prefer alter to abolish: 'abolishing' something is nihilistic until we know what we want to replace it with.
The point is, we have many degrees of freedom as
citizens; we are not bound body and soul by decisions
made, or allegedly made, in the past. ...
Read the whole article
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Wealth and Want
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... because democracy alone hasn't yet led to a society
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