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Rack-Rented
A Google search provides these definitions:
Harry Pollard writes, "RACK-RENT is the highest amount
that can be paid for Land from Labor's production that
will enable him to survive (and reproduce). Even as new
skills and techniques are adopted, and innovative
technology is put to work, so will rack-rent rise,
swallowing the lion's share of the product."
The Most Rev. Dr Thomas Nulty, Roman Catholic Bishop of
Meath (Ireland): Back to
the Land (1881)
Landlordism Confiscates the Work of
Improvers.
But the present system of Land Tenure not merely
enables a class to exact from the people of the country a
famine price for the use of the land which God made: it
also enables them to charge a rent for the use of the
improvements on the land which the people themselves
made, which are purely the result of their own industry
and capital, and which, in fact, on the strictest
principles of justice are their own private property.
With the knowledge and experience which we have acquired
all our lives long of the transactions that are daily
taking place between landlords and tenants, the clearest
and most convincing proof that can be given of this fact
will perhaps be found in the plain and simple statement
of it.
The land of Ireland would at this
moment still be in its original state of nature had it not
been drained, cleared, reclaimed and fertilised by the
enormous outlay of labour and capital which has been
expended on it by the people of the present and their
forefathers in past generations. The landlords contributed
nothing, or next to nothing, for its
improvement.
Mr. Mill thus writes of the
improvement of land in Ireland: "Whenever in any country
the proprietors, generally speaking, cease to improve their
lands, political economy has nothing to say in defence of
landed property as there established.
Landed property in England is very
far from completely fulfilling the conditions which render
its existence economically justifiable. But if
insufficiently realised, even in England, in Ireland those
conditions are not complied with at all. With individual
exceptions . . . the owners of Irish estates do nothing for
the land but drain it of its produce."
Reports of Government
Commissions.
The Bessborough and Richmond Commissions recently
appealed directly to the nation for information on this
important point. The answer which the nation returned was
(as everyone knew should be the case), that all, or
nearly all the permanent improvements in the soil of the
country were effected by the labour and capital of the
people of the country. The Bessborough
Commissioners write in their report: "As a fact, the
removal of masses of rock and stone which, in some parts
of Ireland, encumbered the soil, the drainage of the land
and erection of buildings, including their own dwellings,
have generally been effected by the tenants' labour,
unassisted, or only in some instances assisted, by
advances from the landlord."
The Work of the
Tenants.
The Liberal section of the Richmond Commission
write, in their report on the same subject: "In a country
like Ireland, where the dwelling houses, farm buildings
and other elements of a farm, including often the
reclamation from the waste of the cultivated land itself,
have been, and must, in our opinion, continue to be, for
the most part, the work of the tenants."
Even the Tory section of this
Richmond Commission, composed as it is of men of the
highest type of Conservatism and Landlordism, observe with
a frankness that shows the force of the evidence brought
before them:
"Bearing in mind the system by which
the improvements, and equipments of a farm are very
generally the work of the tenant, and the fact that a
yearly tenant is at any time liable to have his rent raised
in consequence of the increased value that has been given
to his holding by the expenditure of his own capital and
labour, the desire for legislative interference to protect
him from an arbitrary increase of rent does not seem
unnatural."
But further argument in proof of this
fact is quite unnecessary, seeing that both Houses of the
Legislature bear emphatic testimony to it in that section
of the Land Act of 1870, which
declares that "all permanent improvements in the soil and
on the farm are assumed to have been made by the tenant,
except in those cases in which it has been clearly proved
they have been made by the landlord." The vast property
thus created by the labour and capital of the people, in
the permanent improvement of the soil and in the buildings
and equipments of their farms, and which has been growing
and accumulating for centuries, covers a very considerable
part of the aggregate value of the land of the
country.
Driven From the Land.
The question then arises, what has become of this
enormous property? The correct answer to this question
will, I think, be found to be that one part of it has
been wantonly wasted and destroyed; that the landlords
have coolly appropriated to their own use a second part
of it; and that the people pay, at the present moment, a
rent for the use of the residue of what was once all
their own property.
In the one County of Meath, in this
Diocese, there are about 369,000 acres of land laid down in
grass seeds or pasture. That vast territory was nearly all
parcelled out about the commencement of this century in
farms of various sizes, ranging from ten to seventy, eighty
or a hundred acres each. These farms were dotted over with
clean, commodious, comfortable, whitewashed dwellings, with
offices, outhouses and the plant of well-to-do farmers.
These dwellings were occupied by a race of the most
laborious, industrious, hardworking and virtuous people
that ever lived in any country. But, owing to the
iniquitous system of Land Tenure, they have been almost all
mercilessly evicted and swept away, and every vestige of
the vast amount of human life, industry, contentment and
happiness that once flourished on these lands has been so
carefully obliterated that, looking at them in their
present melancholy solitude, one would imagine them to have
always been "prairie lands" since the creation.
The property which these poor people
possessed in their dwellings and farm houses has been thus
wantonly destroyed, and the permanent improvements they had
created in the productiveness of the soil were coolly
appropriated by the landlords who evicted them.
How Tenants are
Rack-rented.
Until the Irish Land League interfered with their
operations, these exterminators sold out by public
auction every year the use of the people's property, as
well as the natural productiveness of the soil, to cattle
dealers, for a term of nine, ten or eleven months, and at
a rent ranging from £4 to £6 an acre; and they
drew from their estates an income twice, and in many
instances three times as large as the few honest and
honourable proprietors in their neighbourhood who never
evicted anyone at all. I need hardly direct attention to
the notorious fact that those who have been suffered to
remain, were only too glad to be allowed the privilege of
paying a rent for the use of the residue of what was once
their own property.
The proof of this is plain.
Proprietors, in letting their land, do not distinguish
between the enormous value superadded to the land by the
people's labour and capital for centuries, and the value it
has inherited from nature, and, perhaps in some instances,
from their own improvements.
They let its whole value from every
source at the highest price it will bring. And yet this
sorely aggrieved class of men complain that they can not
now let their lands as they always let them before, and as
all other owners are allowed to sell their property still,
on the principle of open competition and free
sale!
During the long, large and varied
experience the world has had of the letting of land on that
principle, was it ever heard that an owner let his land at
less than its fair value? -- and surely that fair value
included the people's improvements on the land as well as
his own. We have seen, on the high
authority of Mr. Mill, that it is the almost universal
practice of Irish landlords to exact from their tenants in
the form of rent the whole produce of the land minus the
potatoes that are necessary to keep them from dying of
hunger; and surely rack-rents like these cover every form
of value the land possesses, and consequently the people's
improvements. ...
An Open Violation of the
Principles of Justice
Under such a state of things one may
well ask, is it in human nature that anyone could have the
heart or the enterprise to expend his labour and capital on
the permanent improvement of the soil exclusively for the
benefit of others, and with a certainty that he will be
charged an increased rent for the use of his own
property?
How can any government allow the land
of a nation to remain in the hands of a class of men who
will not improve it themselves, or allow others to improve
it either? How can any just government suffer any longer a
system of Land Tenure which inflicts irreparable ruin on
the general industry and prosperity of a nation, and which
is maintained solely for the purpose of giving the
landlords an opportunity of plundering the class of
industrious, improving tenants which it is specially bound
to protect and defend? Read the whole
letter
Henry George: The Land Question
(1881)
As to Belgium, let me quote the high authority of the
distinguished Belgian publicist, M. Émile de
Laveleye, of the University of Liége. He says that
the Belgian tenantfarmers – for tenancy largely
prevails even where the land is most minutely divided
– are rack-rented with a mercilessness unknown in
England or even in Ireland, and are compelled to vote as
their landlords dictate! ...
The truth is that the Irish land system is simply the
general system of modern civilization. In no essential
feature does it differ from the system that obtains here
– in what we are accustomed to consider the freest
country under the sun. Entails and primogeniture and
family settlements may be in themselves bad things, and
may sometimes interfere with putting the land to its best
use, but their effects upon the relations of landlord and
tenant are not worth talking about. As for rack-rent,
which is simply a rent fixed at short intervals by
competition, that is in the United States even a more
common way of letting land than in Ireland. In our cities
the majority of our people live in houses rented from
month to month or year to year for the highest price the
landlord thinks he can get. The usual term, in the newer
States, at least, for the letting of agricultural land is
from season to season. And that the rent
of land in the United States comes, on the whole, more
closely to the standard of rack, or full
competition rent, there can be, I think, little
doubt. That the land of Ireland is, as the
apologists for landlordism say, largely under-rented
(that is, not rented for the full amount the landlord
might get with free competition) is probably true. Miss
C. G. O'Brien, in a recent article in the Nineteenth Century, states that the tenant-farmers generally get for such patches as
they sub-let to their laborers twice the rent they pay
the landlords. And we hear incidentally of many
"good landlords," i.e., landlords not in the habit of
pushing their tenants for as much as they might get by
rigorously demanding all that any one would give. ...
read the whole article
Henry George: The Condition of Labor
— An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII in response to
Rerum Novarum (1891)
I have already referred generally to the defects that
attach to all socialistic remedies for the evil condition
of labor, but respect for your Holiness dictates that I
should speak specifically, even though briefly, of the
remedies proposed or suggested by you.
Of these, the widest and strongest are that the state
should restrict the hours of labor, the employment of
women and children, the unsanitary conditions of
workshops, etc. Yet how little may in this way be
accomplished.
A strong, absolute ruler might hope by such
regulations to alleviate the conditions of chattel
slaves. But the tendency of our times is toward
democracy, and democratic states are necessarily weaker
in paternalism, while in the industrial slavery, growing
out of private ownership of land, that prevails in
Christendom today, it is not the master who forces the
slave to labor, but the slave who urges the master to let
him labor. Thus the greatest difficulty in enforcing such
regulations comes from those whom they are intended to
benefit. It is not, for instance, the masters who make it
difficult to enforce restrictions on child labor in
factories, but the mothers, who, prompted by poverty,
misrepresent the ages of their children even to the
masters, and teach the children to misrepresent.
But while in large factories and mines regulations as
to hours, ages, etc., though subject to evasion and
offering opportunities for extortion and corruption, may
be to some extent enforced, how can they have any effect
in those far wider branches of industry where the laborer
works for himself or for small employers?
All such remedies are of the nature of the remedy for
overcrowding that is generally prescribed with them
— the restriction under penalty of the number who
may occupy a room and the demolition of unsanitary
buildings. Since these measures have no tendency to
increase house accommodation or to augment ability to pay
for it, the overcrowding that is forced back in some
places goes on in other places and to a worse degree. All
such remedies begin at the wrong end. They are like
putting on brake and bit to hold in quietness horses that
are being lashed into frenzy; they are like trying to
stop a locomotive by holding its wheels instead of
shutting off steam; like attempting to cure smallpox by
driving back its pustules. Men do not overwork themselves
because they like it; it is not in the nature of the
mother’s heart to send children to work when they
ought to be at play; it is not of choice that laborers
will work under dangerous and unsanitary conditions.
These things, like overcrowding, come from the sting of
poverty. And so long as the poverty of which they are the
expression is left untouched, restrictions such as you
indorse can have only partial and evanescent results. The
cause remaining, repression in one place can only bring
out its effects in other places, and the task you assign
to the state is as hopeless as to ask it to lower the
level of the ocean by bailing out the sea.
Nor can the state cure poverty by regulating wages. It
is as much beyond the power of the state to regulate
wages as it is to regulate the rates of interest. Usury
laws have been tried again and again, but the only effect
they have ever had has been to increase what the poorer
borrowers must pay, and for the same reasons that all
attempts to lower by regulation the price of goods have
always resulted merely in increasing them. The general
rate of wages is fixed by the ease or difficulty with
which labor can obtain access to land, ranging from the
full earnings of labor, where land is free, to the least
on which laborers can live and reproduce, where land is
fully monopolized. Thus, where it has been comparatively
easy for laborers to get land, as in the United States
and in Australasia, wages have been higher than in Europe
and it has been impossible to get European laborers to
work there for wages that they would gladly accept at
home; while as monopolization goes on under the influence
of private property in land, wages tend to fall, and the
social conditions of Europe to appear. Thus, under the
partial yet substantial recognition of common rights to
land, of which I have spoken, the many attempts of the
British Parliament to reduce wages by regulation failed
utterly. And so, when the institution of private property
in land had done its work in England, all attempts of
Parliament to raise wages proved unavailing. In the
beginning of this century it was even attempted to
increase the earnings of laborers by grants in aid of
wages. But the only result was to lower commensurately
what wages employers paid.
The state could maintain wages above the tendency of
the market (for as I have shown labor deprived of land
becomes a commodity), only by offering employment to all
who wish it; or by lending its sanction to strikes and
supporting them with its funds. Thus it is, that the
thoroughgoing socialists who want the state to take all
industry into its hands are much more logical than those
timid socialists who propose that the state should
regulate private industry — but only a little.
The same hopelessness attends your suggestion that
working-people should be encouraged by the state in
obtaining a share of the land. It is evident that by this
you mean that, as is now being attempted in Ireland, the
state shall buy out large landowners in favor of small
ones, establishing what are known as peasant proprietors.
Supposing that this can be done even to a considerable
extent, what will be accomplished save to substitute a
larger privileged class for a smaller privileged class?
What will be done for the still larger class that must
remain, the laborers of the agricultural districts, the
workmen of the towns, the proletarians of the cities?
Is it not true, as Professor De Laveleye says,
that in such countries as Belgium, where peasant
proprietary exists, the tenants, for there still exist
tenants, are rack-rented with a mercilessness unknown in
Ireland? Is it not true that in such countries as Belgium
the condition of the mere laborer is even worse than it
is in Great Britain, where large ownerships obtain? And
if the state attempts to buy up land for peasant
proprietors will not the effect be, what is seen today in
Ireland, to increase the market value of land and thus
make it more difficult for those not so favored, and for
those who will come after, to get land? How,
moreover, on the principle which you declare (36), that
“to the state the interests of all are equal,
whether high or low,” will you justify state aid to
one man to buy a bit of land without also insisting on
state aid to another man to buy a donkey, to another to
buy a shop, to another to buy the tools and materials of
a trade — state aid in short to everybody who may
be able to make good use of it or thinks that he could?
And are you not thus landed in communism — not the
communism of the early Christians and of the religious
orders, but communism that uses the coercive power of the
state to take rightful property by force from those who
have, to give to those who have not? For the state has no
purse of Fortunatus; the state cannot repeat the miracle
of the loaves and fishes; all that the state can give, it
must get by some form or other of the taxing power. And
whether it gives or lends money, or gives or lends
credit, it cannot give to those who have not, without
taking from those who have.
But aside from all this, any scheme of dividing up
land while maintaining private property in land is
futile. Small holdings cannot coexist with the treatment
of land as private property where civilization is
materially advancing and wealth augments. We may see this
in the economic tendencies that in ancient times were the
main cause that transformed world-conquering Italy from a
land of small farms to a land of great estates. We may
see it in the fact that while two centuries ago the
majority of English farmers were owners of the land they
tilled, tenancy has been for a long time the all but
universal condition of the English farmer. And now the
mighty forces of steam and electricity have come to urge
concentration. It is in the United States that we may see
on the largest scale how their power is operating to turn
a nation of landowners into a nation of tenants. The
principle is clear and irresistible. Material progress
makes land more valuable, and when this increasing value
is left to private owners land must pass from the
ownership of the poor into the ownership of the rich,
just as diamonds so pass when poor men find them. What
the British government is attempting in Ireland is to
build snow-houses in the Arabian desert! to plant bananas
in Labrador!
There is one way, and only one way, in which
working-people in our civilization may be secured a share
in the land of their country, and that is the way that we
propose — the taking of the profits of
landownership for the community.
... read
the whole letter
Henry George: How to Help the
Unemployed (1894)
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
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