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. ...
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 power to 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 masses
— the mere laborers, who of themselves have no
power to use their labor — all the benefits of any
possible advance or improvement that does not alter this
unjust division of land? For having no power to employ
themselves, they must, either as labor-sellers or as
land-renters, compete with one another for permission to
labor. This competition with one another of men shut out
from God’s inexhaustible storehouse has no limit
but starvation, and must ultimately force wages to their
lowest point, the point at which life can just be
maintained and reproduction carried on. ...
See how fully adequate is the cause I have pointed out.
The most important of all the material relations of man
is his relation to the planet he inhabits, and hence, the
“impious resistance to the benevolent intentions of
his Creator,” which, as Bishop Nulty says, is
involved in private property in land, must produce evils
wherever it exists. But by virtue of the law, “unto
whom much is given, from him much is required,” the
very progress of civilization makes the evils produced by
private property in land more wide-spread and
intense.
What is producing throughout the civilized world that
condition of things you rightly describe as intolerable
is not this and that local error or minor mistake. It is
nothing less than the progress of civilization itself;
nothing less than the intellectual advance and the
material growth in which our century has been so
preeminent, acting in a state of society based on private
property in land; nothing less than the new gifts that in
our time God has been showering on man, but which are
being turned into scourges by man’s “impious
resistance to the benevolent intentions of his
Creator.”
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