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.) ...
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. (11.)
Even were it true that the common opinion of mankind
has sanctioned private property in land, this would no
more prove its justice than the once universal practice
of the known world would have proved the justice of
slavery.
But it is not true. Examination will show that
wherever we can trace them the first perceptions of
mankind have always recognized the equality of right to
land, and that when individual possession became
necessary to secure the right of ownership in things
produced by labor some method of securing equality,
sufficient in the existing state of social development,
was adopted. Thus, among some peoples, land used for
cultivation was periodically divided, land used for
pasturage and wood being held in common. Among others,
every family was permitted to hold what land it needed
for a dwelling and for cultivation, but the moment that
such use and cultivation stopped any one else could step
in and take it on like tenure. Of the same nature were
the land laws of the Mosaic code. The land, first fairly
divided among the people, was made inalienable by the
provision of the jubilee, under which, if sold, it
reverted every fiftieth year to the children of its
original possessors.
Private property in land as we know it, the attaching
to land of the same right of ownership that justly
attaches to the products of labor, has never grown up
anywhere save by usurpation or force. Like slavery, it is
the result of war. It comes to us of the modern world
from your ancestors, the Romans, whose civilization it
corrupted and whose empire it destroyed.
It made with the freer spirit of the northern peoples
the combination of the feudal system, in which, though
subordination was substituted for equality, there was
still a rough recognition of the principle of common
rights in land. A fief was a trust, and to enjoyment was
annexed some obligation. The sovereign, the
representative of the whole people, was the only owner of
land. Of him, immediately or mediately, held
tenants, whose possession involved duties or payments,
which, though rudely and imperfectly, embodied the idea
that we would carry out in the single tax, of taking land
values for public uses. The crown lands
maintained the sovereign and the civil list; the church
lands defrayed the cost of public worship and
instruction, of the relief of the sick, the destitute and
the wayworn; while the military tenures provided for
public defense and bore the costs of war. A fourth and
very large portion of the land remained in common, the
people of the neighborhood being free to pasture it, cut
wood on it, or put it to other common uses.
In this partial yet substantial recognition of
common rights to land is to be found the reason why, in a
time when the industrial arts were rude, wars frequent,
and the great discoveries and inventions of our time
unthought of, the condition of the laborer was devoid of
that grinding poverty which despite our marvelous
advances now exists. Speaking of England, the
highest authority on such subjects, the late Professor
Therold Rogers, declares that in the thirteenth century
there was no class so poor, so helpless, so pressed and
degraded as are millions of Englishmen in our boasted
nineteenth century; and that, save in times of actual
famine, there was no laborer so poor as to fear that his
wife and children might come to want even were he taken
from them. Dark and rude in many respects as they were,
these were the times when the cathedrals and churches and
religious houses whose ruins yet excite our admiration
were built; the times when England had no national debt,
no poor law, no standing army, no hereditary paupers, no
thousands and thousands of human beings rising in the
morning without knowing where they might lay their heads
at night.
With the decay of the feudal system, the system of
private property in land that had destroyed Rome was
extended. As to England, it may briefly be said that the
crown lands were for the most part given away to
favorites; that the church lands were parceled among his
courtiers by Henry VIII., and in Scotland grasped by the
nobles; that the military dues were finally remitted in
the seventeenth century, and taxation on consumption
substituted; and that by a process beginning with the
Tudors and extending to our own time all but a mere
fraction of the commons were inclosed by the greater
landowners; while the same private ownership of land was
extended over Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, partly
by the sword and partly by bribery of the chiefs. Even
the military dues, had they been commuted, not remitted,
would today have more than sufficed to pay all public
expenses without one penny of other taxation.
Of the New World, whose institutions but continue
those of Europe, it is only necessary to say that to the
parceling out of land in great tracts is due the
backwardness and turbulence of Spanish America; that to
the large plantations of the Southern States of the Union
was due the persistence of slavery there, and that the
more northern settlements showed the earlier English
feeling, land being fairly well divided and the attempts
to establish manorial estates coming to little or
nothing. In this lies the secret of the more vigorous
growth of the Northern States. But the idea that land was
to be treated as private property had been thoroughly
established in English thought before the colonial period
ended, and it has been so treated by the United States
and by the several States. And though land was at first
sold cheaply, and then given to actual settlers, it was
also sold in large quantities to speculators, given away
in great tracts for railroads and other purposes, until
now the public domain of the United States, which a
generation ago seemed illimitable, has practically gone.
And this, as the experience of other countries shows, is
the natural result in a growing community of making land
private property. When the possession of land means the
gain of unearned wealth, the strong and unscrupulous will
secure it. But when, as we propose, economic rent, the
“unearned increment of wealth,” is taken by
the state for the use of the community, then land will
pass into the hands of users and remain there, since no
matter how great its value, its possession will be
profitable only to users.
As to private property in land having conduced to the
peace and tranquillity of human life, it is not necessary
more than to allude to the notorious fact that the
struggle for land has been the prolific source of wars
and of lawsuits, while it is the poverty engendered by
private property in land that makes the prison and the
workhouse the unfailing attributes of what we call
Christian civilization.
Your Holiness intimates that the Divine Law gives its
sanction to the private ownership of land, quoting from
Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt not covet thy
neighbor’s wife, nor his house, nor his field, nor
his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor
his ass, nor anything which is his.”
If, as your Holiness conveys, this inclusion of the
words, “nor his field,” is to be taken as
sanctioning private property in land as it exists today,
then, but with far greater force, must the words,
“his man-servant, nor his maid-servant,” be
taken to sanction chattel slavery; for it is evident from
other provisions of the same code that these terms
referred both to bondsmen for a term of years and to
perpetual slaves. But the word “field”
involves the idea of use and improvement, to which the
right of possession and ownership does attach without
recognition of property in the land itself. And that this
reference to the “field” is not a sanction of
private property in land as it exists today is proved by
the fact that the Mosaic code expressly denied such
unqualified ownership in land, and with the declaration,
“the land also shall not be sold forever, because
it is mine, and you are strangers and sojourners with
me,” provided for its reversion every fiftieth
year; thus, in a way adapted to the primitive industrial
conditions of the time, securing to all of the chosen
people a foothold in the soil.
Nowhere in fact throughout the Scriptures can the
slightest justification be found for the attaching to
land of the same right of property that justly attaches
to the things produced by labor. Everywhere is it treated
as the free bounty of God, “the land which the Lord
thy God giveth thee.” ... read the whole
letter
THE tax upon land values is the most just and equal of
all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from
society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in
proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking
by the community, for the use of the community, of that
value which is the creation of the community. It is the
application of the common property to common uses. When
all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the
community, then will the equality ordained by nature be
attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any
other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill,
and intelligence; and each will obtain what he fairly
earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full
reward, and capital its natural return. —
Progress & Poverty
— Book VIII, Chapter 3, Application of the Remedy:
The Proposition Tried by the Canons of Taxation
HERE is a provision made by natural law for the
increasing needs of social growth; here is an adaptation
of nature by virtue of which the natural progress of
society is a progress toward equality not toward
inequality; a centripetal force tending to unity growing
out of and ever balancing a centrifugal force tending to
diversity. Here is a fund belonging to society as a
whole, from which without the degradation of alms,
private or public, provision can be made for the weak,
the helpless, the aged; from which provision can be made
for the common wants of all as a matter of common right
to each. —
Social Problems
— Chapter 19, The First Great Reform
NOT only do all economic considerations point to a tax
on land values as the proper source of public revenues;
but so do all British traditions. A land tax of four
shillings in the pound of rental value is still nominally
enforced in England, but being levied on a valuation made
in the reign of William III, it amounts in reality to not
much over a penny in the pound. With the abolition of
indirect taxation this is the tax to which men would
naturally turn. The resistance of landholders would bring
up the question of title, and thus any movement which
went so far as to propose the substitution of direct for
indirect taxation must inevitably end in a demand for the
restoration to the British people of their birthright.
— Protection or Free Trade— Chapter
27: The Lion in the Way -
econlib
THE feudal system, which is not peculiar to Europe but
seems to be the natural result of the conquest of a
settled country by a race among whom equality and
individuality are yet strong, clearly recognized, in
theory at least, that the land belongs to society at
large, not to the individual. Rude outcome of an age in
which might stood for right as nearly as it ever can (for
the idea of right is ineradicable from the human mind,
and must in some shape show itself even in the
association of pirates and robbers), the feudal system
yet admitted in no one the uncontrolled and exclusive
right to land. A fief was essentially a a trust, and to
enjoyment was annexed obligation. The sovereign,
theoretically the representative of the collective power
and rights of the whole people, was in feudal view the
only absolute owner of land. And though land was granted
to individual possession, yet in its possession were
involved duties, by which the enjoyer of its revenues was
supposed to render back to the commonwealth an equivalent
for the benefits which from the delegation of the common
right he received. —
Progress &Poverty
— Book VII, Chapter 4, Justice of the Remedy:
Private Property in Land Historically Considered
THE abolition of the military tenures in England by
the Long Parliament, ratified after the accession of
Charles II, though simply an appropriation of public
revenues by the feudal landowners, who thus got rid of
the consideration on which they held the common property
of the nation, and saddled it on the people at large in
the taxation of all consumers, has been long
characterized, and is still held up in the law books, as
a triumph of the spirit of freedom. Yet here is the
source of the immense debt and heavy taxation of England.
Had the form of these feudal dues been simply changed
into one better adapted to the changed times, English
wars need never have occasioned the incurring of debt to
the amount of a single pound, and the labor and capital
of England need not have been taxed a single farthing for
the maintenance of a military establishment. All this
would have come from rent, which the landholders since
that time have appropriated to themselves — from
the tax which land ownership levies on the earnings of
labor and capital. The landholders of England got their
land on terms which required them even in the sparse
population of Norman days to put in the field, upon call,
sixty thousand perfectly equipped horsemen, and on the
further condition of various fines and incidents which
amounted to a considerable part of the rent. It would
probably be a low estimate to put the pecuniary value of
these various services and dues at one-half the rental
value of the land. Had the landholders been kept to this
contract and no land been permitted to be inclosed except
upon similar terms, the income accruing to the nation
from English land would today be greater by many millions
than the entire public revenues of the United Kingdom.
England today might have enjoyed absolute free trade.
There need not have been a customs duty, an excise,
license or income tax, yet all the present expenditures
could be met, and a large surplus remain to be devoted to
any purpose which would conduce to the comfort or
well-being of the whole people. —
Progress &Poverty
— Book VII, Chapter 4, Justice of the Remedy:
Private Property in Land Historically
Considered
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