Sunday, September 18, 2022

Henry Georges on land property

 




The right of property in things produced by labor— and this is the only true right of property—springs directly from the right of the individual to himself, or as Locke expresses it, from his "property in his own person."

It is as clear and has as fully the sanction of equity in any savage state as in the most elaborate civilization. Labor can, of com-se, produce nothing without land; but the right to the use of land is a primary individual right, not springing from society, or depending on the consent of society, either expressed or implied, but inhering in the individual, and resulting from his presence in the world.

Men must have rights before they can have equal rights. Each man has a right to use the world because he is here and wants to use the world. The equality of this right is merely a limitation arising from the presence of others with like rights.

Society, in other words, does not grant, and cannot equitably withhold from any individual, the right to the use of land. That right exists before society and independently of society, belonging at birth to each individual, and ceasing only with his death. Society itself has no original right to the use of land.

What right it has with regard to the use of land is simply that which is derived from and is necessary to the determination of the rights of the individuals who compose it. That is to say, the function of society with regard to the use of land only begins where individual rights clash, and is to secure equality between these clashing rights of individuals.

 

The primary error of the advocates of land nationalization is in their confusion of equal rights with joint rights, and in their consequent failure to realize the nature and meaning of economic rent— errors which I have pointed out in commenting on Mr. Spencer's declarations in “Social Statics".

In truth the right to the use of land is not a joint or common right, but an equal right; the joint or common right is to rent, in the economic sense of the term. Therefore, it is not necessary for the state to take land, it is only necessary for it to take rent.

This taking by the commonalty of what is of common right, would of itself secure equality in what is of equal right —for since the holding of land could be profitable only to the user, there would be no inducement for anyone to hold land that he could not adequately use, and monopolization being ended no one who wanted to use land would have any difficulty in finding it.

And it would at the same time secure the individual right, for in taking what is of common right for its revenues the state could abolish all those taxes which now take from the individual what is of individual right.

The truth is that customs taxes, and improvement taxes, and income taxes, and taxes on business and occupations and on legacies and successions, are morally and economically no better than highway robbery or burglary, all the more disastrous and demoralizing because practiced by the state. There is no necessity for them.

The seeming necessity arises only from the failure of the state to take its own natural and adequate source of revenue—a failure which entails a long train of evils of another kind by stimulating a forestalling and monopolization of land which creates an artificial scarcity of the primary element of life and labor, so that in the midst of illimitable natural resources the opportunity to work has come to be looked on as a boon, and in spite of the most enormous increase in the powers of production the great mass find life a hard struggle to maintain life, and millions die before their time, of overstrain and under nurture.

When the matter is looked on in this way, the idea of compensation—the idea that justice demands that those who have engrossed the natural revenue of the state must be paid the capitalized value of all future engrossment before the state can resume those revenues—is too preposterous for serious statement.

And while in the nature of things any change from wrong-doing to right-doing must entail loss upon those who profit by the wrong-doing, and this can no more be prevented than can parallel lines be made to meet; yet it must also be remembered that in the nature of things the loss is merely relative, the gain absolute. Whoever will examine the subject will see that in the abandonment of the present unnatural and unjust method of raising public revenues and the adoption of the natural and just method even those who relatively lose will be enormous gainers.

 

Private property in land— the subjecting of land to that exclusive ownership which rightfully attaches to the products of labor—is a denial of the true right of property, which gives to each the equal right to exert his labor and the exclusive right to its results.

It differs from slavery only in its form, which is that of making property of the indispensable natural factor of production, while slavery makes property of the human factor; and it has the same purpose and effect, that of compelling some men to work for others.

Its abolition therefore does not mean the destruction of any right but the cessation of a wrong—that for the future the municipal law shall conform to the moral law, and that each shall have his own.


Peter Tosh: Equal rights and justice


NB: At the end of the 19th century, it was said that, to be sustainable, rent should not exceed one tenth of the income. In 1980 when I rented my first flat, that was up to one third. Today, it is around half while in some places like Tel Aviv and many big metro hubs, it is the entire salary thus forcing many people into flat sharing with the cost of one room still equating to half the salary ...




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