http://www.prosper.org.au/progresspdf/Progress1056_JulAug2003.pdf

The Law of Rent

This is the Law of Rent. As individuals come together in communities, and society grows, integrating more and more its individual members, and making general interests and general conditions of more and more relative importance, there arises, over and above the value which individuals can create for themselves, a value which is created by the community as a whole, and which, attaching to land, becomes tangible, definite and capable of computation and appropriation.

As society grows, so grows this value, which springs from and represents in tangible form what society as a whole contributes to production, as distinguished from what is contributed by individual exertion.

By virtue of natural law in those aspects which it is the purpose of the science we call political economy to discover – as it is the purpose of the sciences which we call chemistry and astronomy to discover other aspects of natural law – all social advance necessarily contributes to the increase of this common value; to the growth of the common fund.

Here is a provision made by natural law for the increasing needs of social growth; there 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, and by the utilization of which society, as it advances, may pass, by natural methods and easy stages, from a rude association for purposes of defence and police, into a cooperative association, in which combined intelligence can give to each more than his own exertions multiplied manyfold could produce.

By making land private property, by permitting individuals to appropriate this fund which nature plainly intended for the use of all, we throw the children’s bread to the dogs of greed and lust; we produce a primary inequality which gives rise in every direction to other tendencies to inequality; and from this perversion of the good gifts of the Creator, from this ignoring and defying of his social laws, there arise in the very heart of our civilization those horrible and monstrous things which betoken social putrefaction.

Henry George (1839-1897) Extract from Social Problems