http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/darrow-clarence_on-land-ownership.html
The Land Belongs to the
People
Clarence Darrow
[Reprinted from Everyman, October, 1916]
If we could imagine some wise being somewhere in the clouds, looking
down upon the earth and seeing men with their manner of life and their
devious activities, we could imagine that such a being would not look
upon man with the same reverence and respect with which man looks upon
himself. Such a being would see great spaces of vacant land, hundreds
of miles, without any population, miles and miles of fertile land with
no people living on it, and would look into great huddles of men in our
big cities and find a busy hive of men and women working, fighting,
toiling, stealing, living five, six, ten, twenty stories up in the air,
because there is not room enough on earth! He would look at man with
all his goings and his comings and wonder what sort of brain he has; he
would look at him and consider him far inferior to the ant who
organizes his hill with system and plan and purpose so that all may
live.
He would think man did not understand the science of social life as
well as the bee who builds his home so that all the bees may live and
all have substantially the same chance for life. And such a being would
doubtless wonder whether man was really worth while to bother with or
to save, and would probably respect that portion of the apes who refuse
to evolve into men. He certainly could not understand how man, with his
method of life, his warfare upon his fellows, his ill adjustments,
could claim to be the wisest and the best and the greatest and the most
worth while of all the animals that live upon the earth.
This earth is a little raft moving in the endless sea of space, and the
mass of its human inhabitants are hanging on as best they can. It is as
if some raft filled with shipwrecked sailors should be floating on the
ocean, and a few of the strongest and most powerful would take all the
raft they could get and leave the most of the people, especially the
ones who did the work, hanging to the edges by their eyebrows. These
men who have taken possession of this raft, this little planet in this
endless space, are not even content with taking all there is and
leaving the rest barely enough to hold onto, but they think so much of
themselves and their brief day that while they live they must make
rules and laws and regulations that parcel out the earth for thousands
of years after they are dead and, gone, so that their descendants and
others of their kind may do in the tenth generation exactly what they
are doing today — keeping the earth and all the good things of the
earth and compelling the great mass of mankind to toil for them.
Now, the question is, how are you going to get it back? Everybody who
thinks knows that private ownership of the land is wrong. If ten
thousand men can own America, then one man can own it, and if one man
may own it he may take all that the rest produce or he may kill them if
he sees fit. It is inconsistent with the spirit of manhood. No person
who thinks can doubt but that he was born upon this planet with the
same birthright that came to every man born like him. And it is for him
to defend that birthright. And the man who will not defend it, whatever
the cost, is fitted only to be a slave. The earth belongs to the people — if they can get it — because
if you cannot get it, it makes no difference whether you have a right to it or
not, and if you can get
it, it makes no difference whether you have a right to it or not, you
just take it. The earth has been taken from the many by the few. It
made no difference that they had no right to it; they took it.
Now, there are some methods of getting access to the earth which are
easier than others. The easiest, perhaps, that has been contrived is by
means of taxation of the land values and land values alone; and I need
only say a little upon that question. One trouble with it which makes
it almost impossible to achieve, is that it is so simple and so easy.
You cannot get people to do anything that is simple; they want it
complex so they can be fooled.
Now the theory of Henry George and of those who really believe in the
common ownership of land is that the public should take not alone
taxation from the land, but the public should take to itself the whole
value of the land that has been created by the public — should take it
all. It should be a part of the public wealth, should be used for
public improvements, for pensions, and belong to the people who create
the wealth — which is a strange doctrine in these strange times. It
can be done simply and easily; it can be done by taxation. All the
wealth created by the public could be taken back by the public and then
poverty would disappear, most of it at least. The method is so simple,
and so legal even — sometimes a thing is legal if it is simple — that
it is the easiest substantial reform for men to accomplish, and when it
is done this great problem of poverty, the problem of the ages, will be
almost solved. We may need go farther.
Henry George said, in "Progress and Poverty" that while the land tax
may not bring about the dream of the socialist, it would still prepare
the way for that — or for any dream.
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