• Firstly, to redistribute land means to divide it up. But land is so vastly different as to make this task utterly impractical, what with wilderness, marginal agricultural land, good agricultural land, outer suburban land and prime real estate in the heart of the cities. Where's Solomon to wisely divide it all up, with the added problem of buildings and improvements that some people have built and others haven't? Would A have to get 100 square kilometres of desert to match B's parcel of two square metres opposite the GPO?
• Secondly, even if the different values were measured at a given moment, they would immediately begin to change, and would continue to do so. Even if everyone might start with a parcel of land equal in value to everyone else's, those values would at once begin to shift. In the first year a dam is built here, a school is closed down there, and roads are built everywhere. Appreciation and depreciation would continue year after year, and in no time everyone's "equal" parcels would have ceased to be such. A great way to operate a casino, but what sort of way to run a society?
• Thirdly, even if you could wave a magic wand and somehow take into account the different and ever-changing values of land, what about new entrants like the newborn of the next and future generations? And what do immigrants get?

• After the land "reform," would selling, speculating and profiteering go on as before, or would all have to stick to their allocated plots for the rest of their lives?
• It would require a really squeaky-clean government for the "casino" of changing land values not to turn into a den of political influence and corruption. Most likely, development would be skewed towards the land of the politically empowered. Or maybe the kleptocracy would get the tip-off to buy land where development is going to take place.

We'll see that equalisation in most countries works something like that; that is, in addition to this inter-provincial equalisation, there's a tax shift involved where local sources of taxation like the property tax are being displaced by the federal income tax. I suppose Ferdinand Marcos would be a splendid example of the kind of person I was talking about in the poor country and in West Virginia you have all these coal companies whose owners live in Palm Beach, whose shareholders live in Palm Beach and such places, who benefit from an inter-state equalisation that benefits West Virginia. Well these are similarities. Now differences.  ... read the whole article

Lindy Davies: Land and Justice

Wealth — products, widgets — these things are made by human beings. If customers are willing to buy more of them, then manufacturers will make more of them. But human beings can't make land. The supply of land cannot be increased. If the demand for land increases, only one thing can happen: its price will go up.

The owners of land see population and production go up, up, up — and no more land. So, they will only put their land to use if they have an immediate need for the cash. If they can afford to wait, they will wait, because they expect the land's value to increase with time.

That, in a nutshell, is the key to the land problem — the problem of poverty.

That is why millions upon millions of people who are willing and able to work cannot find work, even while millions upon millions of acres of useable land (city land, industrial land, farm land, you name it) are held idle.

This leads to no end of problems. In the United States, it brings urban blight and suburban sprawl, which disrupt communities, and waste energy and resources. You don’t think under-use of land is that big a deal? Consider the fact that in the five boroughs of New York City, 7.5% of its land, or 18.6 square miles, is vacant. That’s buildable land, not parks or streets. And, of course, a great deal more land in New York, as in every other city, is used somewhat, but far less than the local economy would support. New York City has about 80 people per acre of residential land. That means that New York’s vacant land could house another 956,000 people at current density levels, without even starting to use its vast stock of under-used land.

Even though downtowns are underbuilt, people want to move away from the high prices and high crime rates they often find there — so development leapfrogs, using far more land than is necessary, jacking up the price of farmland near the city — so that local farms can no longer compete. All this sprawl creates more and more need for roads — provided by tax dollars, of course. With all these roads, and all these cars, public transportation systems become less popular and harder to finance. This chokes the cities with even more traffic, making them even less desirable places to be. Meanwhile, all these subsidized highways are just great for the big trucks, burning subsidized fuel, carrying imported merchandise to all the big-box stores and franchise restaurants of suburbia. In other words: two of the hugest problems that progressives are trying to address today — the decay of communities and the rise of the corporate big box — are all about the land.

Around the world, it gives too much power to the banks, for land is by far the greatest source of collateral for loans, everywhere. The more money we have to pay for land, the more power we give to the banks. Although 66% of American families own their homes, the overall net equity of American home “owners” is only 18%.

It’s all about treating the land as an “asset.”

In "developing countries" it leads to a terrible vicious circle: peasants lose their land to one of two groups: either, first, to land-baron cronies of corrupt regimes — who hold land idle for the specific reason of not allowing peasants to use it, thus making sure they have no place to go, and are willing to work for subsistence wages — or, second, to multinational corporations, who run huge plantations to grow crops for export. The foreign exchange thus gained goes for debt service, which allows the ruling regime to keep playing by the IMF's rules, and stay in power. Meanwhile, the peasants gravitate to the cities, seeking nonexistent jobs, and end up in shantytowns that lack clean water and sewers.

We're told that two billion people live on less than two dollars a day. Now, certainly there is lots of poverty in the world — but that statistic troubles me. Two dollars a day? Consider your own basic needs, and ask yourself how far two bucks will go toward satisfying them. Nobody can survive on two dollars a day. Why haven't those two billion people just keeled over by now?

This sort of paradox led the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen to the studies described in his book Development as Freedom. Sen contends that the true measure of economic welfare — and therefore of development in any meaningful sense — can't be a matter of GDP and other conventional measures of "growth." Any true measure of economic welfare must have to do with the degree to which each person can set and achieve his or her own economic goals.

Economic freedom for the world’s poorest people is unquestionably all about the land. Let's say a peasant family has a goat and a garden, and, working carefully, can grow enough to feed itself. Occasionally a good harvest will yield some surplus which can be sold — there wouldn't be much of that, but let's say it brought in an average of two dollars a day. With thrift, enough for school clothes, maybe even books.

Now, let's imagine that the family lost their land — perhaps an injury or some other disaster made it impossible to keep farming it — and they had to go to the city, where they managed to find a combination of odd jobs, yielding them an income of $10 per day. Now, they had to somehow buy their food and every other necessity out of that ten dollars, and they had to live in a miserable shack, with open sewage running in unpaved streets — yet in terms of development numbers, their income had increased by $500%.

In which case did the family have more freedom? Which scenario is more conducive to development?

We were talking about the tendency for landowners to use land as an investment — a sensible thing to do — not to use it now if they don't need to, but to think in terms of enjoying its increase in value over time. We even identified that as the key to the problem of poverty. But — good heavens, what can we do about that? Isn't that just how the economy works? Isn't the private ownership of land a basic part of a modern economy? How can we do without such an important institution?

Or in other words — won't the poor always be with us?

Not necessarily. It has been plain, since very earliest days of civil society, that the private ownership of land leads to exploitation and great extremes of wealth and poverty. And, since the time of the Book of Leviticus, we have had a pretty good idea of what to do about it. In that book were recorded the words "The land shall not be sold for ever, for the land is Mine, for ye are strangers and sojourners with me." ... read the whole speech