THE Land Question is not merely a question between farmers and the owners of agricultural land. It is a question that affects every man, every woman, and every child. The Land Question is simply another name for the great labor question, and the people who think of the Land Question as having importance simply for farmers forget what land is.

If you would realize what land is, think of what men would be without land. If there were no land, where would be the people? Land is not merely a place to graze cows or sheep upon, to raise corn or raise cabbage. It is the indispensable element necessary to the life of every human being. We are all land animals; our very bodies come from the land, and to the land they return again.

Whether a man dwells in the city or in the country, whether he be a farmer, a laborer, a mechanic, a manufacturer, or a soldier, land is absolutely necessary to his life. No matter what his occupation may by, if he is engaged in productive labor, that productive labor, if you analyze it, is simply the application of human exertion to land, the changing in place or in form of the matter of the universe.

• Men produce coal by going down under the ground, hewing out the coal, and bringing it to the surface of the earth;
• they produce fish by going to the lough, or river, or ocean and pulling the fish out;
• they produce houses by bringing together timber and stones and iron into the shape and form of a house;
• they produce cloth by taking the wool of a sheep or the fibers of a plant and bringing them together in a certain connection;
• they produce crops by opening the ground and putting in seed and leaving it there for the germinating influences of nature

• that which a man makes belongs to him and can by him be given or sold to anyone that he pleases.
• But that which existed before man came upon the earth, that which was not produced by man, but which was created by God -- that belongs equally to all men. 

We claim that the land of Ireland, like the land of every country, cannot justly belong to any class, whether that class be large or small; but that the land of Ireland, like the land of every other country, justly belongs in usufruct to the whole people of that country equally, and that no man and no class of men can have any just right in the land that is not equally shared by all others.

We say that all the social difficulties we see here, all the social difficulties that exist in England or Scotland, all the social difficulties that are growing up in the United States--

• the lowness of wages,
• the scarcity of employment,
• the fact that though labor is the producer of wealth, yet everywhere the laboring class is the poor class

Joseph Stiglitz: October, 2002, interview

Q: In Globalization and its Discontents, you write (p. 81): "But land reform represents a fundamental change in the structure of society, one that those in the elite that populates the finance ministries, those with whom the international financial institutions interact, do not necessarily like."

JES: Yes. Let me try to approach the question a little more systematically. Once you take the perspective I just gave, that means the management should be done in such a way that it maximizes the amount of money available to the US government from natural resources because they are within its domain and control. So, looking at the United States, one of the implications of this is that a foundation such as yours [the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, created to promote the ideas of Henry George, as expressed in Progress & Poverty] ought to be very much against the policies of the US government of giving away our natural resources. Here is a case where we not only are not taxing it much, we're actually giving it away.

Q: I assume you're speaking in particular of oil and mineral rights, but would not Broadband Spectrum rights also be included in that category?

JES: Yes, Broadband Spectrum rights as well. Now, giving away rights such as those would be anathema to the spirit of Henry George. And the second part is that when you sell them, you want to do so in such a way as to maximize the revenues. And whether you decide to sell it or whether you decide to rent it, would be the question of what is the way that maximizes the extraction of public revenues.

Q: And those revenues go to the people. Not to private concerns.

JES: Exactly. So you're trying to say, from the perspective of public management, how can we take this inelastic supply of public resources and maximize the rents that we can extract from it, consistent with other public objectives? That is a very deep philosophical approach, and requires a re-thinking of how we manage all aspects of those public resources. However, much of what we do is inconsistent with that. Now, the issue of land reform is a little bit different. There, it's a two-step analysis. My concern that I expressed about land is that in many developing countries, you have most land owned by a few rich people, and the land is relatively little taxed. But the land is worked in a system of sharecropping in which workers have to pay the landlord 50% of their output. In a way, you can look at that 50% as a tax. The sharecroppers are paying a 50% tax to the landlord. But it's worse than a tax. Because it's not a land tax, it's a tax on their labor. And it's a tax that goes to the landlord rather than to society. So the notion is that land reform could take a variety of different forms. For instance, the government could take over the land and rent it to the people. Or give it to the people and have a land tax that would not have the distortionary effect of land reform. So, in a way, these systems of share-cropping are worse even than anything that Henry George was worried about in terms of misuse of land. ... read the entire interview

Humanity is emerging from eons of development during which survival has been promoted both by the ability to grab resources from others and by the ability of groups to cooperate and share natural resources within communities that occupied territorial homelands. In recent centuries we have been developing a consensus that taking from the weak is wrong, and that we ought to have a social order that prevents all such behavior. But we have not yet worked out how to do it.

Some people think of preventing grabbing in terms of preserving the status quo. There are two difficulties with this.

• First, the status quo incorporates extensive holdings that were acquired by indefensible means. A decision to preserve the status quo commits us to defending the indefensible.
• Second, there is no magic to any particular date, before which unjust appropriations are incorporated into the status quo and after which they are reversed.

A practice of allowing an appropriation to be treated as just if it has survived long enough gives aggressors an incentive to see if they can grab and hold on long enough. The result is actions like Indonesia's seizure of East Timor and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Only if we have a standard of justice that is independent of history can we expect to end such actions.

Henry George's theory of economic justice--that every person has a right to his or her productive powers, and that all persons have equal rights to all natural opportunities--provides a simple formula around which opinion about the shape of a peaceful world can coalesce.

This may seem hopelessly optimistic. But no other theory that I have seen has anything like the clarity, coherence and power of this theory. ...

What to Do When Some Nations Fail to Fulfill Their Obligations

THE THEORY that has been developed incorporates all of the ways that nations impinge upon one another by their appropriations of natural opportunities-through their claims to land, natural resources, the frequency spectrum, and geosynchronous orbits, through their appropriations of fish in the ocean, through their use of natural resources that are embedded in goods, through their emissions of pollutants that cross international borders, including the ones that produce global warming and ozone depletion, through their decisions to have population growth rates that differ from the world average, and in any other way that nations appropriate scarce natural opportunities. The theory describes what nations must do to fulfill their obligations to other nations. But how will unwilling nations be compelled to fulfill their obligations if they do not wish to do so?

The theory is not designed to coerce recalcitrant nations. The theory is designed to describe what must be done by those who wish to fulfill their obligations. But universal acceptance is not needed for the theory to work. In the first place, under the theory that has been presented only some nations have obligations. The others have claims. Until a careful analysis is done, it is not possible to specify which nations have the obligations and which have the claims. But only the nations with obligations need to be persuaded to fulfill their obligations under the theory, and these are likely to be predominantly rich nations. Because the magnitudes of transfers to recipient nations depend on what those nations do, they receive incentives to economize on their appropriations of natural opportunities, even if they do not agree with the theory.

But suppose that only some of the nations with net obligations are willing to honor those obligations. How should these nations respond to the lack of cooperation by others?

• First, they should compute their obligations as if the resources and populations of the non-cooperating nations did not exist. All persons have equal rights to all natural opportunities. If some natural opportunities have been improperly grabbed by people who refuse to acknowledge their obligation to share, then those who do recognize their obligation should understand that they must all claim less.
• Second, the cooperating nations should do what can reasonably be done to deny acceptability of excessive claims to natural opportunities. If some nation appropriates the oil, diamonds or other resources under the ground that it occupies without regard to the rights of people in other nations, then the people in the other nations should decline to purchase those resources, or products made with them. To do so would be to purchase stolen property. If they have a dire need for the resources, they should recognize the claims of all persons to the resources by including the value of the resources in their own calculations of what they appropriate from everyone's common heritage. In this way, economic pressure would be put on all resource users to acknowledge the equal rights of all persons to natural opportunities.

What if a nation refuses to share the value of natural opportunities among its citizens? A reasonable test of whether a nation can properly be treated as the agent of its citizens and the appropriate recipient of its citizens' shares of the value of natural opportunities is whether the nation allows its citizens to leave. If a nation does not allow its citizens to leave, then it is not proper to treat the nation as the agent of its citizens. The citizens are effectively imprisoned. We have no way of honoring our obligations to them. We might put their shares in trust, but if they are not allowed to leave, then we should not trust their government to use their shares of the value of natural opportunities as they would wish. On the other hand, if the citizens could leave and decline to do so, and if there are some other nations that would accept them, then we are justified in regarding their continued citizenship as evidence of their implied consent to the decisions of their government about how their shares of natural opportunities will be used. This rule may induce governments that would otherwise keep their citizens captive within their borders to instead allow them liberty.

Thus the proper application of a principle of equal rights of all persons to natural opportunities will generate incentives for increased compliance and increased liberty for all. It is not necessary to have a world government that has the power to coerce all nations to abide by a single authority's determination of what they owe. Every nation can make its own determination of what, if anything, they owe to others. Within broad limits people can accept differing interpretations of obligations. If some nation exceeds the limits of tolerance, other nations can reasonably respond by declining to regard that nation or its citizens as the true owners of the things they seek to trade. What is created is a diverse, tolerant, and responsible international community.

It is not necessary to achieve universal acceptance of this theory for it to be effective. What is necessary is acceptance by the major economic powers, plus a willingness to condition economic relations on an assurance that traded goods are not unjustly appropriated from nature, and are not made with the labor of persons who are deprived of their liberty to migrate if they choose.  ...  Read the whole article

“Free to Choose: A Conversation with Milton Friedman” — July 2006: http://www.hillsdale.edu/imprimis/ The following is an edited transcript of a conversation between Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and Milton Friedman, which took place on May 22, 2006, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco, California, during a two-day Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar celebrating the 25th anniversary of Milton and Rose Friedman's book, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. excerpt:

LA: Let me ask you about demographic trends. Columnist Mark Steyn writes that in ten years, 40 percent of young men in the world are going to be living in oppressed Muslim countries. What do you think the effect of that is going to be?

MF: What happens will depend on whether we succeed in bringing some element of greater economic freedom to those Muslim countries. Just as India in 1955 had great but unrealized potential, I think the Middle East is in a similar situation today. In part this is because of the curse of oil. Oil has been a blessing from one point of view, but a curse from another. Almost every country in the Middle East that is rich in oil is a despotism.

LA: Why do you think that is so?

MF: One reason, and one reason only — the oil is owned by the governments in question. If that oil were privately owned and thus someone's private property, the political outcome would be freedom rather than tyranny. This is why I believe the first step following the 2003 invasion of Iraq should have been the privatization of the oil fields. If the government had given every individual over 21 years of age equal shares in a corporation that had the right and responsibility to make appropriate arrangements with foreign oil companies for the purpose of discovering and developing Iraq's oil reserves, the oil income would have flowed in the form of dividends to the people — the shareholders — rather than into government coffers. This would have provided an income to the whole people of Iraq and thereby prevented the current disputes over oil between the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, because oil income would have been distributed on an individual rather than a group basis.

LA: Many Middle Eastern societies have a kind of tribal or theocratic basis and long-held habits of despotic rule that make it difficult to establish a system of contract between strangers. Is it your view that the introduction of free markets in such places could overcome those obstacles?

MF: Eventually, yes. I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual's natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they're responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of.

Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.

Alanna Hartzok: Earth Rights Democracy: Public Finance based on Early Christian Teachings
 
Nic Tideman: The Constitutional Conflict Between Protecting Expectations and Moral Evolution

One impediment to the recognition of equal rights to the use of natural opportunities is that some system of assessment would be needed to identify the transfers that would compensate for unequal access to natural opportunities. Another impediment is that a system of rewards for those who discover new opportunities would be needed. But if there were a will to address them, these technical difficulties could be solved adequately, as they are in jurisdictions such as Alberta, Canada, that claim all mineral rights for the government. ...  Read the whole article

James Kiefer: James Huntington and the ideas of Henry George

Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty, argued that, while some forms of wealth are produced by human activity, and are rightly the property of the producers (or those who have obtained them from the previous owners by voluntary gift or exchange), land and natural resources are bestowed by God on the human race, and that every one of the N inhabitants of the earth has a claim to 1/Nth of the coal beds, 1/Nth of the oil wells, 1/Nth of the mines, and 1/Nth of the fertile soil. God wills a society where everyone may sit in peace under his own vine and his own fig tree.

The Law of Moses undertook to implement this by making the ownership of land hereditary, with a man's land divided among his sons (or, in the absence of sons, his daughters), and prohibiting the permanent sale of land. (See Leviticus 25:13-17,23.) The most a man might do with his land is sell the use of it until the next Jubilee year, an amnesty declared once every fifty years, when all debts were cancelled and all land returned to its hereditary owner.

Henry George's proposed implementation is to tax all land at about 99.99% of its rental value, leaving the owner of record enough to cover his bookkeeping expenses. The resulting revenues would be divided equally among the natural owners of the land, viz. the people of the country, with everyone receiving a dividend check regularly for the use of his share of the earth (here I am anticipating what I think George would have suggested if he had written in the 1990's rather than the 1870's).

This procedure would have the effect of making the sale price of a piece of land, not including the price of buildings and other improvements on it, practically zero. The cost of being a landholder would be, not the original sale price, but the tax, equivalent to rent. A man who chose to hold his "fair share," or 1/Nth of all the land, would pay a land tax about equal to his dividend check, and so would break even. By 1/Nth of the land is meant land with a value equal to 1/Nth of the value of all the land in the country.

Naturally, an acre in the business district of a great city would be worth as much as many square miles in the open country. Some would prefer to hold more than one N'th of the land and pay for the privilege. Some would prefer to hold less land, or no land at all, and get a small annual check representing the dividend on their inheritance from their father Adam.

Note that, at least for the able-bodied, this solves the problem of poverty at a stroke. If the total land and total labor of the world are enough to feed and clothe the existing population, then 1/Nth of the land and 1/Nth of the labor are enough to feed and clothe 1/Nth of the population. A family of 4 occupying 4/Nths of the land (which is what their dividend checks will enable them to pay the tax on) will find that their labor applied to that land is enough to enable them to feed and clothe themselves. Of course, they may prefer to apply their labor elsewhere more profitably, but the situation from which we start is one in which everyone has his own plot of ground from which to wrest a living by the strength of his own back, and any deviation from this is the result of voluntary exchanges agreed to by the parties directly involved, who judge themselves to be better off as the result of the exchanges.

Some readers may think this a very radical proposal. In fact, it is extremely conservative, in the sense of being in agreement with historic ideas about land ownership as opposed to ownership of, say, tools or vehicles or gold or domestic animals or other movables. The laws of English-speaking countries uniformly distinguish between real property (land) and personal property (everything else). In this context, "real" is not the opposite of "imaginary." It is a form of the word "royal," and means that the ultimate owner of the land is the king, as symbol of the people. Note that English-derived law does not recognize "landowners." The term is "landholders." The concept of eminent domain is that the landholder may be forced to surrender his landholdings to the government for a public purpose. Historically, eminent domain does not apply to property other than land, although complications arise when there are buildings on the land that is being seized.

I will mention in passing that the proposals of Henry George have attracted support from persons as diverse as Felix Morley, Aldous Huxley, Woodrow Wilson, Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, Leo Tolstoy, William F Buckley Jr, and Sun Yat-sen. To the Five Nobel Prizes authorized by Alfred Nobel himself there has been added a sixth, in Economics, and the Henry George Foundation claims eight of the Economics Laureates as supporters, in whole or in part, of the proposals of Henry George (Paul Samuelson, 1970; Milton Friedman, 1976; Herbert A Simon, 1978; James Tobin, 1981; Franco Modigliani, 1985; James M Buchanan, 1986; Robert M Solow, 1987; William S Vickrey, 1996).

The immediate concrete proposal favored by most Georgists today is that cities shall tax land within their boundaries at a higher rate than they tax buildings and other improvements on the land. (In case anyone is about to ask, "How can we possibly distinguish between the value of the land and the value of the buildings on it?" let me assure you that real estate assessors do it all the time. It is standard practice to make the two assessments separately, and a parcel of land in the business district of a large city very often has a different owner from the building on it.) Many cities have moved to a system of taxing land more heavily than improvements, and most have been pleased with the results, finding that landholders are more likely to use their land productively -- to their own benefit and that of the public -- if their taxes do not automatically go up when they improve their land by constructing or maintaining buildings on it.

An advantage of this proposal in the eyes of many is that it is a Fabian proposal, "evolution, not revolution," that it is incremental and reversible. If a city or other jurisdiction does not like the results of a two-level tax system, it can repeal the arrangement or reduce the difference in levels with no great upheaval. It is not like some other proposals of the form, "Distribute all wealth justly, and make me absolute dictator of the world so that I can supervise the distribution, and if it doesn't work, I promise to resign." The problem is that absolute dictators seldom resign. ... read the whole article

Charles T. Root — Not a Single Tax! (1925)

Every community, whatever its political name and extent — village, city, state or province or nation — has its own normal, unfailing income, growing with the growth of the community and always adequate to meet necessary governmental expenditure.

To explain: Every community has an indefeasible original right to the land on which it exists, and to all the natural, unmodified properties and advantages of that particular area of the earth's surface. To this land in its natural state, undrained, unfenced, unfertilized, unplanted and unoccupied, including its waters, its contents and its location, every individual in the community (which may consist of any political unit selected) has an equal right, while all the individuals together have a joint right to the value for use which society has conferred upon these natural advantages.

This value for use is known as "Land Value," or by the not particularly descriptive but generally adopted name of "Economic Rent."

Briefly defined the land value or economic rent of any piece of ground is the largest annual amount voluntarily offered for the exclusive use of that ground, or of an equivalent parcel, independent of improvements thereon. Every holder or user of land pays economic rent, but he now pays most of it to the wrong party. The aggregate economic rent of the territory occupied by any political unit is, as has been stated above, always sufficient, usually more than sufficient, for the legitimate expenses of the government of that unit. As also stated above, the economic rent belongs to the community, and not to individual landowners. ... read the whole article

Dave Wetzel: Justice or Injustice: The Locational Benefit Levy

• South Africa's former policy of apartheid;
• the USA's former segregated schools and buses;
• discrimination based on race, religion, disability or sex;
• slavery;
• the oppression of women;
• Victorian Britain's use of child labour and colonialism.