Take
What You Need and Leave the Rest
(and don't take more than you will put to use, in order to
make a profit off others' similar needs —
and don't condone a system that permits some
of us to do so!)
Our corporations, REITS and wealthy families
take as their own our very best land: the urban land served by
extensive, expensive and sophisticated infrastructure, the ocean, lake and
river coasts. Our system of taxation does not collect from them the economic
value
of the
land they hold. Some, like Ted Turner, wisely place more of their portfolio
into land and other natural resource; our incentives provide them no
reason not to do so.
Georgists seek a society and an economy in which each of us owns the amount
of land we personally can put to good use, pay society its annual worth for
the exclusive right to that property, and leave the rest of the land available
for others to access. Some of that land will have little or no value, but
it should be available. She or he who has a plan for putting an excellent
piece of land to work should be able to access it, but its annual cost to
them should take into account the competing uses of other entrepreneurs.
This way, a good piece of land will be used well, producing jobs for many
more people than it currently does in its underused state. The "100%
location"
should be put to a "100% use," because that will benefit all of
us. (And its owner will profit from the security of possession, and putting
it to a 100% use — but not from the economic rent of the site, which
he will return to the commons in the form of land value taxation.) When our
incentives
allow someone (individual, family trust,
corporation,
real
estate
investment
trust)
to
keep that land
at 80%
use,
or 60% use, or
even 40% use until they're good and ready to improve it, hundreds or thousands
of us lose out, our cities sprawl, and land on the fringes gets developed
prematurely; people must commute long distances. Those who say that "property
rights" are
more important, that if a 40% use is what that owner of a 100% location wants,
that is his
prerogative,
miss the point that land is fundamentally different from things which are
manmade, and we can't create another plot of land in that 100% location — and
we all bear the costs of granting that level of property privilege,
through pollution, energy and time usage, etc.
H.G. Brown: Significant
Paragraphs from Henry George's Progress & Poverty, Chapter 4: Land Speculation
Causes Reduced Wages
In communities like the United States, where the user of land generally prefers,
if he can, to own it, and where there is a great extent of land to overrun,
this cause operated with enormous power.
The immense area over which the population of the United States is scattered
shows this. The man who sets out from the Eastern Seaboard in search of the
margin of cultivation, where he may obtain land without paying rent, must,
like the man who swam the river to get a drink, pass for long distances through
half-tilled farms, and traverse vast areas of virgin soil, before he reaches
the point where land can be had free of rent i.e., by homestead entry or pre-emption.
He (and, with him, the margin of cultivation) is forced so much farther than
he otherwise need have gone, by the speculation which is holding these unused
lands in expectation of increased value in the future. And when he settles,
he will, in his turn, take up, if he can, more land than he can use, in the
belief that it will soon become valuable; and so those who follow him are again
forced farther on than the necessities of production require, carrying the
margin of cultivation to still less productive, because still more remote points.
... read the whole chapter
Ted Gwartney: Estimating
Land Values
Each person has a right to keep
what he or she produces, but no
one has the right to waste what belongs to all people, the land which
includes the natural environment. Each person should have an
opportunity to use the best land for his business or personal needs,
as long as they are willing to pay the land rent that other land
users are willing to pay.
If the value of land rent exceeds
the community's needs for public
services a method of dispensing of the revenue can easily be
found. To maintain an equitable society, where nobody has special
benefits that they do not pay for, it is important to collect all of
the land rent. The community should use what is needed for public
services and improvements such as schools, hospitals, parks, police,
roadways, utilities and defense -- and reserve a fund for
emergencies.
An ethical proposal might be to
then divide the excess revenue
that is not needed for public facilities and services at the end of
each year and send each citizen in that community an equal portion of
the remaining revenue. This is similar to the method used in Alaska
and Alberta. Equality of opportunity to be productive can only be
accomplished by recapturing all of the market rent of land and
ensuring that all people benefit from its value.
Not only is land rent potentially
an important source of public
revenue, collecting all of it would ensure that the equal opportunity
to be productive would be available to all citizens. People could
fund useful buildings, equipment and wages, rather than having to buy
land at inflated prices. Many countries, including the United States,
were started on the premise of using land rent to fund public
services. Many countries suffer economic loss because they no longer
collect the market rent of land.
The value of land can be estimated
with an acceptable accuracy, at
a cost which is very small compared to the revenue to be obtained. A
proper system of assessment and taxation of land can provide for the
proper economic use of the land. A land site should be available to
the user who can make the highest and best use of the site and
maximize the site benefits for all people. A land tax can provide a
major source of public revenue which the local governing body could
use for the benefit of all people. A land tax can prevent the
dispossession of our children, the future producers in the society.
Justice requires that land values, which are created by society and
nature, be made available for public improvements. This is the
responsibility of good government.Read
the whole article
Nic Tideman: Peace,
Justice
and Economic Reform
These components of the
classical liberal conception of justice
are held by two groups that hold conflicting views on a companion
issue of great importance: how are claims of exclusive access to
natural opportunities to be established?
John Locke qualified his statement
that we own what we produce
with his famous "proviso" that there be "as much and as good left in
common for others." A few pages later, writing in the last decade of
the seventeenth century, he said that private appropriations of land
are actually not restricted, because anyone who is dissatisfied with
the land available to him in Europe can always go to America, where
there is plenty of unclaimed land.[12]
Locke does not address
the issue of rights to land when land is scarce.
One tradition in classical
liberalism concerning claims to land is
that of the "homesteading libertarians,"
as exemplified by Murray
Rothbard, who say that there is really no need to be concerned with
Locke's proviso. Natural opportunities belong to whoever first
appropriates them, regardless of whether opportunities of equal value
are available to others.[13]
The other tradition is that of the
"geoists,"
as inspired if not
exemplified by Henry George, who say that, whenever natural
opportunities are scarce, each person has an obligation to ensure
that the per capita value of the natural opportunities that he leaves
for others is as great as the value of the natural opportunities that
he claims for himself.[14] Any
excess in one's claim
generates an obligation to compensate those who thereby have less.
George actually proposed the nearly equivalent idea, that all or
nearly all of the rental value of land should be collected in taxes,
and all other taxes should be abolished. The geoist position as I
have expressed it emphasizes the idea that, at least when value
generated by public services is not an issue, rights to land are
fundamentally rights of individuals, not rights of governments.
There are two fundamental problems
with the position of
homesteading libertarians on claims to land. The first problem is the
incongruity with historical reality. Humans have emerged from an
environment of violence. Those who now have titles to land can trace
those titles back only so far, before they come to events where fiat
backed by violence determined title. And the persons who were
displaced at that time themselves had titles that originated in
violence. If there ever were humans who acquired the use of land
without forcibly displacing other humans, we have no way of knowing
who they were or who their current descendants might be. There is, in
practice, no way of assigning land to the legitimate successors of
the persons who first claimed land. And to assign titles based on any
fraction of history is to reward the last land seizures that are not
rectified.
The second fundamental problem
with the position of the
homesteading libertarians is that, even if there were previously
unsettled land to be allocated, say a new continent emerging from the
ocean, first grabbing would make no sense as a criterion for
allocating land.
It would be inefficient, for one
thing, as people stampeded to do
whatever was necessary to establish their claims. But that is not
decisive because, if we are concerned with justice, it might be
necessary for us to tolerate inefficiency. But the homesteading
libertarian view makes no sense in terms of justice. "I get it all
because I got here first," isn't justice.
Justice -- the balancing of the
scales -- is the geoist position,
"I
get exclusive access to this natural opportunity because I have left
natural opportunities of equal value for you." (How one compares, in
practice, the value of different natural opportunities is a bit
complex. If you really want to know, you can invite me back for
another lecture.)
Justice is thus a regime in
which persons have the greatest
possible individual liberty, and all acknowledge an obligation to
share equally the value of natural opportunities. Justice is economic
reform--the abolition of all taxes on labor and capital, the
acceptance of individual responsibility, the creation of institutions
that will provide equal sharing the value of natural
opportunities. ... Read the
entire article
Mason Gaffney: The Taxable Capacity of Land
Another attractive feature of
land taxation is its interesting positive effect on the economic base
of a city. It strengthens it by its tendency to hit absentee owners harder
than resident owners. The
land fraction in real estate is generally highest in the CBD of any city,
so that is a favorite place for absentees to buy and hold. They like
the steady income, and the "trophy" quality. The
surplus in real estate is what attracts outside buyers, and land is what
yields the surplus. About 2/3 of downtown Los Angeles is owned
by non-resident aliens, for example. In a more workaday city, Milwaukee,
the absentee owners consist of former residents, or their heirs, who
grew too rich to abide the harsh winters.
Consider the effect on your balance
of payments. When you get more tax money from absentees, money that used
to flow to Tehran, Zurich, or Palm Beach now flows into your local treasury
to pay your local teachers and city workers, and relieve your builders
and building managers. In this way taxing land actually acts to undergird
the value of its own base. ... Read the whole article
Jeff Smith: Share Rent, Transform Society
If someone buys a ticket to Super Bowl and decides not to go and sells it
for more than its face value, he could face the wrath of the law. If he bought
a super location and sold it for more than he paid for it, he could become
a pillar of society. Temporary ownership for profiteering is illegal; but if
permanent ownership, it is legal. If only we had a single standard, I think
society
would change for better. It doesn't matter who
owns what. What
matters is who gets the rent. We have millions of acres of forest we
Americans own together, and we are losing rent on it.
The word property cannot convey the distinction
between
rent and land. Ralph Borsodi came up with an alternative, a trust that
would claim publicly and occupy privately and use sparingly and compensate
neighborly.
Share the rent with
neighbors. A word for that is geonomics,
earth-focused
economics. It hones in on all this flow of rent that is so overlooked.
Shift the focus to sharing; then owning of land loses importance and belonging
to earth regains its importance. It is a different identity for human beings
as parts of the economic
system. ... read the whole article
Frank Stilwell and Kirrily Jordan: The
Political Economy of Land: Putting Henry George in His Place
What about the relevance of Georgist ideas to current concerns with environmental
quality and ecological sustainability? Here too there is a strong claim to
consider. Interest in Georgism has been reinvigorated in recent years by
the need to develop public policies that reflect the nature of land as a
finite natural resource. From a ‘green’ perspective, land tax
is a useful tool in discouraging the excessive and wasteful use of land.
That is, the prospect of paying a high rate of land tax can be expected to
discourage people from purchasing more land than they need directly for their
own purposes. It accords with the principle that people should be taxed according
to their use of scarce environmental assets.
This ‘ecological take’ on Georgism is particularly powerful
at a time of intensifying global environmental problems and recognition of
the need for remedial policy responses. It requires creative extension of
Georgist principles because the limitation of George’s own analysis
in this context is its primary focus on land. A range of other natural resources
needs to be considered, linking up with the broader concerns of modern environmentalists
such as Herman Daly (see, for example, Daly and Cobb, 1990). Hence, land
tax should be seen as an adjunct to taxes on the use of other scarce environmental
assets, including mineral, forestry and fishing stocks, and also bandwidth
for radio and telecommunications, for example (Stilwell, 2002: 316-317).
It should also be seen as a corollary to other taxes that discourage environmental
damage, including resource rental taxes, carbon taxes and fuel excises.
The case for these environmental taxes need not necessarily rest on Georgist
principles, of course, but Georgism can claim to provide a unifying analytical
framework. A common feature of ‘environmental taxes’ is that
they are all targeted, like land tax, at reducing the scope for profiting
from the private appropriation of natural resources, and thereby restricting
the profligate use of those resources.
A tension remains, reflecting the Georgist orientation towards taxes rather
than more directly regulatory interventions. Whether the use of the price
mechanism in this ‘environmental fine tuning’ is sufficient for
dealing with pervasive environment threats is a moot point. The nature and
severity of environmental stresses is such that more directly proscriptive
environmental policies are commonly needed to protect natural resources.
The creation and maintenance of national parks, for example, constitutes
a necessary direct regulation of land-use: the market, even when modified
by taxes, cannot absolutely guarantee the conservation of such crucial assets.
In other words, protection of ‘natural capital’ may commonly
require regulation as well as taxation. ... read the whole article
Peter Barnes: Capitalism
3.0 — Chapter 2: A Short History of Capitalism (pages 15-32)
In the seventeenth century, John Locke sought to balance the commons and
private property. Like others of his era, he saw that private property doesn’t
exist in a vacuum; it exists in relationship to a commons, vis-à-vis
which there are takings and leavings. The rationale for private property
is that it boosts economic production, but the commons has a rationale, too:
it provides sustenance for all. Both sides must be respected.
Locke believed that God gave the earth to “mankind in common,” but
that private property is justified because it spurs humans to work. Whenever
a person mixes his labor with nature, he “joins to it something that
is his own, and thereby makes it his property.” But here Locke added
an important proviso: “For this labor being the unquestionable property
of the laborer,” he wrote, “no man but he can have a right to
what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good,
left in common for others.” In other words, a person can acquire property,
but there’s a limit to how much he or she can rightfully appropriate.
That limit is set by two considerations:
- first, it should be no more
than he can join his labor to, and
- second, it has to leave “enough and as
good” in common for others.
This was consistent with
English common law at the time, which held, for example, that
a riparian landowner
could
withdraw water for his own use, but couldn’t diminish
the supply available to others.
Despite Locke’s quest for balance, the English commons didn’t
last. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the movement to enclose
and privatize it accelerated greatly. According to historian Karl Polanyi,
this enclosure was the great transformation that launched the modern era.
Local gentry, backed by Parliament, fenced off village lands and converted
them to private holdings. Impoverished peasants then drifted to cities and
became industrial workers. Landlords invested their agricultural profits
in manufacturing, and modern times, economically speaking, began. ... read
the whole chapter
Peter Barnes: Capitalism
3.0 — Chapter 8: Sharing Culture (pages 117-134)
The larger lesson of this chapter is that all three branches of the commons — nature,
community, and culture — are under similar assault from corporations,
and all need to be fortified. The means of fortification will vary with the
particular commons. When commons are scarce or threatened, we ought to limit
aggregate use, assign property rights to trusts, and charge market prices
to users. When commons are limitless (like culture, the Internet, and potentially
the airwaves), our challenge is the opposite: to provide the greatest benefit
to the greatest number at the lowest cost. To create scarcity where it doesn’t
need to exist diminishes rather than enlarges our well-being.
In both limited and unlimited commons, corporate and commons algorithms
clash. In limited commons, the corporate algorithm says: use as much as you
can as quickly as you can, because if you don’t, someone else will.
The commons algorithm, by contrast, says: preserve the asset for future generations,
enhance it whenever possible, and live off income rather than principal.
In unlimited commons, the corporate algorithm says: restrict use and charge
what the market will bear. The commons algorithm, by contrast, says: the
more users the merrier, and the cheaper the better. In both situations, the
commons algorithm conflicts head-on with the corporate one, and that’s
just fine. Indeed, it’s precisely the point.
Commons algorithms need to be unleashed in real-time markets, where they
can duke it out with their corporate counterparts. Managers in each sector
will know what to do, and the public will know what to expect. If corporations
keep winning, then add more property to the commons. Eventually, we’ll
get the best of both worlds, and when there’s conflict, more balanced
outcomes than we get today. We’ll also gain clarity about the real
costs of current practices.
After we fortify, we should enhance; just as we take from the commons, so
should we give back. Art and music can be reproduced by corporations, but
they don’t come from corporations; they come from the commons. Folk
music, country music, jazz, blues, garage bands — these are the roots
of our musical heritage. We must nourish the soil in which these roots grow.
This, not copyright extension, is the way to enrich culture. ... read
the whole chapter
Robert H. Browne: Abraham Lincoln
and the Men of His Time
“Christ knew better than we that 'No man having put his hand to the
plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God;' nor is many man doing
his duty who shrinks and is faithless to his fellow-men. Now a word more
about Abolitionists and new ideas in Government, whatever they may be: We
are all called Abolitionists now who desire any restriction of slavery or
believe that the system is wrong, as I have declared for years. We are called
so, not to help out a peaceful solution, but in derision, to abase us, and
enable the defamers to make successful combinations against us. I never was
much annoyed by these, less now than ever. I favor the best plan to restrict
the extension of slavery peacefully, and fully believe that we must reach
some plan that will do it, and provide for some method of final extinction
of the evil, before we can have permanent peace on the subject. On other
questions there is ample room for reform when the time comes; but now it
would be folly to think that we could undertake more than we have on hand. But
when slavery is over with and settled, men should never rest content while
oppressions, wrongs, and iniquities are in force against them.
“The land, the earth that God gave to man for his home, his
sustenance, and support, should never be the possession of any man, corporation,
society, or unfriendly Government, any more than the air or the water,
if as much. An individual company or enterprise requiring land should hold
no more in their own right than is needed for their home and sustenance,
and never more than they have in actual use in the prudent management of
their legitimate business, and this much should not be permitted when it
creates an exclusive monopoly. All that is not so used should be held for
the free use of every family to make homesteads, and to hold them as long
as they are so occupied.
“A reform like this will be worked out some time in the future.
The idle talk of foolish men, that is so common now, on 'Abolitionists,
agitators, and disturbers of the peace,' will find its way against it,
with whatever force it may possess, and as strongly promoted and carried
on as it can be by land monopolists, grasping landlords, and the titled
and untitled senseless enemies of mankind everywhere.” ... read
extended excerpts
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