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Wealth and Want | |||||||
... because democracy alone is not enough to produce widely shared prosperity. | |||||||
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In
One's Sleep
"Landlords grow rich in their sleep without working, risking or economising. If some of us grow rich in our sleep, where do we think this wealth is coming from? It doesn't materialize out of thin air. It doesn't come without costing someone, another human being. It comes from the fruits of others' labors, which they don't receive. Is it enough to promise "pie in the sky when we die"? Or does living in a civilized society dedicated to the proposition that all of us are created equal and endowed with certain rights demand something else of us? John Stuart Mill: Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy (1848)
Henry George: Thou Shalt Not Steal (1887 speech) Chattel slavery was incarnate
theft of the worst kind. That system which made property of human
beings, which allowed one person to sell another, which allowed one
person to take away the proceeds of another’s toil, which permitted the
tearing of the child from the mother, and which permitted the so-called
owner to hunt with bloodhounds the person who escaped from the owner’s
tyranny — that form of slavery is abolished. To that extent, the
command, "Thou shalt not steal," has been vindicated; but there is
another form of slavery.
We are selling land now in large quantities to certain English lords, who are coming over here and buying greater estates than the greatest in Great Britain or Ireland. We are selling them land; they are buying land. Did it ever occur to you that they do not want that land? They have no use whatever for American land; they do not propose to come over here and live on it. They cannot carry it over there to where they do live. It is not the land that they want. What they want is the income from it. They are buying it not because they themselves want to use it, but because by and by, as population increases, numbers of American citizens will want to use it, and then they can say to these American citizens: "You can use this land provided you pay us one-half of all you make upon it." What we are selling those foreign lords is not really land; we are selling them the labor of American citizens; we are selling them the privilege of taking, without any return for it, the proceeds of the toil of our children. So, here in New York, you will read in the papers every day that the price of land is going up. John Jones or Robert Brown has made a hundred thousand dollars within a year in the increase in the value of land in New York. What does that mean? It means he has the power of getting many more coats, many more cigars, dry goods, horses and carriages, houses or much more food and wine. He has gained the power of taking for his own a great number of these products of human labor. But what has he done? He has not done anything. He may have been off in Europe or out west, or he may have been sitting at home taking it easy. If he has done nothing to get this increased income, where does it come from? The things I speak of are all products of human labor — someone has to work for them. When a man who does no work can get them, necessarily the people who do work to produce them must have less of the products of human labor than they ought to have. ... read the whole article H.G. Brown: Significant Paragraphs from Henry George's Progress & Poverty, Chapter 5: The Basic Cause of Poverty (in the unabridged: Book V: The Problem Solved)
Henry George: The Condition of Labor — An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII in response to Rerum Novarum (1891)
Louis Post: Outlines of Louis F. Post's Lectures, with Illustrative Notes and Charts (1894) — Appendix: FAQ
Upton Sinclair: The Consequences of Land Speculation are Tenantry and Debt on the Farms, and Slums and Luxury in the Cities
Winston Churchill: Land Price as a Cause of Poverty (1909 speech in Parliament) Then the right hon. gentleman
instanced the case of a new railway
and a country district enriched by that railway. The railway, he
explained, is built to open up a new district; and the farmers and
landowners in that district are endowed with unearned increment in
consequence of the building of the railway. But if after a while
their business aptitude and industry create a large carrying trade,
then the railway, he contends, gets its unearned increment in its
turn.
Karl Williams: Landlording
It Over UsBut the right hon. gentleman cannot call the increment unearned which the railway acquires through the regular service of carrying goods, rendering a service on each occasion in proportion to the tonnage of goods it carries, making a profit by an active extension of the scale of its useful business - he cannot surely compare that process with the process of getting rich merely by sitting still? It is clear that the analogy is not true. ... Read the whole piece If we’re spending decades of our
life
trying to purchase what should be our common birthright – land, the
Common Wealth – then just who is it who’s riding on our backs? Here
[we] expose the extent by which the great landowners – in
Britain, particularly – “get rich in their sleep.” ...
Winston Churchill: The
People's Land Geoism holds that there’s nothing necessarily wrong with being rich – indeed, an economic system exists whereby we could ALL be rich (in wealth, education or leisure time). The justification for riches all depends on whether a wealthy person has become so through creating wealth (in the form of goods and services that people willingly buy in a free and fair market) or through living off the wealth really created by others. Earned wealth might arise through talented or arduous inventing, writing, sports ability, entertaining, entrepreneurialship or whatever. ... Here we’re going to look at one of the most obvious examples of unearned wealth – the massive riches accumulated by the great landowners of Britain. Remember, it’s not the acreage of land that is important, but the value of the land. ... Britains' wealthiest man gets rich the easy way -- he has his underlings collect and bank his rent. And if the rents from his vast land holdings weren’t enough, soaring property prices have escalated his net worth sky high – to be exact, UK£11.5 billion. To give him his full title, he is His Grace, Gerald Grosvenor, OBE, Sixth Duke of Westminster. Forget the vast tracts of rural land, including a 100,000-acre estate in Scotland which contains no less than three mountains. The 300 acres the duke owns in central London, comprising Mayfair and Belgravia, are today one of the most valuable patches of ground on the planet. It was a handy marriage which brought this fortune into the Grosvenor family’s hands – in 1677, Sir Richard Grosvenor married Mary Davies, heir to the hundred acres north of Piccadilly and the “Five Fields” south of Knightsbridge. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Mayfair and Belgravia were built up as residential areas for London’s wealthy classes, a position they have occupied ever since. Unlike many other great landowners who have cashed in, the Grosvenors held on and have benefited enormously from the latest boom in London property prices. The duke has nowadays diversified his land portfolio. His commercial property company, Grosvenor, has become a serious player, with a vast array of investments and developments around the world. These include office blocks in San Francisco, business parks in Vancouver, luxury apartments in Hong Kong and shopping centres in Spain and Portugal. In the UK, Grosvenor has developed Festival Place shopping centre in Basingstoke and is set to undertake a £700m. mixed-use redevelopment in the centre of Liverpool. Back in his tract of Mayfair, land values are in the stratosphere: in 2001, BP’s pension fund sold ten acres of Mayfair for a cool £335m. Is it any wonder that, given how there is little or no land value taxation, the duke has all his many eggs in the land investment basket? But it’s not just for economic considerations that he could never contemplate selling his vast acreage, for he has a philosophical reason for not selling. (Have a bucket ready before reading the following!) “This is part of my heritage, my birthright. It is not to do with anything materialistic, but is deeply ingrained.” Read the whole article Fancy comparing these healthy
processes with the enrichment which comes
to the landlord who happens to own a plot of land on the outskirts or
at the centre of one of our great cities, who watches the busy
population around him making the city larger, richer, more convenient,
more famous every day, and all the while sits still and does nothing.
Roads are made, streets are made, railway
services are improved, electric light turns night into day, electric
trams glide swiftly to and fro, water is brought from reservoirs a
hundred miles off in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord
sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour
and at the cost of other people. Many of the most important are
effected at the cost of the municipality and of the ratepayers. To not one of those improvements does the
land monopolist as a land monopolist contribute, and yet by every one
of them the value of his land is sensibly enhanced. He renders
no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general
welfare; he contributes nothing even to the process from which his own
enrichment is derived. If the land were occupied by shops or by
dwellings, the municipality at least would secure the rates upon them
in aid of the general fund, but the land may be unoccupied,
undeveloped, it may be what is called 'ripening'
-- ripening at the expense of the whole city, of the whole country, for
the unearned increment of its owner. Roads perhaps may have to be
diverted to avoid this forbidden area. The merchant going to his
office, the artisan going to his work, have to make a detour or pay a
tram fare to avoid it. The citizens are losing their chance of
developing the land, the city is losing its rates, the State is losing
its taxes which would have accrued if the natural development had taken
place; and that share has to be replaced at the expense of the other
ratepayers and taxpayers, and the nation as a whole is losing in the
competition of the world -- the hard and growing competition of the
world -- both in time and money. And
all the while the land monopolist
has only to sit still and watch complacently his property multiplying
in value, sometimes manifold, without either effort or contribution on
his part; and that is justice! ...
Every form of enterprise only undertaken after the land monopolist has skimmed the cream off for himself It does not matter where you look or what examples you select, you will see that every form of enterprise, every step in material progress, is only undertaken after the land monopolist has skimmed the cream off for himself, and everywhere today the man or the public body who wishes to put land to its highest use is forced to pay a preliminary fine in land values to the man who is putting it to an inferior use, and in some cases to no use at all. All comes back to the land value, and its owner for the time being is able to levy his toll upon all other forms of wealth and upon every form of industry. A portion, in some cases the whole, of every benefit which is laboriously acquired by the community is represented in the land value, and finds its way automatically into the landlord's pocket. If there is a rise in wages, rents are able to move forward, because the workers can afford to pay a little more. If the opening of a new railway or a new tramway or the institution of an improved service of workmen's trains or a lowering of fares or a new invention or any other public convenience affords a benefit to the workers in any particular district, it becomes easier for them to live, and therefore the landlord and the ground landlord, one on top of the other, are able to charge them more for the privilege of living there. ... Now let the Manchester Ship Canal tell its tale about the land. It has a story to tell which is just as simple and just as pregnant as its story about Free Trade. When it was resolved to build the Canal, the first thing that had to be done was to buy the land. Before the resolution to build the Canal was taken, the land on which the Canal flows -- or perhaps I should say 'stands' -- was, in the main, agricultural land, paying rates on an assessment from 30s. to L2 an acre. I am told that 4,495 acres of land purchased fell within that description out of something under 5,000 purchased altogether. Immediately after the decision, the 4,495 acres were sold for L777,000 sterling -- or an average of L172 an acre -- that is to say, five or six times the agricultural value of the land and the value on which it had been rated for public purposes. Now what had the landowner done for the community; what enterprise had he shown; what service had he rendered; what capital had he risked in order that he should gain this enormous multiplication of the value of his property! I will tell you in one word what he had done. Can you guess it! Nothing. But it was not only the owners of the land that was needed for making the Canal, who were automatically enriched. All the surrounding land either having a frontage on the Canal or access to it rose and rose rapidly, and splendidly, in value. By the stroke of a fairy wand, without toil, without risk, without even a half-hour's thought many landowners in Salford, Eccles, Stretford, Irlam, Warrington Runcorn, etc., found themselves in possession of property which had trebled, quadrupled, quintupled in value. Apart from the high prices which were paid, there was a heavy bill for compensation, severance, disturbance, and injurious affection where no land was taken -- injurious affection, namely, raising the land not taken many times in value -- all this was added to the dead-weight cost of construction. All this was a burden on those whose labour skill, and capital created this great public work. Much of this land today is still rated at ordinary agricultural value, and in order to make sure that no injustice is done, in order to make quite certain that these landowners are not injured by our system of government, half their rates are, under the Agricultural Rates Act, paid back to them. The balance is made up by you. The land is still rising in value, and with every day's work that every man in this neighbourhood does and with every addition to the prosperity of Manchester and improvement of this great city, the land is further enhanced in value. ... Read the whole piece Bill Batt: How Our Towns Got That Way (1996 speech) Two-factor
economics, however, had advantages to influential
individuals and special interests. Land speculators who were
positioned to profit from knowing where locational values would
increase, or were in a position to cause those increases, could
quickly and easily reap a private gain. Simply by holding title to
parcels of real property, without doing anything at all to increase
their value, one could quickly turn a profit. This is because the
increment of unearned increases resulting from social investments
were left for owners to reap rather than recovered by society. In
three-factor economics, land rent reverted to society in an automatic
and efficient manner. When a railroad magnate like George
Leland
Stanford extended the Southern Pacific track to the east of Los
Angeles on land that he was granted by the government, all he then
needed to do was to sit back and wait for the land sales to give him
a return on that which was made more valuable by his investment in
the line. All across America, land speculators learned that capturing
monopoly titles to tracts of land allowed them to quickly and easily
turn a "profit" on their investment yet hardly raising a finger.... read
the whole article
Bill Batt: The Compatibility of Georgist Economics and Ecological Economics Rent becomes critically
important in Georgist economics,
because rent is the increment of market gain that accrues to choice
land parcels. This insight arose originally in the context of
agricultural societies, where differential qualities of land were
recognized by varied payment in rent. An individual’s return on
investment was represented by his labor — that was his and his alone to
keep. So also were whatever capital goods he acquired through the
efforts of his past labor. On the other hand, whenever land offered a
higher yield separate from whatever the individual’s labor investment
might represent, this constituted a windfall gain above and beyond what
might be minimally expected. This is land rent, and it exists even if
it isn’t collected. Today, as earlier noted, the greatest land rents
derive from their location, grown out of nearby social investment.
The concept of rent needs further explication precisely because it is so foreign to 20th century students, even those who have been schooled in economics at it is currently taught. Land rent has no relationship to the word rent as it is used in contemporary vernacular, that is, when one rents a car or an apartment. Rather, rent is a surplus, defined as the return on investment above and beyond what is minimally required to bring a service into production. To take just an elementary example, consider that there are three parcels of land available for farming and three farmers of equal ability and enterprise. But suppose the parcels differ in their productive capacity, due perhaps to their fertility, access to water, and so on. If planted with similar quality seed, the three parcels will yield different quantities of harvest, the one with the highest quality land having the best return. The one with the lowest quality land would in like fashion have the lowest return. Economic rent is defined as the amount of surplus harvest qualitatively measured by the difference between the parcel with the highest return and that with the lowest return. Even though its originator, David Ricardo, had in mind the differential return from agricultural lands, the concept of rent applies to other natural services as well. Consider what happens in the case of urban communities, using the simplest comparison with a tic-tac-toe board. When the lattice is completely undeveloped and consists only of vacant land squares, the locational sites have inconsequential value. But let us suppose that each square is then settled — the first by a hotel, the second by a department store, the third by a restaurant and so on — and supposing that the owner of the center square is reticent to build at all. Reserving his prerogative as titleholder he may intend ultimately to sell. Given the rules of economics as they apply today he may be wise to do so, keeping his money for other uses, as his square will have increased in market value more than all the others despite his having done nothing to improve it. It was this that prompted John Stuart Mill to observe that “Landlords grow richer in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The increase in the value of land, aris[es] from the efforts of an entire community.. . .” 27 As will be discussed later below, the single greatest factor in determining the economic rental value of land today results not from nutrients or access to water but rather due to site value determined by location. And that can be priced and collected easily. Lastly, one must appreciate that the market value of “land” of every sort is entirely rent, as there is no human factor of labor that accounts for its origination. Services of nature have no prior cost to bring them into production existence — the electromagnetic spectrum, for example, exists regardless of human presence on earth and so presumably does time. Ocean fish, fossil fuels, and heavy metals are all found in nature, not the result of human creation. They are, in 19th century classical economics, the fruits not of man’s labor but of God’s. And it is to God, or at least to God’s representative on earth — the lords and kings — that rent was owed, just as much as it was their role to provide reciprocal services to the tenants of the land. That bargain, so well refined in feudal economic arrangements, was an equilibrium balance, disrupted, one might say, by the annulment of rent collection and the exploitation of land without recognition of its price. The practice effectively ended with what in Britain is known as the “enclosure movement” of the early Tudor reign, driving the peasants off the land into cities to provide cheap labor for the early English industrialists.28 But the theory continued long afterwards. Georgists today argue that land rent should be collected from titleholders so that it is not left to render economic distortions. This in turn affects the price of labor and the price of money. Government’s role, whatever else it does, is at the very least responsible for defending the commons, to ascertain titles and to collect rent. Although there are many differences about the proper role, scope and domain of government among Georgist adherents, the collection of rent and the supervision of open markets is central to its tenets. Despite assiduous efforts to make clear the extent and the limits of the economic rent as a concept — known as well as land rent, Ricardian rent, and ground rent, even the best of contemporary neoclassical economists disagree. Some texts argue that certain athletes or other star performers with great natural ability reap returns for their efforts far above what is in fact necessary to “bring them into productive use.” The difference between what it would minimally take to entice them to perform and the price they are actually paid is all economic rent. Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, Britney Spears, and the Beatles have all been compensated with impressive amounts of economic rent.29 Georgists and classical economists are of mixed minds, arguing sometimes that such payments are either wages or else are simply transfers that in no way reflect productivity.30 ... read the whole article a synopsis of Robert V. Andelson and James M. Dawsey: From Wasteland to Promised land: Liberation Theology for a Post-Marxist World
(W)hen
investors from one country buy property in other countries they are seeking site
rent, which they hope to obtain directly from tenants, or indirectly
by selling land in the future when the price or capital value has increased....
The site rent that is so attractive to overseas investors can be kept in
the country quite easily - - by shifting taxation from labor onto land."
Because George asserted, "We must make land common property," he is sometimes erroneously regarded as an advocate of land nationalization. But, as we have seen, he was nothing of the sort. The expropriation of land makes it practically impossible to fairly compensate people for the improvements to land, which are their legitimate property. George's system renders to the community what is due to the community, without doing any violence to the wealth that has been fairly earned by productive workers. Read the whole synopsis Bill Batt: Comment on Parts of the NYS Legislative Tax Study Commission's 1985 study “Who Pays New York Taxes?”
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Wealth
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... because democracy
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