Land a Gift of Nature
Frank Stilwell and Kirrily Jordan: The
Political Economy of Land: Putting Henry George in His Place
Georgism has a distinctive ethical basis. So a review of the
contemporary relevance of Georgist political economy can usefully
begin by making
this explicit. The key moral issue is the private appropriation
of public wealth. As George recognised, land is a ‘gift
from nature’ and,
as such, is rightfully a community resource. Hence, those deriving
benefits from the private ownership of land should recompense
the community for
the privilege. This principle has strong echoes of the idea of ‘usufruct’,
a pre-capitalist term denoting a person’s legal right to
use and accrue benefits from property that does not belong to
them. In return,
the user is obliged to keep the property in good repair and pay
all costs as a ‘ground rent’ (‘Lectric Law
Library, n.d). The concept of ‘usufruct’ has fallen
out of common usage, so one hesitates to try to revive it. Moreover,
as Richards (2002) notes, ‘it
is difficult to image how this word could be employed, or brought
back into circulation, in the modern world, since we live in
a world in which
people tend to be remarkably unsympathetic to the property rights
or claims of others’. ... read the whole article
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