Mosaic Law

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — Chapter 3: The Meaning of the Landmark

THE Hebrew history tells us that the Law was promulgated in the wilderness at a time when the Israelites had as yet no land of their own to dwell in. Their wanderings at last brought them to the borders of the land of Canaan, and within sight of the fulfilment of the promise made to the founder of their race, the Chaldæan sheikh, Abraham. But they found the country already in possession of a number of tribes — the oft-mentioned "Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites," etc. — entrenched in their hill-fortresses. Moses was dead, having only seen the promised land from afar, from Mount Nebo. But Joshua, his appointed successor, led the nation in arms against the peoples of Canaan. The country to the east of the Jordan had, indeed, been already conquered, and allotted to the pastoral tribes of Reuben and Gad, and the "half-tribe" of Manasseh, on condition that the warriors of those tribes assisted the rest of the nation also to win its inheritance. Then followed a ruthless war of extermination against the peoples in possession. With a view to striking terror into their foes, Joshua took and burnt Jericho, utterly exterminating its inhabitants, and placing the rebuilding of the city under a ban. One after another, Canaanite strongholds were carried by assault, looted, and their inhabitants put to the sword. The Gibeonites, crafty in diplomacy, saved themselves from the general massacre by entrapping the Israelites into an alliance; but, although their lives were spared, their deceit was punished by reducing them to a servile condition. The remnant of the inhabitants, who could only be conquered gradually, were in later times "put to tribute."

§ 2. The Hebrew view of the war of conquest is well expressed by one of the later writers—

"For it was Thy will to destroy by the hands of our fathers both those old inhabitants of Thy holy land, whom Thou hatedst for doing most odious works of witchcrafts, and wicked sacrifices; and also those merciless murderers of children, and devourers of man's flesh, and the feasts of blood, with their priests out of the midst of their idolatrous crew, and the parents, that killed with their own hands souls destitute of help; that the land, which Thou esteemedst above all other, might receive a worthy colony of God's children."

§ 3. Not only the sacrifice of children, but also the degradation of both men and women, seem to have been inseparable from the obscene ritual with which the local Baals were worshipped. It is only when one realises that the sins which have linked the memory of Sodom and Gomorrah with undying infamy were part of the religious rites of the Hebrews' heretic neighbors, that it is possible to understand the savage hatred with which the Hebrew lawgivers and reformers assailed the idolatry which came so near, in their eyes, to being the unpardonable sin. It brought in its wake "red ruin and the breaking up of laws." It was more than a rival cult; it was the negation of moral and social order. There was no remedy for it but the extermination of all its professors. The Israelites conceived themselves as the instruments chosen and used by Jehovah to this end. "Conduct, character, is the one end of the Mosaic system. The heathen — the Canaanite nations especially — are punished not for false belief, but for vile actions."

But behind the mission, there always lurked the question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? ["Who shall watch the watchers themselves?" ] The leaders of Hebrew thought had no hesitation as to the answer. It is one of the most insistent notes in Jewish literature. The Law which prescribed equal weights and measures for buying and selling between one citizen and another; which had only "one manner of law" for the home-born citizen and the alien immigrant; could not possibly fail, in a matter of such supreme importance, to apply the same law to the Israelite as to the Canaanite. If Israel polluted the land as his predecessors had done, his fate would be as theirs. The israelites may have been, at times, a little too conscious that they were "the salt of the earth." But there were always some among them who realised that "if the salt have lost his savor, it is thenceforth good for nothing but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men." The legislators, the chroniclers, the reformers and the poets of Israel tell their people, in passages far too numerous to be fully quoted or even referred to, that drought and dearth, disease and pestilence, civil war and the breaking-up of the national unity, defeat before invading enemies, and, finally, captivity and exile; the "four sore judgments" of Ezekiel — "the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence" — were God's appointed punishments for the Israelites, if they lapsed into the idolatry which was the butt of the bitterest satire of their religious and political teachers, or committed the social injustices against which the stern prohibitions of the Law and the Prophets were directed. ...

According to the Hebrew theory of land-holding, as we have seen, God was the only absolute Owner of land, while all God's children had equal rights in the use of it. "God, the King of the people, is the real proprietor of the land, and He gives it to the people only as beneficiaries." "What would now be called state-loan land, or royal-loan estates, was at that time regarded as being more directly Jehovah's estates, as hereditary land which the individual had on loan from Jehovah."

The method by which these principles were carried into practice was, of course, largely determined by the special circumstances and needs of an Eastern people, settling in a fertile land: "a good land and a large, a land flowing with milk and honey;" "a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig-trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey; a land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not back anything in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayst dig brass."

The method, too, was strongly influenced by two great Hebrew conceptions: that of the family as the unit of the Nation; and that of the Nation itself as a larger family — the children of Abraham — closely bound together by a common descent and a common religion. "The land which the Lord thy God hath given thee" was not a mere façon de parler to the Hebrew; he conceived of his nation own race, "Israel," as a collectivity, almost as a personality. "When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called My son out of Egypt." God had given the fertile land of Canaan to the whole Hebrew nation as a common heritage, in which every family of the commonwealth had equal rights.

The problem which the Mosaic Law set itself to solve was, therefore: How to secure, at least within the limits of the Hebrew Commonwealth, to each family and to every generation, the equal right to the use of "the land which the Lord their God had given them." The social organisation of the Hebrews was on such a primitive model that the problem was comparatively free from complications. They were almost entirely an agricultural and pastoral people; a republic of farmers and shepherds. After the conquest they dwelt in villages of tents: the "fenced cities" of the Canaanites which had been captured had been destroyed; many others were still in Canaanite hands: so that, in case of a Philistine or Midianite raid, the Israelites had to take refuge in caves or mountain fastnesses. ...

It is plain that the method adopted in the Commonwealth of Israel for the practical assertion of the equal right to the use of the earth, however good for the time and place, could not possibly be followed in a modern State, with its complicated social organisation and its varied agricultural, mining, manufacturing and trading interests. But "God fulfils Himself in many ways," and it is quite possible to hold that the Mosaic Land Laws were absolutely right in principle, and also right in method for their own time; without holding it either necessary or desirable to graft the details of early Hebrew legislation on a later and alien Western civilisation. Just as we have long learnt to worship God without filling our churches with the reek of burning bullocks, so, in these latter days, we are learning how to make equal rights in land a reality without an equal division of the land itself. Although such a division is one of the possible ways of asserting the doctrine of equal rights, it ceases to be a convenient or even a just way as soon as civilisation passes beyond the pastoral and agricultural stage.

As we shall see later, the special position of the tribe of Levi in the Hebrew State led to the introduction, in their case, of a modification which directly suggests the method of modern Land Reform. Fortunately it is not even difficult to assert an equal and common right without physical division. If a father gives his children a cake, they naturally assert their equal rights by cutting it up into equal shares. But if he gives them a pony, they divide, not the pony, but the use of it. If he leaves them a house in equal shares, they may either share the occupancy of the house equally, or occupy the house unequally, according to the need of each for house-room, paying the rental into a common fund, from which each draws an equal share; or they may let the whole house to some one else and equally divide the rent.

A proposal to divide a railway — permanent way, buildings and rolling-stock — among the shareholders would meet with scanty favor at a shareholders' meeting: They know well that they divide the railway best by dividing its earnings in the form of dividend. So with the land. It is still true that all men have equal rights in land; it is the joint-stock property of the whole people; every citizen has one share in it. It is no longer true that all men require to use land in equal portions, and more than that every railway-shareholder travels an equal number of train-miles.

It is not true that equal portions of land, even if the land were so divided, are even approximately of equal value. Today when we measure land rather by value than by area, and then only a comparatively small percentage of the people is directly engaged in tilling the soil, the natural and easy and inevitable way of asserting our equal rights in the common heritage is to divide the value of the land (i.e. "economic rent"), by having it paid into a common fund, and by applying it to the common uses in which all can share. "The profit of the earth is for all," and it expresses itself in land value.

Sutherland clearances and Glenbeigh evictions are modern survivals of the primitive, brutal methods of a land-mark remover who does his business inartistically. These methods have become unpopular, because they allow the character and the results of the transaction to be seen in all their native horror, and because they have the damning defect of being not only brutal, but — unnecessary. The exact modern equivalent of the sin of "setting-back" one's neighbors' landmarks is a more subtle and therefore a more dangerous, because a less disgusting, thing. It is the private appropriation of the land value which the community creates. It is a sin which brings a brood of curses, both upon him who gains, and upon those who lose. It is a sin of which all of us, and not merely the landlords, need to be called upon to repent. For in a democratically governed country, with a wide (though not yet nearly wide enough) franchise, when wrong is done by law, the people who made the law, or who, having the power, neglect to repeal it, are as much responsible for the wrong done, as are those who profit by the law while it stands.

A large and increasing body of students of social questions are urging that the true key to Social Reform, the surest and safest foundation for Social Justice, lies in the application of the principles of the Old Testament to the modern Land Question, by the method advocated by Henry George; and that, under modern conditions, the first step towards reasserting the ancient and eternal truths which informed the Mosaic Land Laws must be the Taxation of Land Values. ... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) —Chapter 5: Land, Labor and Learning

§ 7. But, (b) while the main object of the Sabbath year was undoubtedly the protection of the land-rights of future generations, it was, by a statesman-like provision, made useful to the present generation also. It was to be a year of rest, truly, but not of idleness; a year of re-creation, not of mere cessation from work. It was only agricultural labor that was forbidden — ploughing, sowing, reaping, pruning, vintage. Other occupations were, undoubtedly, permitted, but the leisure from the ordinary work of the farm and vineyard was used, at least in part, for educational ends.

"Moses commanded them, saying, At the end of every seven years, in the solemnity of the year of release, in the feast of tabernacles, when all Israel is come to appear before the Lord thy God in the place which He shall choose, thou shalt read this law before all Israel in their hearing. Gather the people together, men and women, and children, and thy stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, and that they may learn, and fear the Lord your God, and observe to do all the words of this law; and that their children, which have not known anything, may hear, and learn to fear the Lord your God, as long as ye live in the land whither ye go over Jordan to possess it."

§ 8. To say that, in the seventh year, the Israelites attended a Bible class conducted by their clergy would be to use one of those dangerous phrases which completely misrepresent the facts of the case under the appearance of stating the bare, literal truth about them. It is true, of course, that the rolls of the "Laws of Moses" now form part of what we now call the Bible — the collection of ancient writings from which extracts are read in church services. The peculiar position so long assigned to these Hebrew writings in our own religion has prevented most Englishmen from realising what they meant to the Hebrews.

They were at once "sacred" and "secular." They assumed in every paragraph the existence of God; but He was a God who stood in direct, constant, and immediate relation to the life of the Nation "the God of thy fathers," "the Lord thy God which brought thee out of the house of bondage," the God who dwelt in the midst of Israel. Yet — not in spite of this, but because of it — the Hebrew writers hold, as strongly as any modern secularist, that "the affairs of this life and of this world demand, and will repay, our utmost care and attention." So completely free from any trace of "other-worldliness" is the Hebrew Torah, that a good bishop once deduced an argument in favor of the inspiration of the Pentateuch from the fact that it contains no reference to a life after death. The future life to which the Law points as the result and the reward of rightdoing is the ideal life of a free and industrious Commonwealth, in which every citizen, secure in the enjoyment of the produce of his labor, surrounded by stalwart sons and comely daughters, sits under his own vine and his own fig tree, none daring to make him afraid "in the land which the Lord thy God hath given thee."

The Law contained not only the elaborate ritual of the sacrifices and the liturgy of the Jewish religion, but the biographies of their national heroes, and the history of the Nation itself. The primitive science of the infant Commonwealth lay in it side by side with the laws of their minstrels and an outline of civil and criminal law. The same collection of documents which told them how the voice of God called upon Moses from the burning bush to organise a general strike against the Egyptian taskmasters, claimed also that the skill of the handicraftsman, no less than the wisdom of the legislator, was due to Divine inspiration. If the Law regulated with minute care the vestments of the high-priests, it was no less careful of the foods of the people. It prescribed in detail the lavish ornaments of the Tabernacle, the outward symbol of national unity, but it also told the citizen how to keep his person, his clothing, and his house clean and healthy. It insisted upon man's duty to God, but no less upon man's duty to his fellows. With a magnificent impartiality it denounced a curse upon the idolater, who rebelled against the majesty of the Most High, and upon the remover of the landmark, who invaded the equal right of his neighbor. The "statutes and judgments of Moses" were the Acts of the Parliament and the case-law of the Hebrew Commonwealth. Whole chapters in Numbers and Joshua are filled with dry lists of names, which were once full of the same kind of interest and significance to the Hebrew reader as Doomsday Book or the Census returns or Mr. Lloyd-George's Land Valuation have to students of English social history.

To the Hebrew, therefore, the study of "all the words of this Law," enjoined in every seventh year, and made possible by the just land system which the sabbatical institutions safeguarded, was, for his time and place, a liberal education. To place within the reach of the English worker, once in every seven years, a year's course at a university in science and law and literature and theology, would be something like the modern equivalent for one of the advantages which the sabbath year offered to the ancient Hebrew. Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — Chapter 6: Compensation

§ 1. ONE tribe out of all the tribes of Israel was set aside for the performance of important public functions. According to the Theocratic constitution of the Hebrew Commonwealth, the men of the tribe of Levi formed the Civil Service of the unseen King of Israel. In order to set them free for the performance of their duties, they were exempted from service in the citizen army, in which all the capable males of all the other tribes were liable to serve "from twenty years old and upwards, all that are able to go forth to war in Israel."

They were the servants of the Lord, and therefore of the Lord's people. Their duties are set forth with great minuteness. They chiefly centered round the one great public building of the nation, the dwelling-place of the Most High, the seat of the national worship, the symbol of the national unity, the central place of assembly for the people.

The Levites were solemnly set apart for their work, to which the prime of their lives was devoted. Their term of full service was from thirty to fifty years of age, apparently after a training of five years; and, when their time had expired, lighter duties were found for them. They were also the official preachers of the Law, and the custodians of the official copy of it. Those members of the tribe of Levi who claimed descent from Aaron formed, within the tribe, a special order with special functions — the priests. They were not only the national clergy — sacrificing, absolving, and blessing — but also the teachers of religion and law, administrators of justice, the medical officers of health and sanitary inspectors, charged with the duties of inspecting, isolating, and (after recovery) disinfecting persons suffering from certain contagious diseases, of disinfecting unclean garments and bedding, of inspecting, cleansing, or, if need be, demolishing infected dwellings; and so on. This mixture of "sacred" and "secular" functions is characteristic of a theory of government which, recognising no king but God, could draw no hard-and-fast line between the service of God and the service of humanity.

§ 2. If the Levites were to give their whole time and attention to the important public duties which have been hinted at above, it was clearly necessary that they should be set free from the necessity of earning their livelihood by ordinary agricultural labor, and that some other provision must be made for them. In order, therefore, that the ministrations of religion and the means of instruction might be brought within the reach of all the citizens, the Levites were provided with residences in forty-eight cities, assigned specially to them "with the suburbs thereof" — a certain amount of surrounding meadow-land for the pasturage of their cattle. These cities were to be taken in fair proportion from all the tribes. Thirteen of them were allotted to the priests. Six were appointed as "cities of refuge," to which "the slayer that killeth unawares and unwittingly" might flee in order to escape lynching and to secure a fair trial.

But it is plain that the provision of an official residence fell far short of what the Levite would have received had he been born into any other tribe. For the Levites had no part in the division of the land, although they obviously had the same "right to the use of the earth" as the other tribes. The families of eleven tribes divided among them land in which the families of twelve tribes had rights to equal shares. The excluded tribe was clearly entitled to compensation for the loss of rights of which, for reasons of public policy, it had been deprived. This compensation was given by means of the tithe. The tribes who had divided among themselves the Levites' share of the land, as well as their own, paid to the Levites one-tenth of the produce of the land, and the Levites in their turn, paid one-tenth of this tithe — "a tithe of the tithe" — to the Aaronic priesthood. ... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — 7: Justice

§ 7. Yet there was a certain element of narrowness which tended to limit the practical application of the law of Justice in O.T. times, in spite of the frequent attempts of legislators and prophets to break through bounds which were cramping their expanding ethical and religious conceptions. But not until our Lord, in one of the most dramatic passages in the Gospels, showed that even the apostate, excommunicated, half-caste Samaritan — the traditional enemy, since the Exile, of the orthodox Jew — was a "neighbor," and therefore to be loved as oneself; not until the Apostle of the Nations, following his Master, and even quoting a Greek poet in support of a Christian dogma, formulated, for Jew and Gentile alike, the doctrine of the Brotherhood of Man, founded on the universal Fatherhood of God — not till then did the Mosaic Law of Justice reach its full development and expression.

When the old Law said, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," the context usually shows that "neighbor" means merely "fellow-citizen." But the same words in the N.T. always have an infinitely wider meaning, for Christ has told us that every man is our neighbor. To love one's neighbor as oneself is "the royal law according to the Scripture" It is the only legitimate restraint upon our liberty, because "love worketh no ill to his neighbor: therefore love is the fulfilling of the Law." It is at once the foundation, the outcome, and the test of our love for God; for he that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. … If we love one another, God dwelleth in us. … He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" ... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

9. Claiming the Promised Land: A New Jubilee for a New World

In the book of Joshua, we find that although the Promised Land is a gift from God, it is a gift that has to be claimed. Even before the actual conquest of the Promised Land, the Mosaic Law prescribed a method whereby possession of land was to be rendered pleasing in God's sight. The Canaanites' claim was forfeited by their idolatry, with human sacrifice and temple prostitution, and by their exploitive, monopolistic social order. By contrast, Israel, to make good its claim, had to institute a social order that would guard against the desecration, pollution, and injustices of which its predecessors were guilty, and would secure to each family and to every generation within the Hebrew commonwealth the equal right to the use of the land, of which the Lord was recognized as the sole absolute owner.

They began with a census of the tribes and families before the conquest (Num. 26:1-51). Every tribe, excepting Levi, and within each tribe every family, was to receive its proportionate share, according to size (Num. 26:55-56), and ultimately, to ensure fairness, by lot (Num. 34:16-29). The actual distribution, according to these provisions, was concluded at Shiloh (Josh. 19:51). According to ancient historian Josephus, the territory was not divided into shares of equal size but of equal agricultural value. The landmarks that protected these allotments were protected by the public and solemn denunciation of a curse against anyone who should dishonestly tamper with them (Deut. 27:11-16; 19:14).

As discovered again in our own century, it is easier to devise a one-time fair apportionment of land that it is to keep the system from falling apart. This is why the ancient law established the Jubilee year. At the end of every fifty years, any alienated lands — given away, sold, or lost from unpaid debts — would be restored to the original families. Temporary possessors were to be compensated for any unexhausted improvements they may have made on the land. Concentrated landownership, and the division of society into landed and landless classes, was thereby prevented from creeping into the system. The Jubilee effectively took the profit out of landholding as such, leaving no incentive for speculation. When it was observed — and historical records indicate that it was observed for long periods — the Jubilee system successfully removed the root cause of poverty from the Jewish society.

The influence of the Jubilee idea upon early Pennsylvania colonists is evidenced by the inscription on the Liberty Bell of the biblical words enjoining the Jubilee year: "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." (Lev. 25:10) The founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn, advocated that all men be "tenants to the public", and to defray public expenses instituted a tax on land.

Environmental concern also goes back to biblical land laws. To prevent the exhaustion of the soil, a periodic fallow was ordered. "During one year in every seven, the soil, left to the influences of sun and frost, wind and rain, was to be allowed to 're-create' itself after six years' cropping, exactly as the tiller of the soil renewed his strength, after six days' work, by his Sabbath day's rest."

As noted, the tribe of Levi did not share in the equal division of the land, since it was charged with carrying out religious and public duties. Its members were entitled to an indemnity from the eleven tribes who received the land that otherwise would have gone to them. This indemnity was the tithe — one-tenth of the product from the land occupied by the eleven other tribes.

Here, in principle, is the formula for a just land system in almost any time or place. The compensation to the Levites maintained the substance of equal rights to land, alongside of and compatible with unequal physical division of the land itself. As Frederick Verinder pointed out in his book My Neighbour's Landmark, joint heirs of a house may share it equally by occupying it equally or unequally but "paying the rental into a common fund, from which each draws an equal share; or they may let the whole house to someone else and divide the rent equally." So it is with land. Sharing equally in the economic rent or value of land through the application of that value to common uses from which all benefit, renders private ownership and unequal partition of land morally and pragmatically benign.

The modern equivalent of removing one's neighbor's landmark is thus not the private ownership of land per se, but rather the private appropriation of land value. "The profit of the earth is for all" (Eccles. 5:9). The Old Testament ethic, to assure everyone the same natural opportunity, asserts that all people have an equal right to economic rent, and the Levite tithe demonstrates that the socialization of rent offsets the ethical and practical harm resulting from private land ownership. But there is another basis for its advocacy: Rent should be taken by society because it is a social product. Rent arises in large measure from two societal phenomena: the mere presence of population, and community activity in a particular area. More people means more demand for space on which to live and work. Community activities such as roads, schools, protection, parks, sewage, utilities and other public services, as well as the totality of private commercial and cultural operations, all make land more productive or desirable. It follows that a community which funds such improvements out of its rent fund will be provided with a stable and growing fund with which to maintain and improve them. And unlike conventional taxes, the collection of this fund will enhance, not penalize, the production of wealth.

Individuals, in their bare capacity as landowners, do nothing to produce land value. By withholding sites from use, whether for speculation or for other reasons, they may generate scarcity, artificially inflating rent, but this does not reflect any positive contribution to production on the part of landowners.

While land value is not the only type of unearned increment, unearned income resulting from such advantages as talent, genes or luck is not at the expense of others. Even Karl Marx admitted: "The monopoly of property in land is even the basis of the monopoly of capital." Marx could have — but did not — champion the abolition of land monopoly; instead he advocated its transfer from private into state hands. It was left to Henry George to expound how the universal principles of justice found in the Mosaic model could be applied to the modern age in all its economic aspects — rural and urban, agricultural and industrial, technologically undeveloped or advanced.

What George advocated was to leave land titles in private hands but to appropriate land rent via the existing machinery of property taxation. "I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The first would be unjust; the second, needless....It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent." No owner or tenant would be expropriated or evicted. No limit would be placed on the quantity of land one could hold, as long as the annual rent were paid.

Coordinately with the capture of rent as public revenue, taxes on products of human labor — improvements, personal property, services, commodities, wages, etc. — would be reduced and ultimately eliminated.

George considered his remedy no mere human contrivance. He saw the growth of land value and the easy means of equitably distributing it as an expression of benevolent supernatural design: "As civilization goes on... so do the common wants increase and so does the necessity for public revenue arise. And so in that value which attaches to land, not by reason of anything the individual does, but by reason of the growth of the community, is a provision intended — we may safely say intended — to meet that social want."

George's remedy goes a long way to stop current inequity and prevent future inequity. While past inequity, in the form of accumulations of capital based on previous land speculation and monopoly cannot be accurately redressed, these fortunes can be impelled to serve the needs of the public via investment in production, not by further investment in land speculation and monopoly.

Dependency theory, to the degree that it hits upon one of the causes of Third World poverty in exploitation by foreign investors, can find in George's land value tax the constructive practical approach it lacks. Neither erection of trade barriers nor legal restriction of foreign ownership is called for. As one Australian writer puts it:

(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.

Common property in land is sometimes discredited by equation with what Garrett Hardin calls "The Tragedy of the Commons." Referring to the common lands that were a major English institution until the mid-nineteenth century, Hardin describes the tendency of individuals, each rationally pursuing self-interest, to overgraze, denude, and use the commons as a cesspool. That which belongs to everybody in this sense is, indeed, in danger of being valued and maintained by nobody.

The enclosure movement ultimately brought an end to this ecologically destructive process, but not without literally pushing people off the land, exacting a baneful price in human misery that might well be termed "The Tragedy of the Enclosures." George hit upon a way of securing the benefits of both commons and enclosures, while at the same time avoiding their evils. Land value taxation rectifies distribution so that all receive wealth in proportion to their contribution to its production. This liberates the economic system from exploiters who contribute little or nothing. Apportioning the wealth pie fairly increases the incentive to increase the size of the pie. The market becomes in practice what capitalist theory alleges it to be — a profoundly cooperative process of voluntary exchange of goods and services. Paradoxical though it may seem, the only way the individual may be assured what properly belongs to him or her is for society to take what properly belongs to it: The ideal of Jeffersonian individualism requires for its actualization the socialization of rent.

Just as Marxists err in insisting that everything be socialized, extreme capitalists err in insisting that everything (even public parks and forests!) be privatized. The middle way is to recognize society's claim to what nature and society create — the value of land and its rent — so that working people, including entrepreneurs, may claim their full share of what they create. In this balanced approach can be found the authentic verities respectively inherent in socialism and individualism. ... Read the whole synopsis

 

Henry George: Moses — Apostle of Freedom (1878 speech, San Francisco)

It was not an empire such as had reached full development in Egypt, or existed in rudimentary patriarchal form in the tribes around, that Moses aimed to found. Nor was it a republic where the freedom of the citizen rested on the servitude of the helot, and the individual was sacrificed to the state.

It was a commonwealth based upon the individual – a commonwealth whose ideal it was that every man should sit under his own vine and fig tree, with none to vex him or make him afraid. It was a commonwealth: in which none should be condemned to ceaseless toil; in which, for even the bond slave, there should be hope; and in which, for even the beast of burden, there should be rest. A commonwealth in which, in the absence of deep poverty, the many virtues that spring from personal independence should harden into a national character – a commonwealth in which the family affections might knit their tendrils around each member, binding with links stronger than steel the various parts into the living whole.

It is not the protection of property, but the protection of humanity, that is the aim of the Mosaic code. Its sanctions are not directed to securing the strong in heaping up wealth as much as to preventing the weak from being crowded to the wall. At every point it interposes its barriers to the selfish greed that, if left unchecked, will surely differentiate men into landlord and serf, capitalist and working person, millionaire and tramp, ruler and ruled. Its Sabbath day and Sabbath year secure, even to the lowliest, rest and leisure. With the blast of the Jubilee trumpets the slave goes free, the debt that cannot be paid is cancelled, and a re-division of the land secures again to the poorest their fair share in the bounty of the common Creator. The reaper must leave something for the gleaner; even the ox cannot be muzzled as he treadeth out the corn. Everywhere, in everything, the dominant idea is that of our homely phrase: "Live and let live!"

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Yet the great concern of Moses was with the duty that lay plainly before him; the effort to lay the foundations of a social state in which deep poverty and degrading want should be unknown – where people released from the meaner struggles that waste human energy should have opportunity for intellectual and moral development.

Here stands out the greatness of the man. What was the wisdom and stretch of the forethought that in the desert sought to guard in advance against the dangers of a settled state, let the present speak!

In the full blaze of the nineteenth century, when every child in our schools may know as common truths things of which the Egyptian sages never dreamed; when the earth has been mapped and the stars have been weighed; when steam and electricity have been pressed into our service, and science is wresting from nature secret after secret – it is but natural to look back upon the wisdom of three thousand years ago as an adult looks back upon the learning of a child.

And yet, for all this wonderful increase of knowledge, for all this enormous gain of productive power, where is the country in the civilised world in which today there is not want and suffering – where the masses are not condemned to toil that gives no leisure, and all classes are not pursued by a greed of gain that makes life an ignoble struggle to get and to keep? Three thousands years of advances, and still the moan goes up: "They have made our lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service!" Three thousand years of advances! and the piteous voices of little children are in the moan.

Standing as I stand, where modern ideas have had fullest, freest development; in the newest great city of the newest great nation; by the side of that ultimate sea, where ends the westward march of the race that has circled the globe, and farthest west meets east, the cool shades and sweet waters whose promise has so long lured us on seem dissolving into mocking mirage.

Over ocean wastes far wider than the Syrian desert we have sought our promised land – no narrow strip between the mountains and the sea, but a wide and virgin continent. Here, in greater freedom, with vaster knowledge and fuller experience, we are building up a nation that leads the van of modern progress. And yet while we prate of the rights of humanity there are already many among us thousands who find it difficult to assert the first of natural rights – the right to earn an honest living; thousands who from time to time must accept of degrading charity or starve.

We boast of equality before the law; yet notoriously justice is deaf to the call of those who have no gold and blind to the sin of those who have.

We pride ourselves upon our common schools; yet after our boys and girls are educated we vainly ask: "What shall we do with them?" And about our colleges children are growing up in vice and crime, because from their homes poverty has driven all refining influences. We pin our faith to universal suffrage; yet with all power in the hands of the people, the control of public affairs is passing into the hands of a class of professional politicians, and our governments are, in many cases, becoming but a means for robbery of the people.

We have prohibited hereditary distinctions, we have forbidden titles of nobility; yet there is growing up an aristocracy of wealth as powerful and merciless as any that ever held sway.

We progress and we progress; we girdle continents with iron roads and knit cities together with the mesh of telegraph wires; each day brings some new invention, each year marks a fresh advance – the power of production increased, and the avenues of exchange cleared and broadened. Yet the complaint of "hard times" is louder and louder; everywhere are people harassed by care, and haunted by the fear of want. With swift, steady strides and prodigious leaps, the power of human hands to satisfy human wants advances and advances, is multiplied and multiplied. Yet the struggle for mere existence is more and more intense, and human labour is becoming the cheapest of commodities. Beside glutted warehouses human beings grow faint with hunger and shiver with cold; under the shadow of churches festers the vice that is born of want.

Trace to its roots the cause that is producing want in the midst of plenty, ignorance in the midst of intelligence, aristocracy in democracy, weakness in strength – that is giving to our civilisation a one-sided and unstable development – and you will find it something which this Hebrew statesman three thousand years ago perceived and guarded against.

Moses saw that the real cause of the enslavement of the masses of Egypt was – what has everywhere produced enslavement – the possession by a class of land upon which and from which the whole people must live. He saw that to permit in land the same unqualified private ownership that by natural right attaches to the things produced by labour, would be inevitably to separate the people into the very rich and the very poor, inevitably to enslave labour – to make the few the masters of the many, no matter what the political forms, to bring vice and degradation no matter what the religion.

And with the foresight of the philosophic statesman who legislates not for the need of a day, but for all the future, he sought, in ways suited to his times and conditions, to guard against this error.

Everywhere in the Mosaic institutions is the land treated as the gift of the Creator to His common creatures, which no one has the right to monopolise. Everywhere it is, not your estate, or your property, not the land which you bought, or the land which you conquered, but "the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee" – "the land which the Lord lendeth thee". And by practical legislation, by regulations to which he gave the highest sanctions, he tried to guard against the wrong that converted ancient civilisations into despotisms – the wrong that in after centuries ate out the heart of Rome, that produced the imbruting serfdom of Poland and the gaunt misery of Ireland, the wrong that is today filling American cities with idle men, and our virgin states with tramps.

He not only provided for a redistribution of the land among the people, and for making it fallow and common every seventh year, but by the institution of the Jubilee he provided for a redistribution of the land every fifty years, and made monopoly impossible. ... Read the whole speech