The Profit of the Earth

If some of us privatize the profit of the earth, while others remain poor, is that privatization acceptable among civilized people, believing people?

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — Chapter 2: First Principles: "The Earth is The Lord's"

§ 4. If, therefore, God, the sole Landowner, has given the land to "the children of men" — i.e. to the whole human race in its widest extension through time and space — it follows that no single generation, still less any single individual, has absolute ownership in land. It is not the right of property in land, but the right to use land — limited by the equal right of every one else, now and for ever, to use land — that God has given to man. No man can claim land as "his very own," "to do as he likes with," e.g. to sell. "The land shall not be sold for ever; for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with Me," saith the Lord. No man could sell land "for ever" for any man's interest in it was only a life-interest; a temporary usufruct, and not a permanent, absolute ownership. It is only the interest of the race that is perpetual. "The days of the life of man may be numbered; but the days of Israel are innumerable." For God has given the land — i.e., the use of it — not to any particular class or generation of men, but to all generations of mankind.

§ 5. Lastly, "the profit of the earth is for all; the king himself is served by the field."

If these be, as I believe they are, the leading principles of the ancient teaching of "Moses and the Prophets" on the Land Question, the most surprising thing about them is, perhaps, their modernity. The mode of their expression is of course, always colored by the Theocratic perceptions of the Hebrew Commonwealth. But when our own great legal and constitutional authorities tell us

• that "all landlords are merely tenants in the eyes of the law;"
• that "the idea of absolute ownership … is quite unknown to the English law; no man is in law the absolute owner of lands, he can only hold an estate in them";
• that "the king, therefore, hath only absolutum et directum dominium. … A subject hath only the usufruct, not the absolute property of the soil";

they are only expressing in different language the same ideas as are embodied in the passages of Scripture above quoted. The theory of the old English law, which vested the ownership of the land in the Crown, as the visible embodiment of the claim of the whole Nation, generation after generation, to "the land which the Lord their God hath given them," resulted in exactly the same negation of private and individual ownership of land as followed upon the Hebrew formula, "The earth is the Lord's; the earth hath He given to the children of men." For, as the last of the Theocratic Republicans told the Israelites, "The Lord your God was your King." The highest interest in land which a Hebrew could hold was a tenancy in capite from the Lord Jehovah, the unseen King of Israel. There was no rent to pay, unless the small offering of firstfruits — a basket of "the first of the first-fruits of all the fruit of the earth"— be regarded as a sort of quit-rent, — a formal acknowledgement of Jehovah's absolutum et directum dominium. The Deuteronomic edition of the Law does, in fact, prescribe a ritual for the offering of the first-fruits, in which this view is clearly and beautifully implied.

So when Henry George, in drafting the first manifesto of the first National Society for the propagation of his teachings, wrote that "no number of individuals can justly grant away the equal rights of other individuals to land, and no generation can grant away the rights of future generations," he was merely re-echoing, as he would have been the first to admit, some of the most primitive doctrines on the Land Question. For, in the youth of the world, when the relation of man to the earth on which he lived was still simple and natural, was easier than it is now for men to see the truth about the Land Question steadily, and to see it whole.

Again, when the modern Land Reformer draws from his general principles the practical deduction that the value of land should meet the cost of the public expenses, he is only restating, in terms of modern conditions, the truth that "the profit of the earth is for all; the king himself is served by the field." ... Read the whole chapter, including footnotes

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

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 6: Compensation

§ 5. After the return from the Exile, the great leader of the restored Israelites, Nehemiah, had to face a condition not unlike that of today. Landlordism had grown up. The people were in bondage, racked with usury, taxed on their daily food. It is refreshing to contrast the action of Nehemiah with the schemes of compensation to landlords which are advocated by some reformers today because of the supposed dishonesty of what they call "confiscation" — i.e. of the restoration to the people of their lost rights in the land, by putting into the fiscus, or public treasury, the values which the public creates.

Before a mass meeting of the landless and disinherited, Nehemiah addressed the "nobles and the rulers" who had profited by social injustice. He "set a great assembly against them," and called upon them to make immediate restitution. No offer of "compensation" is made on the one side, no demand for it on the other.

What would be the modern parallel to this? Is it quite mad to picture, say, an English Archbishop of Canterbury, Bible in hand like Nehemiah, "very angry," because he has heard the cry of the victims of injustice; setting a "great assembly" of landless citizens against the House of Lords, and enforcing a popular demand for the restoration to the people of their God-given rights in the land, without any compensation, except compensation to the plundered people for the exactions of indirect taxation? Mad enough, no doubt; for modern priests and prophets are not always built after Biblical models. ... 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