The Role of the State

What should we ask of government?

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911), Preface

Their main principle was that the holding of land, unlike the owning of commodities, carried with it a great social duty; land is the base of life, and to till the land the first of human tasks; not because a man owns it, but that he holds it as a trust from God, and must use his energy to coax the shy ground to produce more and more. This is his duty before God, the real Owner of it all. If the man is idle and ignorant, he will have to stand aside and starve. The State has to see to it that the opportunities of the land shall not be wasted; and the tiller has to do his best "that two blades may grow where there was but one before." ... Read the whole preface

Frederick Verinder: My Neighbor's Landmark: Short Studies in Bible Land Laws (1911) — 4: The Year of Jubilee: Land and Liberty

§ 1. The equal division of the land gave to every family in the Commonwealth of Israel direct access to the soil. There was little room for the growth of involuntary poverty in a community whose Law did not permit the divorce of land from labor. "He that tilleth his land shall have plenty of bread," "shall be satisfied with bread." It is very significant that while Moses (no doubt "for the hardness of their hearts," Mark 10:5) did permit to the Hebrews a certain form of chattel-slavery — then probably universal among Eastern nations — though hedging it about with unusually stringent limitations, yet he prohibited absolutely that more insidious form of slavery, landlordism, which reduces men to subjection by monopolising the natural elements necessary to their existence. "The bread of the needy is their life: he that defraudeth him thereof is a man of blood. He that taketh away his neighbor's living slayeth him; and he that defraudeth the laborer of his hire is a bloodshedder."

§ 2. So far, then, as the first settlers in the land of Canaan were concerned, they all had a fair start. Wage slavery and undeserved poverty were unknown. The legislator was able to contemplate the possibility of an ideal state of society "when there shall be no poor among you; for the Lord shall greatly bless thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it"; but "only if thou carefully hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all these commandments which I command thee this day." So long as the Law was kept, no Hebrew need toil for sweated wages for a brother Hebrew. By his own labor, under the Law which secured to him the equal right to the use of the earth, he could produce all that he needed, without being beholden to or controlled by any one else. Under such a Law, the worker's wages consisted of the whole of his product. He was not compelled to share what he produced either with a landlord or with an exploiter of labor. "Whoso keepeth the fig tree shall eat the fruit thereof?" "They shall build houses and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat; for as the days of a tree are the days of My people, and Mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain, nor bring forth for trouble." "The husbandman that laboreth must be the first to partake of the fruits." "Who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? . . For it is written in the Law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? Or saith He it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written that he that ploweth the land plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope." ... 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. ...

§ 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

An economic system is best founded on the assumption that people are basically self-centered. And the art of government, Archbishop Temple observed,"is the art of so ordering life that self-interest prompts what justice demands." ...

8. Power in the Wasteland: Understanding Essential Relationships

Many liberation theologists ignore the role of land ownership and do not even include land in the indexes of their books. Yet none would deny that land hoarding and land access are fundamental issues of justice and economic development.

The following two passages by Henry George, the economist who made the most definitive statements on land's role in political economy, illustrate the fundamental characteristics of land that are missed or ignored by modern economic analysts of the left and the right:

Does the passenger who enters a railroad car obtain the right to scatter his baggage over all the seats and compel the passengers who come in after him to stand up? ... We arrive and we depart... passengers from station to station, on an orb that whirls through space — our rights to take and possess cannot be exclusive; they must be bounded everywhere by the equal rights of others. Just as the passenger in a railroad car may spread himself and his baggage over as many seats as he pleases, until other passengers come in, so may a settler take as much land as he chooses, until it is needed by others — a fact which is shown by the land acquiring a value....

On the land we are born, from it we live, to it we return again — children of the soil as truly as is the blade of grass or the flower of the field. Take away from man all that belongs to the land, and he is but a disembodied spirit. Material progress cannot rid us of our dependence upon land.

Beneath all ideologies, there are basic factors and relationships that underlie economic behavior. To understand the (otherwise inexplicable) omission of attention to land's economic importance, it is useful to go back to these basics.

• The term "Land" refers to the whole material universe, exclusive of people and their products. Not the creation of human labor, yet essential to labor, it is the raw material from which all wealth is fashioned. It includes not only soil and minerals, but water, air, natural vegetation and wildlife, and all natural opportunities — even those yet to be discovered. It is a passive factor of production, yielding wealth only when labor is applied to it.
• Labor includes all human powers, mental and physical, used directly or indirectly to produce goods or to render service in exchange. Labor is often thought of as work that is done for hire, at fixed wages, mainly excluded from the risk-taking and decision-making that is normally classed under the heading of "entrepreneurship". Yet labor, properly understood, includes all human exertion in production — including mental exertion. The payment to labor is called Wages. And it is important to remember that the payment, or return, to labor does not include any returns that are the result of monopoly.
• Capital is the economic term that is most profoundly misunderstood and confused. For the term to make sense in any systematic analysis of wealth distribution, we must define capital in its classical sense as "wealth which is used to aid in further production, instead of being directly consumed." Since production is not completed until the product is in the hands of the consumer, products on their way to market, or "wealth in the course of exchange," are also considered capital.

Now, the objective of all economic behavior is the satisfaction of human desires. Human beings always seek to satisfy their desires with the least exertion: this self-evident proposition lies at the heart of our concepts of economic value and exchange. The primary thing needed for satisfaction is, of course, the tangible things, made from natural resources, that satisfy human desires and have exchange value. Things that meet these four fundamental criteria are termed "wealth". But money, bonds, and mortgages are but claims upon and measures of this value; they are not the wealth they symbolize.

A clear understanding of these basic definitions points immediately to the primacy of land as an economic factor. Human beings have inescapable material needs of food, clothing and shelter. Regardless of how long a chain of exchanges they may pass through in a modern economy, these things ultimately have their source in the land; they can come from nowhere else. Human beings need land in order to live. But if we must pay rent to a private land "owner" for access to the gifts of nature, it amounts to being charged a fee for our very right to live.

Land's value goes up when population increases and technological and economic development make labor more productive. Those who "own" land often withhold it from use, expecting to capture its increased value in the future — thus, the possession of land enables people to take an income that they did nothing to produce.

Speculative withholding of land has disastrous consequences. Peasants who seek land on which to survive are pushed out to poorer and poorer lands. These "sub-marginal" lands become their alternative place for self-employment. With such a poor alternative, they have no choice but to accept very low wages. Rent — the payment to landowners — absorbs more of the wealth produced on all sites.

Land speculation also prevents development near the center of cities, pushing it to the outskirts while the center decays from neglect and slums increase. The "sprawl" engulfs farms and forests, even as it raises the price of land, making use and development more costly.

Rapid destruction of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil dramatizes how the unnatural phenomenon of sprawl has an ominous worldwide impact on the environment. In Brazil, ten per cent of the landowners own 80 percent of the land, while one million peasants are forced off the land each year. And a mere one per cent controls 48 percent of the cultivable land. The only place in Brazil where there is land for the taking is in the Amazon rain forest. The destruction of the rain forest is caused by a system that perpetuates artificial land shortages. Nearly four-fifths of Brazil's arable land is covered by sprawling latifundios, most of which are held by speculators who produce nothing.

Here is the root cause of poverty. When laborers are faced with the choice of either bare subsistence wages or land that can barely maintain life, labor itself is marginalized and cannot effectively bargain on its own behalf. Wages, generally, on all land, are driven down toward the point of bare subsistence. Returns to capital are also depressed for the same reason, deterring investment. When this is carried to an extreme — when people can no longer afford the goods being produced and when there is little profit in applying capital — the economy collapses. The inflated land market, on which the speculative frenzy has fed, collapses too.

Since the Great Depression, such total ruin has been minimized in more developed nations through Keynesian measures: monetary expansion, massive public works and welfare programs. In Third World countries, such Keynesian expedients, which support high speculative rent levels, work only if demand for exports is strong. When that demand weakens, the weight of external debt becomes so crushing as to defy redemption.

The Third World debt crisis is taken by many as the clearest sign of the correctness of dependency theory. It is asserted that Western moneylenders have extended loans to corrupt regimes, knowing that the nations' peoples would have to sacrifice to bear ever-increasing burdens. But when we recognize the land problem as the basic cause of the kind of economic collapse that has led to the "foreign debt crisis", it becomes clear that Western financial interests did not create those maladies but rather exploited the hapless economic policies of developing nations for their own gain.

Some defenders of the status quo admit that all land titles may be traced either to acts of force or fraud (or to the more respectable-sounding "priority of occupation"). But, they add, we cannot start over; society has for centuries given legal sanction to private landed property. Innumerable contracts have been executed on the basis of this sanction, and these include the good faith purchase of land. For society to withdraw this sanction, they claim, would be a breach of trust.

The passage of time, however, cannot turn a wrong into a right. Kings and popes and governments never had the moral right to vest in perpetual ownership what God intended for the benefit of all. If the acquisition of a benefit under the law were to establish such a vested right, no law could ever be amended, since it would invariably work to someone's disadvantage.

Obviously, change that further rends the fabric of society is usually self-defeating. And the vast majority of beneficiaries of unjust structures — the beleaguered middle classes — are not intentional wrongdoers but passive recipients of unearned wealth from a flawed system they did not create. The dismantling of these structures, therefore, should, whenever possible, be done in ways that avoid excessive hardship for them. But it must be done. ... 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!" ...

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