June 1982 RAIN Page 3 This Land Was Made For You and Me Finding New Roots In The Past by John Ferrell The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me. — Yahweh to the Children of Israel, Leviticus 25:23 There is on earth no power which can rightfully make a grant of exclusive ownership in land . . . For what are we but tenants for a day? Have we made the earth, that we should determine the rights of those who after us shall tenant it in their turn? ... Let the parchments be ever so many, or possession ever so long, natural justice can recognize no right in one man to the possession and enjoyment of land that is not equally the right of his fellows. —Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1879 All the natural resources of the earth — the land, the forests, the oil, the minerals and the waters — are the gift of nature, or Nature's God to all humankind. No title to absolute ownership ofany part of the Earth can be traced back to a deed issued by the Creator of the Earth. All natural resources are by their nature trustery, not property. — Ralph Borsodi, A Decentralist Manifesto, 1958 When Henry George died suddenly in 1897 his passing was a news event around the world. His funeral in New York City resembled that of a departed president or great national hero. Yet today few people even recognize his name. Seldom has a man so famous in his own lifetime fallen so quickly and completely into historical obscurity. Who was Henry George? He was a self-educated printer and journalist who watched closely and thoughtfully as America expanded rapidly westward following the Civil War. It was a “Gilded Age" of land speculation which brought incredible wealth — to a few. George, who had fought his way out of dire poverty and had observed extremes of wealth and impoverishment in many parts of the world during his early years as a seaman, was deeply troubled by economic inequities. Like Karl Marx, he set out to discover a remedy for the poverty which persisted — and deepened — amidst expanding wealth. In 1879, George published the results of his research in a book called Progress and Poverty. In it he challenged his readers to re-think the very concept of land ownership. "Wherever we can trace the early history of society," he said, "... land has been considered ... as common property, in which the rights of all who had admitted rights were equal." In George's view, this was simply a recognition by our ancestors of a law of nature, and its violation in modem societies was at the root of the economic injustice he sought to remedy; Henry George 1839-1897 The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, political, and consequently the intellectual and moral condition of a people. And it must be so. For land is the habitation of man, the storehouse upon which he must draw for all his needs, the material to which his labor must be applied for the supply of all his desires; for even the products of the sea cannot be taken, the light of the sun enjoyed, or any of the forces of nature utilized, without the use of land or its products. On the land we are lK>m, from it we live, to it we return again — children ofthesoilas truly as is the blade ofgrass or theflower of the field. Take away from man all that belongs to land, and he is but a disembodied spirit. As a believer in the free market of Adam Smith, George had no quarrel with individual title to land and did not advocate confiscation or nationalization. Instead, he called for recognition that landowners were actually tenants on a commons belonging to human society as/a whole and should pay a fair rent on the value of their land to society. This rent could be collected in the form of a land tax falling only on the unearned income which landowners would be able to realize by the mere fact of ownership rather than on any additional value they might create through their own efforts. Thus, hoarders and speculators would be punished while small farmers and entrepreneurs who used their holdings carefully and productively would be rewarded. Over time, George believed, the land tax would result in resources being redistributed to those who could use them best. The tax burden of hardworking people would be significantly less, income levels would rise among the formerly disadvantaged, and the problem of unemployment would lessen. Progress and Poverty was a publishing sensation. It was
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