(With a nod to Mark Twain!) The OT lesson in my church today was from Exodus, about God raining bread from heaven for Moses and his people.
Can you imagine if some of us claimed the land onto which that bread had fallen as our own, and told those who wished to collect their share of that bread that they must first pay us rent for the privilege? Can you imagine if some of us gathered it, and sold it to our fellow human beings at high prices? Can you imagine if we permitted the landholders to charge their fellow human beings for access, and then turned around and imposed an income tax on the general community, pretty much ignoring land value in the process?
But isn't that what we do? We permit some to claim our land, and the finite resources -- e.g., oil, water -- which attach to it, as if they were somehow more entitled to it than the remainder of humanity. We honor property rights more than human rights, and fail to distinguish between private property in manmade things, private property in land, and, in some times and places not so distant, private property in human beings. These are as different from each other as are the inputs to production: land, labor and capital, and as are the returns to those inputs: rent, wages and interest.
The wise alternative, of course, is to collect from landholders the economic value that accrues to them strictly as a function of their landholdings, to be used to meet the needs of the community, and to leave untouched by taxation whatever they, and others, create after that (as long as they do no harm to the commons, and as long as what they take leaves "enough and as good" for others).
And then there was the gospel reading, from Matthew 20:1-16, the story of the landowner and the laborers in his vineyard, which ends with "Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?" Only those who have land, either through ownership or through lease, or through access to common land, are in a position to employ another person. "What belongs to me" ... What does belong to us? In this case, he seemed to be speaking of the wages he intended to pay, but the larger question has to do with his ownership of that which man does not create: the land. Those who claim desirable bits of land as their own, and collect annual rent or appreciation upon sale, are collecting as private treasure value which should not be privatized. One could make the argument that Old Testament land laws and the tithe were mechanisms by which all in the community were made equal and contributed to the community's common expense; I've heard it said that the tithe was a form of land rent, rather than a tax on income, and that when land was apportioned at the jubilee, those who received land close to the center of things received less than those whose land was located further from the markets and community amenities, and that those who received grand of greater natural fertility received less than those who ended up with less favorably located land. All could earn a living. And when Jesus said "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's," perhaps what he was saying was that since Caesar was not part of the community, what was due him was nothing; that the tithe was to meet the needs of the local community, not the interests of any individual anywhere.
Post Script: Of course Henry George told it better:
In the Old Testament we are told that when
the Israelites journeyed through the desert, they were hungered, and
that God sent manna down out of the heavens. There was enough for all
of them, and they all took it and were relieved. But supposing that
desert had been held as private property, as the soil of Great
Britain is held, as the soil even of our new States is being held;
suppose that one of the Israelites had a square mile, and another one
had twenty square miles, and another one had a hundred square miles,
and the great majority of the Israelites did not have enough to set
the soles of their feet upon, which they could call their
own — what would become of the manna? What good would it have done
to the majority? Not a whit. Though God had sent down manna enough
for all, that manna would have been the property of the landholders;
they would have employed some of the others perhaps, to gather it up
into heaps for them, and would have sold it to their hungry brethren.
Consider it; this purchase and sale of manna might have gone on until
the majority of Israelites had given all they had, even to the
clothes off their backs. What then? Then they would not have had
anything left to buy manna with, and the consequences would have been
that while they went hungry the manna would have lain in great heaps,
and the landowners would have been complaining of the over-production
of manna. There would have been a great harvest of manna and hungry
people, just precisely the phenomenon that we see today. [Source: The Crime of Poverty]
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