Being born into the Landed Gentry is like holding the winning lottery ticket

The Ianded gentry ...  sounds so noble ... so gentle ...  so aristocratic .... so entitled!

What is it about? 

A few definitions from the online Merriam-Webster dictionary

Gentleman

1 a: a man of noble or gentle birth b: a man belonging to the landed gentry c (1): a man who combines gentle birth or rank with chivalrous qualities (2): a man whose conduct conforms to a high standard of propriety or correct behavior d (1): a man of independent means who does not engage in any occupation or profession for gain (2): a man who does not engage in a menial occupation or in manual labor for gain  2: valet —often used in the phrase gentleman's gentleman  3: a man of any social class or condition —often used in a courteous reference <show this gentleman to a seat> or usually in the plural in address <ladies and gentlemen>

Gentle

1 a: belonging to a family of high social station barchaic : chivalrous c: honorable, distinguished; specifically : of or relating to a gentleman d: kind, amiable —used especially in address as a complimentary epithet <gentle reader> e: suited to a person of high social station  2 a: tractable, docile b: free from harshness, sternness, or violence  3: soft, delicate  4: moderate

Country Gentleman

1 : a well-to-do country resident : an owner of a country estate 2 : one of the English landed gentry

Gentleman Farmer

: a man who farms mainly for pleasure rather than for profit

Gentry

1 a: obsolete : the qualities appropriate to a person of gentle birth; especially : courtesy b: the condition or rank of a gentleman  2 a: upper or ruling class : aristocracy b: a class whose members are entitled to bear a coat of arms though not of noble rank; especially : the landed proprietors having such status  3: people of a specified class or kind : folks <no real heroes or heroines among the academic gentry — R. G. Hanvey>

Entitle

1 : to give a title to : designate 2 : to furnish with proper grounds for seeking or claiming something <this ticket entitles the bearer to free admission>

So owning large amounts of land makes one a noble, a gentleman.  How is it that one who owns large amounts of land need not engage in any occupation or profession for gain?

He who owns the land makes the rules.  He who owns the vast majority of the land in a rural area is likely to be virtually the only available employer, and can set the rent and the conditions of life for the entire community.  Do it his way, or leave, or starve.  (One can't employ oneself without a patch of land, there or anywhere else.) And, by the way, pay the landholder a significant share of what one creates through one's labor for the privilege of having land to labor on and even to live on.  Mark Twain wrote two useful pieces on the subject, Slavery and Archimedes.

The classical economists -- Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill among them -- recognized that land -- the natural creation -- was fundamentally different from the other two factors of production (labor and capital), and that land includes more than simply sites, but also such things as minerals and other nonrenewable natural resources, water, etc.. Today, we'd add such things as the broadcast spectrum, geosynchronous orbits, airport landing rights, etc.; Mason Gaffney details many more in The Hidden Taxable Capacity of Land: Enough and to Spare

If "land" only sounds relevant in a bucolic agricultural setting, I beg to differ.  Oil and water, as well as other natural resources, and urban land values are very 21st century issues in the US and many other parts of the world.  And secure access to a bit of fertile land is a problem for the 85% of the world who are far more directly attached to the soil as farmers than most Americans are today.  In the US, an acre of land in a good agricultural district might be worth $5,000 to $10,000 (and in rare circumstances, more), but an acre in a major city can be worth more than $10 million, and sometimes a good deal more (see a previous post about a Manhattan acre valued at $400 million to $1.2 billion as a teardown).  At 5% per year, the land rent on a $10 million lot is $500,000 per year.  And that lot might be 0.10 acre.  (And if you think all this is somehow a quaint agrarian idea, or that it is too late to remedy the error, follow this link).

He who owns a Manhattan lot is landed gentry just as surely as the owner of a large rural estate.  He has what people need, and he can pocket the annual value of that land just as if he had somehow been involved in creating it, paying only a trivial property tax on it.  He is "entitled" under the way we structure ourselves.  The tenant must come up with the monthly rent, or go elsewhere.  The tenant's rent, even in the most deluxe building with many services provided by the landlord, is mostly for the location (the land) -- not for the building (capital) or services (labor).  The owner of that Manhattan lot may be an individual, or a family trust, or a Real Estate Investment Trust, or a sovereign fund, or a foreign corporation, or a domestic corporation, or a trust created by a long-dead real estate holder, or a philanthropy, or a pension fund, or a university endowment or a private equity fund.  No matter what that entity is, or how many years, decades or centuries they have held title to that site, they did not create the value of the land they own.

We all did it.  Together.  By our presence, by our investment in infrastructure and services which make that site accessible, by technological advances.

Yet we permit the privatization of that land value, as if our nobles, our landed gentry, our gentlefolk, were somehow entitled by their ownership of the land, to privatize its economic value.  What they pocket does not come out of thin air, and it is the product of others' labor, just as a portion of the labor of the tenant farmer in rural England or rural America is transferred into the pocket of his landlord, the local landed gentry, who, if he has enough land, need not labor himself, but can live off the labor of others.  How many tenants pay more than 30% of their income for housing?  How many people with mortgages are paying significant parts of their income to pay off the previous owner of their home -- more precisely, the land under their home -- and the mortgage lender?  This enriches the shareholders, and impoverishes the laborer.

Similarly, we permit the privatization of the value of oil, both by the oil companies which extract it from the earth and by the Jed Clampetts from whose land it is extracted.  Alaska, in recent years, has begun to take some excellent steps with regard to the oil drilled on public lands, and uses the resulting revenue to fund state spending and to add to an endowment which provides an annual income to every yearround resident of the state.  (See a recent post on the subject.)  In many of the OPEC countries, it is the sovereign who gets the revenue (which he may use to buy choice US land and thus have a call on US wages).  Some say that securing the oil revenue for the Iraqi people, as individuals, is why we have over 100,000 Americans in Iraq.  When will we secure the value of America's land -- in the broadest sense, as the classical economists used the term -- for the American people?

People who work are playing by the rules, but the rules are set up to impoverish them, and to enrich those who hold title to our necessary resources.  The alternative, of course, is to shift our taxes off those who work, and onto the ownership of our vital resources.  To do so would not raise prices; indeed, there is evidence it would reduce them.  And by permitting us to untax things we currently tax ... wages, buildings, sales ... such a reform would unburden the economy, creating many more jobs and higher wages, without further enriching the landholders in the process.

Back to the title of this post: Being born into the Landed Gentry is like holding the winning lottery ticket.  Someone has to win the lottery.  Why should we blame the winner, or denigrate him?

The answer, of course, is that we should all be sharing in the winnings, as equals.  Not the products of others' labor, but the value of land and other common resources they take.  We could live in widely shared prosperity, sustainably and in peace, if we only set in place the reforms that Henry George proposed.

Let's end that lottery; we're almost all losers in it, and it is simply unjust.  And we can outvote the few winners.  Aren't we smart enough to recognize that our odds in the current land and resources lottery are pretty similar to our odds in the other lotteries, despite some intermediate prizes which tend to influence our perceptions?

And, no, buying into the landed gentry is no better than being born into it. We are in a corrupt system, and we must fix it.

And if you think that changing the rules would be unjust, please click here.

Comments

[Linda]

Thanks for the visit to my blog. Interesting how one word can provoke so much thought. I agree that the wealth our country has should be shared by all. I just hope as we do so, that we don't loose the high standards of behaviour once associated with being a gentleman (or woman).