LVTFan's Blog

Congressman Maguire's speech on Chinese Exclusion - October 13 & 14, 1893 --- and the remedy

This is a very long speech; it stretched over 2 days.  It was occasioned by discussion of legislation on Chinese exclusion.  James G. Maguire (1853-1920) represented San Francisco in Congress from 1893 to 1899.  Georgists are acquainted with him in part because of his writings in The Standard, Henry George's weekly newspaper, including the 1887 speech to the Anti-Poverty Society in NYC in which Judge Maguire spoke of seeing the cat, which soon became a shorthand for that AHA! moment when one starts to see the full beauty of Henry George's ideas. 

I've seen parts of this speech in various places, but don't always see what I think is the most important and remarkable part of it.    

The situation Congressman Maguire describes in San Francisco is dramatic, and one can see why explaining the situation to his mostly East Coast colleagues in Congress was a challenge. 

In the district which I represent there is a vastly greater number of adult Chinese male population than of adult males of the Caucasian race, citizens and aliens combined. That is the situation there. That was true of the whole city of San Francisco, according to the statistics, until quite recently. I believe it to be the condition in San Francisco now. I believe the census returns of Chinese population in San Francisco to be wholly and grossly inaccurate.

At the end of the first section, we get a hint of where the speech is going.

You see the hardships imposed by our Federal laws upon the Chinese, and your sympathies go out to them because you do not see the other side of the picture. We see the oppression, misery, degradation, and slavery to which our own laborers are reduced as a direct result of Chinese immigration. We see that the imported Chinese coolies are mere agencies in the hands of monopolists—domestic and foreign—by which our own people are gradually reduced to a condition of wretchedness approximating to the social condition of the Chinese slaves, and without the slightest feeling of malice against the unfortunate Chinamen we demand their exclusion and their deportation as necessary measures of defense to our own people.

Bengough: The Declaration of Independence Vindicated

This appeared in Single Tax Review in Autumn, 1905.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE VINDICATED.
(For the Review.)
By J. W. BENGOUGH.

There are some people in the United States who take the position more or less openly that the Declaration of Independence is an out-worn document; that whatever its practical merits may once have been, it is now no more than a cherished relic having certain spectacular uses on Fourth-of-July occasions. There are other Americans—constituting the vast majority—who regard such sentiments as savoring of blasphemy, but who, nevertheless, are ardent supporters of the prevailing policy of Protection. The real difference between these two classes of citizens is merely this: That the one consciously repudiates the Declaration, and the other virtually does so.

The fundamental doctrine of the Declaration is that "All men are endowed with certain inalienable rights, amongst which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The meaning of this is clear enough. The fathers undoubtedly intended to assert that whatever the duties of men might be in civilized society, however they might differ in mind, body or estate, all alike were entitled to the enjoyment of certain natural rights, which rights were inalienable—that is, could not be justly taken away, curtailed or invaded by any human power, so long as they were exercised by each man with due respect for the similar rights of every other. Amongst these rights three are enumerated: The right to Life, involving necessarily the right of access to food, clothing and shelter, the right to Liberty of mind and body, so that a man’s ownership of himself might be vindicated, and his powers applied to the securing of the things necessary to life; and the right to the pursuit of Happiness, the freedom to move about and to hold such relations with his fellow men as would conduce to the enjoyment of a full and harmonious life.

The writers of the Declaration had but recently experienced the tyrannical power of taxation, and it might almost seem that the weapon of unjust taxation, like Macbeth’s dagger, was floating before their mental vision when the memorable words above quoted were penned. For certainly there is no more effective way in which man’s right to life can be abridged than by levying taxes upon the results of his labor; and his right to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can be abrogated in no way more surely than by means of a system which interferes with his impulse to trade.

Terrence Powderly: On Earth Peace, Good Will Toward Men (Cosmopolitan, December, 1891)

 

"ON EARTH PEACE, GOOD WILL TOWARD MEN."

T. V. POWDERLY.

Terence V. Powderly was born January 22, 1849, at Carbondale, Pennsylvania. His parents were natives of Ireland and were honest hard-working people.The boy's school days ended at the age of thirteen.  At fourteen he was examiner for the Delaware and Hudson Canal company: at seventeen he was apprenticed in the Delaware, and Hudson shops to learn the trade of machinist; at twenty he was a machinist in the locomotive shops of the Lackawanna railway at Scranton, and in 1871 joined a labor organization.  Two years later, in spite of the fact that he was a Conservative, he was discharged from the shops because of his activity in the labor union.  He worked at his trade wherever he could find employment notwithstanding the "black list" until 1878, when he was elected Mayor of Scranton, an office he retained for six years. He has been a chief factor in organizing the Knights of Labor, whose General Master Workman he has been since 1879.

IT is easier to point out the wrong than rectify it, less difficult to find something to condemn or find fault with than praise or endorse; and in the field of industry, while the advance toward better conditions has been more rapid during the past decade than for centuries before, the results are not so apparent to the worker in the field as to the looker-on. The great danger which presented itself to the people fifteen years ago was the law. The poor were without friends: they were the recipients of denunciation from statesman, press and pulpit. It was considered rude to even hint that the man who soiled his hands in manual toil had a right to any consideration other than a patronizing kindness at the hands of his employer, and to suggest that others should take an interest in his welfare was to incur the displeasure of society. The law made it a crime to be idle and gave to employers the privilege of turning the workman away without protest. To be out of money and on "tramp" was an offense against the law: it is today, but is not punished so rigorously as it used to be.

The Single Tax: An Essay on the Single Tax in 50 Words

All men have equal right to life.

Life depends absolutely upon land.

Therefore all have equal right to land.

Some must occupy more valuable land than others.

Equal right demands that landholders pay the yearly value of land Into a common fund for common purposes.

This is the single tax.
SAMUEL BRAZIER.

in The Public, 1900

Meum, Tuum and Stealum

Another gem, also from the Leavenworth Labor News -- a little bit of filler at the bottom of a column:

Qualified Ownership

The moral law recognizes three kinds of ownership: what belongs to me, what belongs to you, and what I can legally steal from you.  "Meum," "Tuum" and "Stealum."

My high school Latin is long behind me, but I think the 3rd person plural would be Nostrum --- "ours," as in common property. 

(And http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/latin/stage-1-latin/resources/stage-1-latin-grammar-resource/pronouns/ didn't refresh my memory much.) 

 

John Farrell, The Philosophy of the Single Tax, Part II: The Need for Reform

The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, NSW: 1883-1930)  Sat 19 Oct 1889  Page 5  

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SINGLE TAX.
BY J. FARRELL

No. II.  THE NEED FOR REFORM.

The speaker with whose words I closed my paper of last week went on to say that if the followers of Henry George occasionally gave some reason for the very common accusation that they regarded their leader as an economic pope that pope had, at least, learned his business. But as a general rule there is no foundation for such a charge other than the density of those who make it. Of the prominent supporters of the single tax in these colonies, there is not one, I believe, who is not quite prepared to state his case from start to finish and justify every point of his belief with cogent reasons, and anyone who is conversant with the literature of the subject in the United States and England can readily believe that it is the same there. Whatever doubt existed in the minds of those who were at first inclined to accept "Progress and Poverty" as the revelation of a new truth was dispelled by the attempts made to controvert the writer's positions. After Arnold Toynbee, W. H. Matlock, the Duke of Argyll, and others less widely known, but in some cases infinitely more worthy to be heard, had spoken, it began to be realized that no coherent argument in opposition to the single tax theory could be put forward. But there has not been a blindfold acceptance of the whole belief of Henry George. His teaching has been very closely scrutinized indeed, and no better proof of this could be given than that a large number of the most diligent students of it, while holding his demonstration, that by taxing away land values poverty may be finally abolished, to be complete, refuse to accept his views with regard to the matter of interest. The point here at issue is highly problematical and perfectly immaterial, as it is one which must bring its own solution with it, but it is the only part of the work that those who have pored closely over the whole of it hesitate to endorse. The wonder is that such a stupendous task as the evolving of order and sequence out of the chaotic mass of contradictions which passed as a science a dozen years ago and was called political economy, should have been so well performed by one mind, not that one or two errors may have been made. It was superhuman work to undertake, such a work as a college of trained specialists, rather than an individual, should have engaged in. And, looking upon the result and knowing of the care and the patience and conscientious effort of the writer, and his great ability, it is surely about a fair thing to feel impatient when economists of the Teohey calibre undertake to declare that the single tax is unjust or unworkable. Here in Sydney there are dozens of people who tell you that they advocated land

John Farrell, The Philosophy of the Single Tax, Part IV: The Heart of the Matter

The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, NSW: 1883-1930)  Sat 9 Nov 1889  Page 10

The Philosophy of the Single Tax
by J. Farrell

No. IV   The Heart of the Matter

"The laws of distribution are obviously laws of proportion, and must be so related to each other that any two being given the third may be inferred." When it is known what the total value of a product, is, what portion of that value is taken as rent, and what as interest upon invested capital, it can readily be ascertained how much will remain to go in the shape of wages to those who engaged in the work of production. Presuming that the readers who have followed me up to this point have perfectly comprehended the differences between Henry George and the earlier teachers, and the important difference in conclusions which they must involve, I will now proceed to deal with a part of the question in which he is practically in accord with them — the law of Rent.

This, as stated by Ricardo, who more than any former writer devoted himself to the subject and who has been widely accepted as the standard authority, is as follows: — "The rent of land is determined by the excess of its produce over that which the same application of labor can secure from the least productive land in use." Here the definition of the word "land" must be borne in mind. It must be remembered that "land" means not only the surface of the earth but all natural agencies and means of production, such, for instance, as forests, mines, fisheries, &c. Rent is the advantage (expressed usually in money) which one natural avenue of production possesses over another, and can only refer to natural advantage. Rent is commonly and erroneously accepted as meaning payment for the use of buildings or improvements of any kind effected by labor or capital, but that error must be avoided. Such payment is wages or interest for the labor or capital expended in making the buildings or improvement, not rent. It must be remembered, too, that rent arises not only when the owner of land and the user of it are separate persons. If the owner and user are one and the same person, that portion of his income which he might obtain if he leased his land to a second party instead of putting it to use himself is rent. When land is purchased the purchase money — exclusive of any sum paid in consideration of improvements upon it — is simply rent capitalized. The purchaser pays in a lump sum what, if he leased the land, he would pay in rent. It must not be supposed that Ricardo's law assumed usefulness to be the basis of rent. No matter what especial advantages a piece of land possessed, rent could not attach to it while another piece, equal in every respect, was open to free use. And the expenditure of labor or capital upon such a piece of land would not in any way affect its rental. If improvements worth a million pounds stood upon it still not a single

John Farrell, The Philosophy of the Single Tax, Part VII: Chiefly in Reply

The letter to which this is replying follows the article itself here.

The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, NSW: 1883-1930)  Sat 18 Jan 1890  Page 9

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SINGLE TAX.
By J. Farrell

No. VII. CHIEFLY IN REPLY.

Before proceeding to deal finally with the method of what upholders of the single tax claim to be the solution of the great problem which has so long and deeply engaged the thought of mankind, before explaining how the unravelment of the maze is to be effected, I must glance at certain objections raised by Mr. A. G. Yewen in The Daily Telegraph of January 7 against certain of my contentions. These were — that trades-unionism cannot generally avail, under present conditions, to help labor all round to a better share of what it produces; that any gain to organized labor obtained by such means is at the expense of labor not organized; and that socialism, as generally propounded, is apparently both impracticable and unjust.

Touching the first, my ground, clearly set forth in preceding papers, is that land (all the raw material or natural opportunity upon which labor and capital can exert themselves to produce anything) is so monopolized that both labor, the worker and capital, the tool he uses, can only get free access to such avenues of employment as will keep the one alive and reproduce the other. Therefore, any more productive avenues they seek to use take from them such a portion of their product in the shape of rent that they are always practically working at the most unprofitable verge possible.  The rate of wages and interest, I have endeavored to show, is determined wholly by the degree of land monopoly reached in any particular country, or, in other words, by the number of laborers or capitalists seeking to use one particular avenue of production. If these are many rent is high and wages and interest low; if few, the exact reverse is the case. The "standard of comfort" is controlled by this measure of accessibility of productive power to raw material. And while monopoly has the power to prevent production in any degree it may choose I fail to see any possibility of trades-unionism having the general beneficial effect Mr. Yewen claims for it. Monopoly need not yield an inch to allow the increased production from which alone the whole field of labor could receive substantial betterment.

A Poem of Political Economy -- likely J. W. Bengough, from 1887

A Poem of Political Economy
from Grip, mid-1887
likely by J. W. Bengough

Capital, Land and Labor
    Were triplets at their birth,
And started out together
    To cultivate the earth;

Quoth they, “We’ll work together,
    And all the wealth we make
Will be divided fairly,
    And each a third will take.

“Capital’s share is Interest,
    Land’s share we’ll know as Rent,
While Labor’s we’ll call Wages.
    And each will be content.”

The business grew and prospered,
    And wealth was made galore,
But, lo! while Land waxed wealthy
    The other two grew poor.

And it was seen, most strangely,
    That with the rise of Rent,
Both Interest and Wages
    Lower and lower went!

“There’s something wrong, dear brother.”
    The others said to Land,
“There’s something crooked somewhere
    We’d like to understand.

“While you are fat and jolly,
    And from all care are free.
We, though we do our portion
    Are pressed by poverty.”

Said Land, “My dearest brothers,
    The facts are as you state—
While capital and wages fall
    Rent grows at inverse rate.

“And why? — the thing is simple,
    And very plain to see: —
For all your raw material
    You’ve got to come to me.

“And I (through ‘private ownership’)
    Am thus empowered to say,
As much as I see fit to ask
    You both have got to pay.

“We’re on a different footing,
    As you may now perceive,
You’ve got to have my help, you know,
    Or, simply, you can’t live.

“And since (through ‘private ownership’)
    I ask more than my share,
It follows that my partners
    Are left a little bare!”

“Most excellently reasoned,”
    Said Labor. “clear as day!”
“The very thing,” said Capital,
    “That I was going to say.”

“Well, now,” said Labor thoughtfully,
    “I think I see the chip
That spoils our dish of porridge—
    It’s ‘private ownership.’

“We’ll just dissolve this little firm
    And form again with two
Called Capital & Labor —
    Both workers — that will do.

“And Land (or raw material)
    Since it by Heaven is sent
We’ll treat as common property
    By wiping out all rent.

“Then while the wealth producing
    Will go on as before,
The workers will enjoy it,
    And neither will be poor.”

 

J. W. Bengough was a prolific illustrator and cartoonist, and he clearly had a way with words.  He published Grip for many years, and late did weekly cartoons for The Public.  See also his Up-To-Date Primer and Whole Hog.    He coined the phrase "Natural Public Revenue."     Look for "Grip" on Google Books; you won't be disappointed!

James Maguire's speech in the House of Representatives: 1893-10-13 LAND MONOPOLY AND THE LABOR QUESTION

https://archive.org/stream/calspeech1906unse/calspeech1906unse_djvu.txt

LAND MONOPOLY AND THE LABOR QUESTION.
The Honorable James G. Maguire
In the House of Representatives, Friday and Saturday, October 13 and 14, 1893.

The House having under consideration the bill (H. R. 3687) to amend an act entitled "An Act to prohibit the coming of Chinese persons into the United States," approved May 5, 1892,

Mr. MAGUIRE said:

The gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Morse] scouted the idea that ninety thousand or one hundred thousand Chinamen in this great country could be a source of any real hardship to the country, or any menace to our institutions, social, political, or industrial, and as one basis for his statement in that behalf he called attention to the magnificent, boundless, inexhaustible, natural resources of this country. Our natural resources are indeed measureless and inexhaustible, and if they were open to the people of this country on fair and equal terms — on the terms on which the great Creator gave them to mankind — the gentleman's argument on that phase of the question would be sound.

But these natural resources, without access to which labor can produce no wealth at all, are not open to the people. They are monopolized. Chinese labor would not and could not oppress American labor if our lands were free, but, as it is, land monopoly and cheap imported labor are the upper and the nether millstones, between which American labor is being ground into serfdom and pauperism, as I will presently explain. The natural resources of the Pacific coast, the natural resources of our entire country, are the private property of a few individuals.

This great country, which we are pleased to call ours, belongs, by legal title, to a few landlords whose number and proportion to the whole people are annually growing less.

Every cheapening of labor, by any means, increases the market value of the land and the rent rolls of its owners; thus, by a double process, widening the gulf between the landless poor and our growing landed aristocracy. American labor, driven from the natural sources of independent self-employment, is forced to enter the labor markets of cities and towns and compete for employment with the cheapest labor that is there offered for sale.

Mr. MORSE. Who is responsible for that condition?

Mr. MAGUIRE. The people are responsible, because they have the power to correct the evil and do not exercise that power; but it is to be hoped that the people will ere long relieve themselves of that responsibility.

The monopoly of the natural earth and its God-given resources is the colossal crime of modern civilization, beside which all other oppressions of the poor are insignificant. Land is the exclusive source of human subsistence. All wealth, all means of physical subsistence, are extracted by labor from the natural earth. Indeed, man is a land animal in every sense. His food, his clothing, his shelter, his very body, all come from the land and all to the land return again. He must live upon the land and from the land, if he lives at all. Even the sailor and the aeronaut are not exempt from these conditions of human existence, for the decks trodden by the one and the bars and ropes which support the other are of land.

The right to life, which we all regard as sacred and inalienable, cannot be more sacred than the right of access to the exclusive means by which life can be supported. "You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live."

Yet, in this land of unexampled and unparalleled political liberty, a few men own and control the only source from which the masses of the people can draw their subsistence.

Those few have, therefore, the unnatural power to dictate the terms upon which the masses of the people of this country can live — to fix the terms upon which they may have access to the natural resources that the Creator made necessary to the support of their lives. The Creator not only made and freely gave those resources as a common heritage to all his children for their support and sustenance, but he is constantly from day to day replenishing and improving them by the operation of his natural laws.

The creative power, by its changing seasons, by its sunlight and its rains, and its drifting winds, by. its processes of decay in the vegetable and the animal world, is ever building up and replenishing the elements of the land that yield subsistence for mankind.

The unquestioned legal right of our landed class to entirely exclude their fellow-citizens from the lands of our country involves the power to inflict all oppressions less than such exclusion.

We have, therefore, under the forms of the greatest political freedom, a land system which creates an absolute despotism, under which the land-owning classes are lords of the industries, the liberties, and even the lives of their landless fellow-citizens.

It is in connection with this institution and this condition that we must consider the question of Chinese immigration. To consider the question abstractly is not to consider it at all. Upon the abstract question of human rights we are practically agreed.

HOW LABOR IS DEGRADED.

The condition of land monopoly prevailing in this country tends to fix the wages of all labor according to the standard of living of the lowest class of laborers seeking employment in the country.

American labor is no longer free, because its natural opportunities for self-employment, although they are measureless and inexhaustible, as the gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Morse] has said, are closed against it by monopoly. It can no longer escape from an unsatisfactory labor market, but, in spite of the fact that wages bear no relation whatever to the value of labor, it must bid for employment against the cheapest labor that is offered there.

The tendency and the end of such competition in an over-crowded labor market where there is still an army of unemployed laborers, after all demands for labor have been supplied, is to reduce all wages to the line at which the unemployed surplus, facing the alternative of beggary and starvation, are willing to work.

I have seen the whole problem of labor's degradation worked out in practical life before my own eyes. Thirty years ago, sir, labor in California was comparatively free, because land was comparatively free there. Labor was then paid according to its production and not according to the lowest standard of living prevailing among the laborers as now. It was then worth what it produced and it was paid accordingly.

Laborers being then free to go upon the virgin soil and build their homes and establish their own industries, and being able there to comfortably feed and clothe their families and to educate their children in the standard branches of useful learning, were not obliged to remain in the labor market when it offered less favorable conditions. Then California was labor's "Promised Land." Then California was the last rampart from which the boasted and really glorious "standard of American labor" has been permitted to float.

Then there were in our land no tramps, few paupers, and no surplus labor in enforced idleness.

Then sparseness of population and the consequent lack of social advantages imposed the only hardships that were known. What wonder that those who knew the freedom and the happiness of those conditions yearn for their return!

I saw the change of social conditions come. I saw the shadow of land monopoly steal over and encompass our Golden State. I saw a few hundred men become the absolute owners and masters of her great natural resources, that were manifestly intended by their Creator to furnish homes and subsistence to 40,000,000 people. I saw an empire of her best and richest land pass by act of Congress under the dominion of a single, soulless corporation. I saw the gates of natural independence in home and industry closed against American labor.

I saw labor driven from its lucrative and independent retreats in the mountains and valleys into the markets of the cities and towns, there to be sold as a commodity at prices fixed by the laws of trade.

I saw the wages of American labor changed from the value of. ita product down to the price fixed by the alternative of pauperism, while the wealth-producing power of labor was increased, on the average, in all departments of industry, elevenfold.

I saw the beneficiaries of monopoly manipulating the labor market to keep the price of labor down. I saw them importing, in tens of thousands, the coolies of China, not for the benefit of the Chinamen, as Eastern philanthropists persist in believing, but for the double purpose of bearing the labor market, by maintaining a surplus and of teaching American laborers to live on the rations of Asiatic slavery. These beneficiaries, let me say to the gentleman from Kentucky [Mr. McCreary], are the Californians whose brass bands and streaming banners heralded the dawn of Asiatic slavery on the Pacific coast in the ratification of the Burlingame treaty; and they, sir, would again furnish bands and banners to celebrate the resumption of their slave traffic if the Geary act were repealed.

In the great State of California, whose natural resources are confessedly capable of supporting 40,000,000 people, I saw the horrors that are supposed to result only from overpopulation, prevailing with a population of only 1,000,000.

I saw the millionaire and the tramp, contemporaneous menaces tp our civilization, arise out of these conditions.

I saw the millionaire, without productive effort on his part, become a multi-millionaire, upon the tribute commanded by his purchased and granted privileges; and I saw the army of pauperism growing as he grew, and growing because of the conditions that made him grow — recruited by thousands from the ranks of unemployed labor — a ghastly procession of vice and crime, and rags and filth, and torment and despair, drifting listlessly, as "flotsam and jetsam" on the tide of our civilization, to whatever goal a just God may deem suitable at the close of their earthly hell.

These are the results as I have seen them on the Pacific coast, of land monopoly, supplemented by the importation of Chinese slaves. These are the conditions which we seek to mitigate by the enforcement of the Geary act.

The picture that I have drawn is no "distorted vision," no "distempered dream," but a stern tragedy in real life enacted in the open light of day. An awful tragedy on which the curtain rose within my memory, and upon the last act of which — the final triumph of humanity over monopoly — I hope to see the curtain fall within my lifetime.

DECLINE AND FALL OF ROME.

These results of land monopoly are not (excepting the Chinese slavery phase) peculiar to California or the West.

They prevail throughout the civilized world, wherever our land system prevails; but in the older sections of our country the change from free conditions antedates the earliest recollections of the generation now upon the stage of public life, and the Chinese phase of our Western problem has no parallel east of the Rocky Mountains.

But it has a striking parallel in the history of the decline and fall of the civilization and power of ancient Rome.

Macaulay tells us that "in the brave days of old," when Rome was mistress of the world; when to be a citizen of Rome was esteemed the proudest privilege of manhood, her "lands were fairly portioned" among her citizens. In the period of her decline and fall the lands had become the property of a few great landlords who employed slaves to work them. The landless citizens, thus excluded from the poor privilege of working as laborers upon the lands which once their fathers owned, drifted helplessly to the cities and towns, and there, in the helplessness of enforced idleness, they sank into pauperism and vice. Their debased suffrage became mere merchandise in the market, thus extending instead of controlling the powers of the monopolists. The soldiers of Rome became supplicants for alms, and their children hereditary paupers. The outer form of her official life alone preserved the semblance of Rome's departed glory. Then Rome fell, and, over the sepulchre of her once splendid civilization, her epitaph was written: "Latifundia perdidere Italiam" ("Great estates ruined Italy").

Shall history be permitted to repeat itself? Shall the lords of our land be permitted to work it with slave labor? Shall they be permitted to exclude our brethren, and our fellow-citizens from the poor privilege of earning their living as hired laborers upon the land in which, by natural right, they have an equal interest with the landlords themselves?

Shall they be permitted for their private gain to bring upon our country the curse that shattered the Empire of Rome? Shall they be permitted to turn our civilization backward, and make the ages of its development droop again?

No; this is our country, this is our civilization. Their preservation is our first, and our highest duty, and is the truest friend ship to mankind.

We of the West do not yield to the people of New England in love of humanity. As a native son of New England I glory in her devotion to the cause of liberty and civilization. Our warfare is not against the unfortunate Chinamen. We would rather help them than hurt them.

We are struggling to preserve our own people from the hell of slavery that yawns beneath them. That accomplished, we will, in proportion to our numbers and our means, match every dollar and every effort that New England will contribute for the enlightenment and civilization of the Chinese, and for the betterment of their moral and social condition. Until American labor shall be made free we demand that it be protected from the competition of slavery. The emancipation of our own labor is the only just alternative for the exclusion and deportation of the Chinese. This brings me to the discussion of that alternative — the emancipation of labor.

HOW TO MAKE LABOR FREE.

The gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Morse] asked: "Who is responsible" for the condition of land monopoly prevailing in this country, and I answered that the people were responsible, because they have the power to correct the evil and do not exercise that power.

The question is pertinent and important, because if the greatest evil of Chinese immigration results from faults in our land system, it may well be asked why we do not cure those faults and let the Chinese remain.

The gentleman's question, touching as it does the very heart of the great social conflict now agitating the civilized world, deserves a more complete and a more detailed answer.

The remedy which I propose for the evil of land monopoly is simple, just, practical and unquestionably sufficient. It is this: To appropriate to public use, by taxation, for the support of our Federal, State, and municipal governments, the entire rental value of all land, irrespective of improvements, and to abolish all other taxes.

Would that be just? If it would not be just it would not be expedient. I hold that no permanent good ever resulted from an act of injustice. "Never yet did men or nations prosper finally in wrong." Entertaining these views and believing with Daniel Webster that "Justice, sir, is the great interest of man on earth," I am fully convinced, after mature deliberation, that the remedy is not only just in itself, but that it embodies the only means by which justice can be permanently and universally established among men.

Land is the common heritage of all mankind. It was freely given by the Creator, with all of its elements and all of its powers, for the equal use and sustenance of all mankind. It was not given to any one generation, nor to any class or classes in any generation, but equally to all mankind, from the first child of nature to the last human creature who shall inhabit the earth.

Land is the common heritage of every child of God — not as the heir of his natural father, not according to the possessions or the will of his natural father, whose right to land perishes with his own life — but as the direct heir of the Universal Father, from whom the right to life, to liberty, to air, to sunlight, are likewise directly inherited.

The true province of government is to regulate the use of this heritage by its citizens while preserving to each his equal right therein.

Why do men monopolize land?

To cure the evil of land monopoly the motive for it must be clearly understood in order that the incentive may be intelligently removed. Is the motive self-aggrandizement, or is it malicious, or is it mercenary? Our common experience is alone necessary to determine the question.

The motive is almost wholly mercenary. The desire for power over other men has its influence, hut it is purely incidental.

Profit, either present or prospective, is practically the sole inducement to land monopoly. That profit is yielded either in present groundrent or future enhancement of the land value.

What is groundrent, and why does land, the natural elements and qualities of which remain unchanged, continue to advance in value in all growing communities?

Who produces the rental value of land? What influence has Chinese slave labor upon groundrent?

Groundrent is the landlord's share of production. It is the tribute charged by the owner of the natural earth for allowing others to use it. Its measure is, referring to any given piece of land: "the excess of its product over that which the same application can secure from the least productive land in use."

In practice it may be generally stated that the rental value of any given piece of land is the difference between the average value of its product and the average cost (labor and capital) of production, for the period of the lease.

It is therefore manifest that whatever increases the value of the product, without increasing the cost of production, increases groundrent, as an increased demand for the product, resulting from increase of population or other cause, or an improvement in the quality of the product.

It is also manifest that whatever reduces the cost of production tends to increase groundrent, as: a reduction of the wages of labor, inventions of labor-saving machinery, and improvements in the methods of combining and subdividing labor.

Thus it is that, under our land system, every contribution to material progress, as well as every reduction in the wages of labor, attaches itself to the land and inures to the benefit of the landlords in increased groundrent.

For example, let as suppose that a given farm, or a shop or store site, which can be operated by one man, will yield a groundrent of $150 per year, when the standard wages of the required labor are $2 per day; if the wages of such labor be generally reduced to $1.75 per day, the cost of productively using that land will be reduced about $75 per year, and the amount of that reduction of cost can be added to the rent, unless, as another result of the reduction of wages the price of the product also goes down in the market.

Making an allowance of $40 on account of the reduction in the price of the product (a very liberal allowance), we have a net saving of $35 per year, which the landlord can add to his rent. This is the primary effect, only, of the reduction of wages upon the value of land. There is another effect equally important. A piece of land which will yield a certain amount of rent annually as a net income, is worth as an investment twenty times the amount of its annual rent.

Therefore, an addition of $35 per annum to the rental value of the land in question would increase its market price $700.

Thus, the reduction of 25 cents per day in the poor man's wages not only lessens his purchasing power to that extent, but actually adds $700 to the price of the home which it is his life's ambition to secure.

This is the result which every reduction of wages brought about by Chinese competition has produced in California.

This is the result which, with greater or less intensity, is being produced by land monopoly everywhere.

The displacement of labor by labor-saving inventions drives the displaced laborers into the market to swell the army of the unemployed. The natural opportunities for the redistribution of the labor thus displaced being closed by monopoly, competition among laborers is intensified, wages reduced, and rent correspondingly increased.

This is the process which is enslaving labor and exalting landlordism everywhere.

PUBLIC ENTITLED TO ALL GROUNDRENT.

We have now seen, in brief outline at least, what groundrent is and how it arises. We have seen that it is an increment of value produced and imposed upon the natural earth by the presence, industry, enterprise, inventiveness, and virtues of the whole people of each community in which it arises.

We have seen that it absorbs all of the general advantages of the material progress of the whole people, that to the landlord it is in every sense an unearned increment to which as landlord he does not in any way contribute.

Merely permitting labor to use land productively is not a contribution to production, because the land, with all of its useful elements, was given to mankind by God, and would have been accessible to labor if the shadow of landlordism had,never darkened the horizon of our civilization.

The landlord is not entitled to the rental value of his location, because he does not produce it.

The community is entitled to the rental value, because the community does produce it. Every value belongs of natural right to him whose labor or service produces it, and without whose labor or service it would not have existed. It is immaterial whether the value be produced by one person, or by ten persons, or by a million persons. It belongs to those who produce it — individually, if it be individually produced; collectively, if it be collectively produced.

The argument in favor of leaving the accrued rental value of land, that is, the unearned increment which has already attached to land, to the present owners, is based upon a mistake of fact. There is no such thing as an accrued rental value attaching to any land. All future rental values of land depend upon what the people will do in the future, and not at all upon what they have done in the past.

It is, therefore, just for the people who produce the rental value of land to take that value by taxation for their public uses.

This rule applies to all land whether it be owned by landlords, or by speculators, or by its immediate occupants.

The value which the public gives to the location should be paid to the public by the person who is in a position to control or appropriate that value.

As the landlords have confessedly no moral or legal right to compel the people to put forth the enterprise and industry necessary to produce and to maintain the rental value of their lands, they certainly can have no moral right to privately appropriate any of the direct or indirect results of such enterprise and industry as the people may voluntarily put forth.

As to improvements, the man who plants an orchard, or digs a ditch, or builds a house or a fence should pay no more taxes upon his orchard or his field or his lot than he would be required to pay if he had made no improvements whatever.

The value of the improvements belongs to the man who makes the improvements, by the same rule of right which awards the value of the location to the people who produce it; and a wise concern for the public interest dictates the encouragement of improvements by exempting them from taxation, rather than the discouragement of improvements by placing any kind of burden upon them.

The man who builds a house or plants an orchard increases the means of satisfying human wants, and is a benefactor of mankind in spite of the fact that his motive may be purely selfish; while the man who keeps a foot of useful land out of use works a corresponding injury to mankind.

This expediency of raising all public revenues by a single tax on land values, as a substitute for all other forms of taxation, further appears in the fact that it would save nine-tenths of the expense and waste now involved in levying and collecting taxes upon personal property, upon imports, and upon business privileges, all of which taxes are regularly shifted from the primary payers to the ultimate consumers — falling principally upon the overburdened farmers and laborers of our country.

Besides it would require men to pay taxes according to the advantages which they receive from the community, and not according to their necessities, as now.

As such a tax would bear upon land according to its value, and not according to area, and as the value of farming land is very small, by comparison with the value of land used for commercial and other industrial purposes, the small farmers — the most heavily burdened class under our present system — would find the single tax less in volume and far less oppressive in method than the complex and accumulated burdens of the direct and indirect taxes which now fall upon them with notorious inequality.

A tax on land values is the only property tax that always falls with proportionate equality upon all owners and that cannot be shifted from the person paying it to the ultimate consumer or user. The reason that it cannot be shifted is that while a tax on any other kind of property tends to check its production, and thus, by the law of supply and demand, to increase its price sufficiently to cover the tax, a tax on land values forces idle land into the market, increasing the supply of land offered for sale or lease, and thus, by the same law of supply and demand, reducing, instead of increasing, the rent. Heavy taxation of houses increases the rent of houses by the amount of the tax, but heavy taxation of land values decreases the rent of land. All political economists are agreed on that proposition, and it needs no argument.

Such a change in our taxation laws would not be an impairment of any vested right of landowners, because the power and right of taxation, to the extent of taking the entire rental value, whenever the public good may seem to require it, has been absolutely reserved to our governments, national and State, against every foot of land that has ever passed into private ownership in this country.

EFFECTS OF THE SINGLE TAX.

The effect of such a system of taxation upon the monopoly of land in this country must be instantly apparent. It would at once make such monopoly unprofitable and wasteful to the monopolist. It would at once take away the only incentive that now exists for the monopoly of land. It would compel all landowners to use their land productively, or at once let it go to those who would so use it.

Every user of land could afford to pay the margin of production or economic rental value of his land in taxes; but no man, above the mental level of a fool, would pay taxes amounting to the economic rental value of his land for the mere purpose of monopolizing it.

It would put an end to land speculation and the train of evils that follow ever in its wake. It would put an end to the collection of speculative rent, to booms, and to industrial depressions.

It would encourage the productive use and improvement of lands by relieving them of all public burdens, while insuring permanency of tenure, security of improvements, and security in the fruits of all productive effort.

It would forever settle the conflict between capital and labor and, by improving the condition of labor, put an end to strikes and boycotts and lockouts.

It would make land freer to labor than it was in California forty years ago; freer than it was on the Atlantic seaboard two hundred years ago.

It would restore the once cherished dignity of American labor, and the grand individuality which was once the distinguishing characteristic of American citizenship.

As a relief to our overcrowded labor markets, it would be equal to the discovery of a new and free and fertile continent in the Pacific Ocean, and its advantages would be more permanent.

PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY GEORGE.

The people have not yet sufficiently learned that labor never can be free except where land is free.

Knowledge must ever precede right credence, and right credence must ever precede correct political action.

The people are reading and studying the philosophy of Henry George. Progress and Poverty, which a distinguished English writer has happily denominated "a glorious gospel of justice," is steadily and rapidly changing the credence of the world on the subject of land tenure.

It is the herald of the next great step in the order of social evolution.

It is a practical development of the principles of Jeffersonian Democracy. It is a justification of our Declaration of Independence. It is a vindication of "the ways of God to man."

James Maguire's speech in the House of Representatives: 1894-01-31 Direct Taxation of Land Values

Search this on "Santa Marguerita" and on Salinas River.

 

DIRECT TAXATION OF LAND VALUES,

Speech of HON. JAMES G. MAGUIRE, of California.
In the House of Representatives, Wednesday, January 31, 1894.

The House being in Committee of the Whole on the state of the Union, and having under consideration the bill (H. R. 4864) to reduce taxation, to provide revenue for the Government, and for other purposes, and the question being upon an amendment thereto offered by the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. McMillan), providing for a tax on incomes, etc., the following proceedings were had:

MR. MAGUIRE. Mr. Chairman, I offer the amendment which I send to the desk. The amendment was read, as follows:

Amend the amendment by striking out sections 1 to 18 thereof, both inclusive, and inserting in lieu thereof the following:

"And be it further enacted, That a direct tax of $31,311,125 be, and is hereby, annually laid upon land values in the United States, and the same shall be, and is hereby, apportioned to the States and Territories and District of Columbia, respectively, in proportion to population as ascertained by the census enumeration of the year 1890.

"Sec. 2. That the said direct tax laid by this act shall be assessed and laid on the value of all land exclusive and irrespective of the improvements thereon; Provided, That all lands belonging to the United States, or to any State, county, or municipality, shall be exempted from assessment and taxation under this act; And provided further, That all land subject to taxation under this act shall be valued and assessed, for the purpose of taxation, at its full market value, on the first Monday in March of each year, the valuation for the fiscal year commencing on the 1st day of June, 1894, to relate to the first Monday of March, 1894.

"That, for the purpose of assessing said tax and collecting the same, sections 9 to 12, both inclusive; sections 14 to 48, both inclusive, and sections 53 to 58, both inclusive, of that certain act entitled 'An act to provide increased revenue from imports to pay interest on the public debt, and for other purposes,' approved August 5, 1861, are hereby re-enacted and made of full force and effect hi so far as they provide for the assessment and collection of direct taxes on lands and lots of ground, and for any and all methods and procedure in the levying, collection, and enforcement of such taxes."

Mr. MAGUIRE (continuing) said:

Mr. Chairman: The arguments in support of the pending amendment have all proceeded upon the theory that the proposed tax upon incomes, above $4,000 per annum, will compel the rich to bear a fairer proportion of the expenses of the Government than they now bear, and that the people will be satisfied with the accomplishment of that result. The people do, indeed, very much desire the establishment of such a system of taxation, and their claim for a more equitable distribution of the burdens of taxation is unquestionably just. But they are really desirous of substantial relief from the present power of the rich to use their wealth for the oppression of the poor; and they expert some measure of that relief to come to them through the income tax.

Such relief will not come from the income tax, nor will that change in our system of taxation even tend to curb the oppressive power of wealth. It simply puts a 2 percent tax mainly on the results of useful investments and of personal effort. The control of labor by wealth, in certain forms of investment, and the consequent unfairness in the distribution of the products of labor is a matter of infinitely greater importance to the people than the equalization of the burdens of government, which is sought to be accomplished by the income tax. I am in favor of the income tax, as proposed by the Committee on Ways and Means, because it is better than the system of taxation now prevailing; because the burdens which are laid by the income tax, wherever they may ultimately fall, are all for public uses, while under the tariff system three parts of the burden are laid for the enrichment of private individuals to every one part that is collected for public use.

As a choice between the income tax and any extension of tariff taxation, beyond that provided for in the "Wilson" bill, I will unhesitatingly vote for the income tax.

UNDUE POWER OF WEALTH.

But, sir, I seek by the amendment which I have just submitted to establish a system of taxation by which the revenues necessary for the support of this Government can be raised without any burden whatever upon either industry or commerce, and by which, at the same time, the power of accumulated wealth over labor will be destroyed. The power of wealth to oppress labor results almost entirely from the present investment of wealth in the control of the natural resources, from which alone labor can produce wealth.

Land is the storehouse in which the Creator has placed the raw materials of all wealth, and labor is the means by which those raw materials are changed into forms of usefulness for the satisfaction of human wants. Wealth is the result of labor applied to land, or to the products of land, and land furnishes not only this raw material for all wealth, but it constitutes also the home and the working place of all labor. All of these things the Creator freely provided for the use and sustenance and shelter and comfort of mankind by giving the land of the world, with its abundant resources, as an equal heritage to the whole human race. The same Creator made man a land animal. He must live upon the land, and from the fruits of the land, if he shall live at all. All of his food and clothing and shelter, and every other thing that will tend to satisfy his wants, natural and acquired, come from the land. Indeed, his whole physical body comes from the land, and goes back to the land again at the close of his life.

Separated from the land, man must perish, just as a fish would perish on being separated from the water, which is his element. Therefore, if man has a natural and inalienable right to life and to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness, he must have a natural and equally inalienable right to the means which the Creator, who gave him life, has freely and abundantly provided for his support. There can be no right to life more sacred than the right to the means of sustaining life. "You take my life when you do take the means by which I live." Liberty is impossible to one man so long as another man controls his means of living.

Natural resources and peace -- Snowden

Permanent peace can only be established when men and nations have realized that natural resources should be a common heritage, and used for the good of all mankind.

—First Viscount Philip Snowden (1864–1937)

 

This is part of Martin Adam's recent book, Land, online at http://www.unitism.com/

U.S. Government Sells 400,000 Acres in Gulf

Why on earth would we-the-people sell assets such as this instead of leasing them, producing an income that would benefit future generations???   That would be Natural Public Revenue.

 

The value of that acreage will rise over time.  Why will that be private, or corporate, gain, rather than public gain??

 

U.S. Government Sells 400,000 Acres in Gulf

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS  AUG. 20, 2014

The federal government has sold more than 400,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico off the Texas coast for oil and gas exploration and development, an official with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said Wednesday. The acreage represents a small fraction of the 21.6 million acres the agency had offered as part of a five-year program to develop resources on the outer continental shelf. Offerings since 2012 in the western Gulf attracted buyers for about 60 million offshore acres, adding about $2.3 billion to the Treasury. Wednesday’s sales, if approved, will bring in about $110 million. BP submitted the largest number of high bids, winning 27 of the 81 tracts that sold. It was the first sale in the western Gulf for BP since it was barred from such auctions after the 2010 oil spill. Conoco Philips spent the most of the 93 bidders in the sale, paying about $61 million for a tract in the ultra-deep-water Alaminos Canyon area.

a response to Joe Stiglitz's "A Tax System Stacked Against the 99 Percent"

Last week, Joe Stiglitz posted a blog piece at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/a-tax-system-stacked-against-the-99-percent/, in which, among other things, he wrote:

One of the reasons for our poor economic performance is the large distortion in our economy caused by the tax system. The one thing economists agree on is that incentives matter — if you lower taxes on speculation, say, you will get more speculation. We’ve drawn our most talented young people into financial shenanigans, rather than into creating real businesses, making real discoveries, providing real services to others. More efforts go into “rent-seeking” — getting a larger slice of the country’s economic pie — than into enlarging the size of the pie.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We could have a much simpler tax system without all the distortions — a society where those who clip coupons for a living pay the same taxes as someone with the same income who works in a factory; where someone who earns his income from saving companies pays the same tax as a doctor who makes the income by saving lives; where someone who earns his income from financial innovations pays the same taxes as a someone who does research to create real innovations that transform our economy and society. We could have a tax system that encourages good things like hard work and thrift and discourages bad things, like rent-seeking, gambling, financial speculation and pollution. Such a tax system could raise far more money than the current one — we wouldn’t have to go through all the wrangling we’ve been going through with sequestration, fiscal cliffs and threats to end Medicare and Social Security as we know it. We would be in sound fiscal position, for at least the next quarter-century.

to which I posted a response.  The last time I looked, it was the only one, out of about 430, which discussed the issue of rent seeking.  Here's what I wrote:

How do we unstack it? Collect the rent. Treat it as our COMMON treasure, not something subject to privatization by individuals, corporations, foundations, universities, etc. 

Will it fund everything? We don't know. We can't know. We don't even collect the data that would permit us to calculate its magnitude. (Funny thing about that. Wonder who benefits from that. Could it be the rent-seekers?) Start collecting it, and using it to fund public goods.

At the same time, start reducing, even eliminating the dumb taxes which burden the economy: taxes on sales, buildings, wages, starting with the lowest wages earned. Watch the 99% recover. Watch the economy recover. The 1% will do all right under such a set up, but the rest of us will begin to thrive. Most likely, we'd be able to reduce the amount we need to spend on the social safety net, so that collected rent might cover a large share of our internal revenue needs.

What else might we collect revenue from? How about the privileges we've given out -- the privilege of using the airwaves (think how much a strong radio signal sells for in a large city) and the entire electromagnetic spectrum; franchises of various kinds, landing rights at LaGuardia, particularly at rush hour; 

Then there are our nonrenewable and scarce natural resources: water, oil, natural gas, various metals. Royalties on many of these things are trivial, or they are going into private pockets, instead of being treated as our common treasure.

Inequalities

Inequalities we are born with, — we cannot help. Differences in physique, disposition, temperament, ability, talent, ambition, perseverance, character and many other personal qualities, will always exist. But these inequalities are made more unequal by inequalities that ought not to exist. It is the economic inequalities that especially command our attention. Inequalities before the law make outlaws of those who are outlawed. Inequalities in the enjoyment of special privileges, natural opportunities and resources, make millionaires at one end of the social line and tramps at the other. Inequalities in wealth and taxation, however they arise, are trouble breeders in every community. While ability and enterprise and push are always recognized as factors in success, still they wholly fail to explain the great disparity of rewards existing between the frugal and industrious on the one side and the profligate idle, drunk with opulence and power, on the other. Too many now have tasted the bitter cup of despair and have looked beneath the economic surface of things to be longer quieted by admonitions of sobriety, Industry and perseverance.

In success, they now see more the hand of fraud and cunning than the qualities of exertion and merit. Their disillusionment is known and appreciated in high places and is well-voiced in the following words of John A. Hobson, Lecturer in Economics, Oxford University:

"Though there are still many comfortably-situated men and women who believe that, on the whole, industrial conditions are such as to apportion the 'good things in life' in accordance with the deserts of the recipients, this belief is rarely held either by those whose circumstances give them a close and wide acquaintance with the 'hard facts of life,' or by those who have brought intellectual analysis to bear upon the processes by which distribution of wealth is affected. The political economy, not only of 'the masses,' as voiced by Karl Marx, Henry George and their followers, but also of the classes, through the mouths of academic teachers, is full of frank avowals of the deep injustices which underlie the existing apportionment of wealth. The following words of J. G. Hill may be taken as a representative expression of this feeling: 'The very idea of distributive justice or any proportionality between success and merit, or between success and exertion, is, in the present state of society, so manifestly chimerical as to be relegated to the region of romance.'"

When you pick up a special privilege and examine it, — whether it be a franchise, a rebate, a tax or a tariff, — you have in your hands someone's special preserve. He is hurt if you criticise, and you are hurt if you don't. The social organism is filled with these special preserves. They are a prolific source of economic inequality. They leave no place for a buffer in the successive distributions of labor brought about by the successive discoveries in the arts and of mechanics and tools. When the natural resources are someone's preserve and are closed to retreat, those crowded out of employment by machines and tools cannot fall back, — they must stagnate and starve, or else go forward. And "forward" here means to turn backward upon the preserves.

-- in The Painter and Decorator, a union journal, 1907

Ethics of Piracy

I wonder if Morgan the Pirate,
   When plunder had glutted his heart,
Gave part of the junk from his ships he had sunk
   To help some Museum of Art; 
If he gave up the role of "collector of toll"
   And became a Collector of Art?

I wonder if Genghis the Butcher,
   When he'd trampled down nations like grass.
Retired with his share when he'd lost all his hair,
   And started a Sunday school class;
If he turned his past under and used half his plunder
   In running a Sunday school class?

I wonder if Roger the Rover,
   When millions in looting he made,
Built libraries grand on the jolly mainland
   To honor Success and "free trade;"
If he founded a college of natural knowledge
    Where Pirates could study their trade?

I wonder, I wonder, I wonder,
     If Pirates were ever the same,
Ever trying to lend a respectable trend
   To the jaunty old buccaneer game;
Or is it because of our Piracy Laws
    That philanthropists enter the game?

—Wallace Irwin, in Life. -- reprinted in The Painter and Decorator, a union journal, 1907

The Earth-for-All Calendar: Undecimber 23 -- Shakespeare

Cloten. Why tribute? Why should we pay tribute? If Caesar can hide the sun from us with a blanket, or put the moon in his pocket, we will pay him tribute for light.

—Shakspere, "Cymbeline," Act III, Scene 1.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: Undecimber 22 -- Hal Caine

"The Lord's Prayer says, Give us this day our daily bread. Our daily bread comes from the land. No man made the land. It is God's gift to mankind. It belongs to all men. Therefore individual ownership of land is wrong. Individual control of the fruits of the land is wrong."

— Hall Caine, "David Rossi," in "The Eternal City."

The Earth-for-All Calendar: Undecimber 16 -- Proudhon

The monopoly of the natural resources, principal among which is land, causing rent, and the monopoly of exchange, causing interest, are at the bottom of all the misery and wretchedness of humanity.

—Proudhon.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: Undecimber 9 -- Rousseau

As soon as I see landed property established, then I see unequal fortunes, and from these unequal fortunes must there not necessarily result different and opposed interests, all the vices of riches, all the vices of poverty, the brutalisation, the corruption of civil manners?

—Jean Jacques Rousseau, "Douies sur L'Otdre Naturel."

The Earth-for-All Calendar: Undecimber 8 -- Allen

The only point where I do not find myself in complete accord (and that is perhaps more due to your comparative silence than anything else) is that I attach relatively more importance to the initial injustice done by the permitted monopoly of raw material in a few hands. It seems to me that individualism, in order to be just, must strive hard for an equalisation of original conditions by the removal of all artificial advantages. The great reservoir of natural wealth that we sum up as land (including mines, etc.) ought, it seems to me, to be nationalised before we can say that the individual is allowed fair play. While he is thwarted in obtaining his fair share of the raw material, he is being put at a disadvantage by artificial laws.

—Grant Allen, Letter to Herbert Spencer, 1886, in "Grant Allen, A Memoir," by Edward Clodd.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: Undecimber 7 -- Renan

In our society, established upon a very rigorous idea of property, the position of the poor man is horrible; he has literally no place under the sun. There are no flowers, no shade, no grass but for him who possesses the earth. In the East these are the gifts of God, which belong to no man. The proprietor has but a slender privilege; nature is the patrimony of all.

—Ernest Renan, "Life of Jesus," Chapter X.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: December 21 -- St. Ambrose and Dr. McGlynn

God has ordered all things to be produced, so that there should be food in common to all, and that the earth should be a common possession to all. Nature therefore has produced a common right for all, but greed has made it a right for a few.

— ST. AMBROSE, On the Duties of the Clergy (A. D. 391), Chap. XXVIII., Sec. 132. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. X., p. 23.

The Creator has made ample provision for all men in the storehouse of nature and in the faculties and powers of man. To do God's will, we must make room at the Father's table for all His children.

— FATHER EDWARD McGLYNN, Lecture on the Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man.

a Doxology from 1903

Praise John from whom oil blessings flow.
Praise him oil creatures here below:
Praise Teddy some, but John the most,
Praise Baer next, and then the Holy Ghost. 

This appeared in The American Cooperator.  Searching a bit, another verse turns up:

Praise John from whom oil blessings flow.
Praise him oil creatures here below:
Praise him above, ye heavenly host,
Praise William some, but John the most. 

Want Less Inequality? Tax It

Want Less Inequality? Tax It.

Pigou, a key bridge figure in the history of his field, was one of the earliest classical economists to notice that markets do not always produce the best possible social outcomes. The pollution generated by a factory imposes costs on those who live downstream or in the path of its airborne emissions. The risks assumed by banks leading up to the recent financial crisis imposed costs on just about everybody. Market transactions often generate what economists call “externalities” — side effects, sometimes positive but often negative, that affect people who do not participate in the transaction. 

Pigou, having recognized the problem, was the first to propose a solution. Society should tax the negative externalities and subsidize the positive ones. This simple notion — if you want less of something, tax it — is why his ideas periodically bubble up in the service of combating a recognizable cost to society, like pollution. We think that his approach offers an answer to another great problem of our time: inequality.    

Does the extreme degree of inequality in America today really create, as Pigou would put it, negative externalities? Does the fact that hedge-fund manager Mr. Jones rakes in 100 or 1,000 times what office manager Mrs. Smith earns impose costs on everybody else? Plenty of Americans think not. Defenders of our skewed income distribution point out that a free-enterprise system requires some inequality. Unequal rewards give people an incentive to work hard and acquire new skills. They encourage inventors to invent, entrepreneurs to start companies, investors to take risks. It’s fine in this view that some people get astronomically rich. As Mitt Romney likes to say, “I’m not going to apologize for being successful.”  

On the other side, many of us have a gut feeling that inequality has gone too far. Our times are reminiscent of the Gilded Age’s worst excesses. Hence the popularity of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s slogan, “We are the 99 percent.”

LVTfan here: Wouldn't it be better to prevent the inequality by such measures as treating the natural creation as our common treasure, instead of permitting its privatization and then taxing back what is taken?   Treating the natural creation, and that which the community creates by its presence and its investment in public goods -- schools, roads, libraries, etc. -- as our COMMON treasure would create equal opportunity for all, a much better idea than permitting some to capture it and then taxing some of their booty back after the fact.   When we let some reap what others sow, and then take back a share after the fact, we're still permitting them to reap which deprives the sowers of that right.  Whether it be nature doing the sowing, or the community as a whole, no good can come of permitting the privatization of that.  Henry George, in "Progress and Poverty" and "Social Problems" showed the logical, efficient, just way to do better.

Individual Account Retirement Plans: An Analysis of the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances | EBRI

Note: this has some statistics you might want to know, but it is primarily a post on public policy.

Individual Account Retirement Plans: An Analysis of the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances | EBRI.

... many Americans are facing the likelihood of not having sufficient income in retirement unless they increase their savings, work longer, or significantly decrease their expenditures in retirement if they hope to make ends meet.

The Employee Benefits Research Institute recently published an analysis of 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances data.  It demonstrates how few people have the traditional defined-benefit retirement plans, and the account balances people of various demographics have in their individually-directed retirement accounts.

Here are some statistics worth considering as we think about the effects of a system which permits a few of us to capture a large share of the nation's net worth and a large share of its income, and to unduly influence our elections with advertising which works to conceal and reinforce the structures of that system:

• 38% of all families -- of all ages -- had a family member with a retirement plan. [Figure 2]
  • of those 38%, 18% had only a defined benefit plan; 61% had only a defined contribution plan; 21% had both.  82% had a 401(k) type plan, and of that 82%, 22% also had a defined benefit plan
  • Among those families whose head was 55-64, 43% had a member with a retirement plan; among those 45-54, 53% did.
  • Interestingly, the top 75% of the net worth spectrum all had rates in the 41% to 46% range; in the bottom 25%, only 21%.
• Among families whose head was under 65 and working, 52% had a member participating in a retirement plan [Figure 3].  
  • Among households with income abov e $100,000, 76% had retirement plans; in the $50,000 to $100,000 income range, 64%; in the lower income groups, the rate ranged from 44% down to 9% 
  • In the 55-64 age group, 59% had a retirement plan; in the 45-54 group, 61%. 
  • Within this working-age universe, similar trends held: the top 50% had roughly 61-67% availability of employment-related retirement plans; for the next 25%, only 53%; for the bottom 25% of working families, only 29%.   
• IRAs and Keogh plans: 28% had one or both; median value, $40,000 (up from $34,574 in 2007). Among those 55-64, 41% had one or both; median value $60,000 (down from $68,101); among those 45-54, 29% had one or both; median value $40,000, up from $37,717. [Figure 5]
  • Even among those in the top 10% of the net worth spectrum, only 77% had IRA or Keogh accounts, median value $200,,000, up from $142,487 in 2007; in the next 15% of the net worth spectrum, median value was $60,000.  
• Of all families, 64% had some sort of retirement account from a current or previous employer (down from 66% in 2007) 
• Retirement assets in Defined Contribution plans and IRAs typically [that is, at the median] represent 61% to 66% of total financial assets, which is to say that most have less in mutual funds, stocks, checking and other accounts than they do in their retirement accounts. [Figure 8]
• Only in the top 10% do retirement assets represent less than half of financial assets.
• As is typical of median/average ratios, average holdings are considerably higher -- that is, the holdings of the top few are huge, and most of us are below average.  The average balance is $173,232; in the top 10% of the net worth spectrum, average balances are $519,034.  For the next 15% of us, the average balance is 147,061 -- well below the average of all of us! [Figure 9]  Recall from Figure 6 that 64% of us have such a plan; the other 36% have no balance at all (and likely a significant percentage have very small account balances).
• For those in the 65-74 age group, the average balance is $324,199; for those in the 55-64 group, the average balance is $297,903.
• For those in the top 10%, average account balance is $519,034.  One might reasonably guess that the top 5% have the lion's share of this.
• It might be worth noting that a 70 year old must withdraw at least 1/27 of his IRA per year.  Based on that 65-74 age group average balance, that's $12,000 per year.  (Another rule of thumb says that if one only withdraws 3% per year, one's account should last forever. That would be $9,725 per year, for that "average" -- not median -- family in the 65-74 age group. 

 Enough said.  Time to circle back to the study's conclusion:

... many Americans are facing the likelihood of not having sufficient income in retirement unless they increase their savings, work longer, or significantly decrease their expenditures in retirement if they hope to make ends meet.

What public policy reforms might one suggest based on these data points?

• Find a way to raise wages for ordinary workers
• Find a way to lower the cost of living for ordinary workers and retirees
• Find a way to reduce the sum of the taxes we pay and the costs of housing without reducing the public goods which those taxes provide (unless it is by reducing the demand for social safety net 

If you have other suggestions, I'd like to hear them.

But the reason for this blog is that I believe I have found the public policy reform which would accomplish these goals, in collecting the lion's share of the annual rental value of our land, and in collecting for the commons certain other kinds of natural public revenue which our current system permits to accrue to individuals and corporations.  I didn't invent it.  Henry George is the clearest exponent of it, but not the first or last.  Is it perfect?  No, but it is vastly superior to what we've got now, and I believe it is consistent with the ideals to which Americans pay the most honor.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: October 20 -- Howells

The common ownership of mines necessarily followed, with an allotment of lands to anyone who wished to live by tilling the land; but not a foot of the land was remitted to private hands for purposes of selfish pleasure or the exclusion of any other from the landscape.

— W. D. HOWELLS, A Traveler from Altruria, Chap. XI., p. 271.

Born Yesterday

Well, not quite.  The film's a little older than I am.

Watched that film last night ... great quote:

Billie: Because when ya steal from the government, you're stealing from yourself, ya dumb ass.

And when we allow others to steal from the commons what rightly belongs to the community, what are we?   Some of that theft we all recognize as theft, and other kinds are perfectly legal, even honored, under our current laws.  I find the latter even more troubling than the former.

And when neither our economists nor our leaders even SEE it, it is fair to call that a corruption of what their businesses are supposed to be.

 

The Earth-for-All Calendar: October 5 -- Spencer

Equity, therefore, does not permit property in land.  For if one portion of the earth's surface may justly become the possession of an individual and may be held by him for his sole use and benefit as a thing to which he has an exclusive right, then other portions of the earth's surface may be so held; and eventually the whole of the earth's surface may be so held; and our planet may thus lapse into private hands.

— HERBERT SPENCER, in 1850, Social Statics, Chap. IX.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: October 4 -- Bagehot

In the early ages of society it would have been impossible to maintain the exclusive ownership of a few persons in what seems at first sight an equal gift to all (the land) — a thing to which everyone has the same claim.   

— WALTER BAGEHOT (1826-1877), Economic Studies, Essay I., Part I., p. 31.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: October 3 -- Marmontel

Let us suppose that a people is excluded from the ownership of the land.  I say that this exclusion, even if followed by no other injustice (which I think impossible), by making a man a stranger to the commonwealth, makes him indifferent to the existence of the State.

— MARMONTEL, Address in Favor of the Peasants of the North (1757), Oeuvres, Vol X., p. 72.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: October 2 -- Jefferies

That any human being should dare to apply to another the epithet "pauper" is, to me, the greatest, the vilest, the most unpardonable crime that could be committed.  Each human being by mere birth has a birthright in this earth and all its productions; and if they do not receive it, then it is they who are injured, and it is not the "pauper," oh, inexpressibly wicked word! — it is the well-to-do who are the criminal classes.

— RICHARD JEFFERIES, The Story of My Heart, Chap. X., p. 122.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: September 12 -- Grant Allen

"But how is it that you allow these chiefs — landlords, don't you call them? — to taboo the soil, and prevent you all from even walking on it? Don't you see that if you choose to combine in a body, and insist upon the recognition of your natural rights — if you determined to make the landlords give up their taboo, and cease from injustice, they'd have to yield to you? And then you could exercise your natural right of going where you pleased, and cultivate the land in common for the public benefit, instead of leaving it as now, to be cultivated anyhow, or turned into waste, for the benefit of the tabooers?"

— GRANT ALLEN, The British Barbarians (Words spoken by Bertram).

One's "Fair Share"

The post below this one, "Mitt Romney's 'Fair Share' " refers to his fair share of the costs of providing public goods.

But perhaps an equally important question is the nature of one's fair share of the output of our economy and the output of the earth.  Some of the former output is the result of individual efforts, and one ought to be able to keep that portion. But at the same time we must recognize how much comes from the division of labor, from drawing down on the non-infinite supply of non-renewable natural resources on which all of us today must depend and on which future generations of human beings must rely. Those who draw down more than their legitimate share owe something to the rest of the community.  Our wealthiest tend, we suspect, to use many, many times their legitimate share, and the median American likely draws far more than their share, when one considers the planet as a whole.   

Perhaps "legitimate" is not the right word here.  It refers to what is permissible under current law.  (The word gets misused a lot -- see the discussion on "legitimate rape," which seemed to be about the circumstances under which a woman has a right to make a specific very personal, decision, and when it is considered by some to not be left to her and is the province of government, legislators or others.)

What is one's "fair share" of natural resources?  America is using a hugely disproportionate share of the world's resources.  Are we entitled to it because we're somehow "exceptional"?  Because "our" God is somehow better than other nation's Gods?   Or do we genuinely believe that all people are created equal, and intend to live our lives accordingly?

Our output of greenhouse gases exceeds our share of the world's population.  This is not without consequences for the world, and for peace on earth.

We ought to be re-examining our incentives so that they move us in the direction we ought to be going, which is, to my mind, using less.  We can build transportation infrastructure which will permit many more of us to move around with less impact on the environment.  We can fund that through collecting the increases in land value that infrastructure creates.  We can correct the incentives which cause us to use today's inferior technologies to extract natural resources from the earth in ways which damage the environment, as if ours was the final generation, or the only one worth serious consideration.

Better incentives could reduce, eliminate, even reverse urban sprawl.  I refer specifically to land value taxation as a replacement for the existing property tax, particularly in places where assessments are for one reason or another not consistent with current property values -- e.g., California and Florida, parts of Delaware and Pennsylvania which currently use assessments from the 1970s, and many other places where assessments are simply out of whack with current reality!)  We should be replacing sales taxes, wage taxes, building taxes with taxes on land value and on natural resources.  Most of that value is flowing generously into private or corporate pockets, to our detriment.  It concentrates wealth, income, and, of course, political power. 

Collecting the rent, instead of leaving the lion's share of it to be pocketed by the rent-seekers, would go a long way to making our society and our economy healthier.  Eliminating the privilege of privatizing that which in a wisely designed society would be our common treasure would make our society a better place in which to live, a place in which all could thrive and prosper without victimizing their fellow human beings. 

Stiglitz: "Mitt Romney’s Fair Share"

a few excerpts from: "Mitt Romney’s Fair Share" by Joseph E. Stiglitz | Project Syndicate.

A major theme of the underlying political debate in the United States is the role of the state and the need for collective action. The private sector, while central in a modern economy, cannot ensure its success alone. For example, the financial crisis that began in 2008 demonstrated the need for adequate regulation.

Moreover, beyond effective regulation (including ensuring a level playing field for competition), modern economies are founded on technological innovation, which in turn presupposes basic research funded by government. This is an example of a public good – things from which we all benefit, but that would be undersupplied (or not supplied at all) were we to rely on the private sector.

Conservative politicians in the US underestimate the importance of publicly provided education, technology, and infrastructure. Economies in which government provides these public goods perform far better than those in which it does not.

But public goods must be paid for, and it is imperative that everyone pays their fair share. While there may be disagreement about what that entails, those at the top of the income distribution who pay 15% of their reported income (money accruing in tax shelters in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens may not be reported to US authorities) clearly are not paying their fair share. ...

I have to disagree with the second sentence of this next paragraph.  And I think Stiglitz knows better, if he stops to think about it:

Democracies rely on a spirit of trust and cooperation in paying taxes. If every individual devoted as much energy and resources as the rich do to avoiding their fair share of taxes, the tax system either would collapse, or would have to be replaced by a far more intrusive and coercive scheme. Both alternatives are unacceptable. 

We don't need intrusive or coercive; we just need to start collecting the lion's share of the rent!  Well, I suppose some rent-seekers would find this extremely intrusive -- it intrudes on their habit of self-enrichment by privatizing of what is rightly and logically our PUBLIC treasure, the logical way of financing PUBLIC goods.   And Professor Stiglitz is quite aware of the value of natural resources; he may not be quite as conscious of the value of urban and other well-situated land.   

Our national recordkeeping doesn't even collect the valuations of land and natural resources on any consistent basis! (One could reasonably argue that this failure-to-measure is a form of corruption!)  What we don't measure we can't do anything about.  And the powers that be are quite content with how we do things; the benefits accrue to them!  And several generations of college-educated people know nothing about the issue, which was well known and widely discussed 100 years ago.  (Look into the extensive Single Tax literature and the ideas of Henry George.)

Some more excerpts:

The billionaire investor Warren Buffett argues that he should pay only the taxes that he must, but that there is something fundamentally wrong with a system that taxes his income at a lower rate than his secretary is required to pay. He is right. Romney might be forgiven were he to take a similar position. Indeed, it might be a Nixon-in-China moment: a wealthy politician at the pinnacle of power advocating higher taxes for the rich could change the course of history.

Comments

But Romney has not chosen to do so. He evidently does not recognize that a system that taxes speculation at a lower rate than hard work distorts the economy. Indeed, much of the money that accrues to those at the top is what economists call rents, which arise not from increasing the size of the economic pie, but from grabbing a larger slice of the existing pie.

Those at the top include a disproportionate number of monopolists who increase their income by restricting production and engaging in anti-competitive practices; CEOs who exploit deficiencies in corporate-governance laws to grab a larger share of corporate revenues for themselves (leaving less for workers); and bankers who have engaged in predatory lending and abusive credit-card practices (often targeting poor and middle-class households). It is perhaps no accident that rent-seeking and inequality have increased as top tax rates have fallen, regulations have been eviscerated, and enforcement of existing rules has been weakened: the opportunity and returns from rent-seeking have increased. 

Today, a deficiency of aggregate demand afflicts almost all advanced countries, leading to high unemployment, lower wages, greater inequality, and – coming full, vicious circle – constrained consumption. There is now a growing recognition of the link between inequality and economic instability and weakness.

There is another vicious circle: Economic inequality translates into political inequality, which in turn reinforces the former, including through a tax system that allows people like Romney – who insists that he has been subject to an income-tax rate of “at least 13%” for the last ten years – not to pay their fair share. The resulting economic inequality – a result of politics as much as market forces – contributes to today’s overall economic weakness. 

You Didn't Build That!

seen on Twitter:

"If you extract economic rent from the value of your land, you didn't build that." -- Henry George http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoism

 

We -- WE! -- built that -- and we ought to be collecting it, month in and month out, and keeping our hands off what the individual or small business or corporation DID build.  (Of course, this presumes that each of us is expected to compensate the community for the pollution we create, and the non-renewable resources we take.)

The Earth-for-All Calendar: July 28 -- William Morris

Not seldom a piece of barren ground or swamp, worth nothing in itself, becomes a source of huge fortune to him from the development of a town or a district, and he pockets the results of the labor of thousands upon thousands of men, and calls it his property.

— WILLIAM MORRIS, Signs of Change, p. 188.

Society will be changed from its basis when we make the form of robbery called profit impossible by giving labor full and free access to the means of fructification — i. e., to raw material.

— WILLIAM MORRIS, Signs of Change, p. 201.

 

The Earth-for-All Calendar: July 17 -- Dove

The great social problem, then, that cannot fail ere long to appear in the arena of European discussion is, "to discover such a system as shall secure to every man his exact share of the natural advantages which the Creator has provided for the race; while, at the same time, he has full opportunity, without let or hindrance, to exercise his skill, industry, and perseverance for his own advantage."

— PATRICK EDWARD DOVE, Theory of Human Progression, (1850), Chap. III., Sec. 3, p. 305.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: July 7 -- John Stuart Mill

The social problem of the future we consider to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labor.

— JOHN STUART MILL, Autobiography, Chap. VII., p. 232.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: June 30

Yes, ye may fill your garners, ye that reap
The loaded soil, and ye may waste much good
In senseless riot; but ye will not find
In feast or in the chase, in song or dance,
A liberty like his, who, unimpeached
Of usurpation, and to no man's wrong,
Appropriates nature as his Father's work,
And has a richer use of yours than you.

— COWPER, The Task, Book VI.

Property Rights -- Florence A. Burleigh (1902)

I thought this 110 year old article worth sharing.  (See also, over at wealthandwant.com, the page on "ownership and possession.")   Seems appropriate as we enter the celebration of the Declaration of Independence.

The Railroad trainman, Volume 19 -  By Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen
December, 1902, page 918

Property Rights
Florence A. Burleigh

THE recent coal strike has brought the subject of property rights to the minds of many people who had never before thought of it seriously. In a general way, most people think that no one should appropriate to himself what does not belong to him, and that every one has a right to keep what does belong to him. The only question is, what constitutes rightful ownership? Possession certainly does not, neither does any one rightfully own anything simply because he bought it and paid for it in "hard-earned money."

It is a little amusing to hear people argue that such and such a person — often a "poor widow" — owns a piece of land, a horse or a building because it was paid for in "hard-earned money." Is it his or hers any more because the money was hard to earn than if it was easily earned or came down from heaven like manna? Paying for a thing, whether with "hard-earned" money or money that is easily earned, gives no valid title; there must be a little back of that which is transferred or there is no rightful ownership. A man might buy a horse and pay to the seller its full value in gold; but if the horse had been stolen, no matter how many times it had been sold since, it belonged to the man from whom it was stolen. A man can give no better title to anything than he possesses, and title is not made by buying or selling.

Hard and unjust as were the demands of the mine owners in the recent coal strike, they are perfectly legitimate, if it is once conceded that those men or corporations own the mines. A man may do what he likes with his own if he does not aggress on other people's rights. If these men really owned the mines they had a perfect right to sit back and say to the miners, "You shall not work for us unless you come to our terms; there is nothing to arbitrate." They have a right to close their mines for as long a time as they choose, to offer only starvation wages, to compel their employes to trade at "pluck-in" stores, or to exact any other terms they may choose to impose if the mines are really theirs.

Ownership includes absolute control by the owner of the thing owned. If a man owns a tool, a piece of furniture or a watch, he is at liberty to break or burn it, or give it away if he does not care to use it. He may refuse to lend it to any but men with black hair or may put it in a glass case in his parlor if he chooses; it is nobody's business but his own what he does with it, so long as he injures no one else. It may be that he would be foolish, selfish in his disposal of it, but that is his own affair; the article is his without question — his to do with as he pleases.

So it is with mines or any other land; if a man really owns them and can show a good title, he has a right to "dictate terms'' to any one else who wants to use them or whom he wants to work for him; no one can justly interfere. But is the title to coal mines or other natural resources as good as that to labor products? Can it be traced back to the Creator? If so, private property in land is right; if not, private property in land is wrong.

Ownership comes from production -- production being used in the large sense to include exchange. If a man makes a hat it is his; if he exchanges the hat for a coat or a pair of shoes, they are also his because that for which he exchanged them was his. But how is it with land? Can anyone show a title from the producer? Henry George says in "Progress and Poverty," Book VII, Chapter 1: "What constitutes the rightful basis of property?  . . .  Is it not, primarily, the right of a man to himself, to the use of his own powers, to the enjoyment of the fruits of his own exertions?  . . .  As a man belongs to himself, so his labor when put in concrete form, belongs to him. And for this reason that which a man makes or produces is bis own as against all the world — to enjoy or to destroy, to use, to exchange, or to give. No one else can rightfully claim it, and his exclusive right to it involves no wrong to anyone else. Thus, there is to everything produced by human exertion a clear and indisputable title to exclusive possession and enjoyment which is perfectly consistent with justice as it descends from the original producer in whom it is invested by natural law.  . . . .  There can be to the ownership of anything no rightful title which is not derived from the title of the producer and does not rest upon the natural right of the man to himself. There can be no other rightful title because, (first) there is no other natural right from which any other title can be derived, and (second) because the recog nition of any other title is inconsistent with and destructive of this.

" . . . If production give to the producer the right to exclusive possession and enjoyment, there can rightfully be no exclusive possession and enjoyment of anything not the production of labor and the recognition of private property in land is wrong. For the right to the produce of labor cannot be enjoyed without the right to the free use of the opportunities offered by nature, and to admit the right of private property in these is to deny the right of property in the produce of labor."

Herbert Spencer, in the unrevised edition of "Social Statics," Chapter 9, said: "Either men have the right to make the soil private property or they have not. . . . . If they have such a right, then is that right absolutely sacred, not on any pretense to be violated. . . .  If they have such a right, then it would be proper for the sole proprietor of any kingdom — a Jersey or a Guernsey, for example — to impose just what regulations he might choose on its inhabitants — to tell them that they should not live on his property unless they professed a certain religion, spoke a particular language, paid him a specified reverence, adopted an authorized dress and conformed to all other conditions he might see fit to make.  . . .  There is no escape from these inferences. They are necessary corollaries to the theory that the earth can become individual property. And they can only be repudiated by denying that theory."

These quotations are given not because Mr. George or Mr. Spencer or anyone else is infallible, but because the conclusions are irrefutable if once the premises are granted and it is inconceivable that anyone who is at the same time thoughtful, intelligent and fair can deny the premises.

It may be that the statute law allows private property in land, but statute law never of itself made right. Statute law has always winked at or allowed much wrong and injustice, but notwithstanding that, piracy and chattel slavery were finally abolished. When the majority of people come to see the enormous and fundamental wrong in private ownership of land, they will change the laws and wonder how they could have been so blind before as to think that private ownership, in what was not and never could be made by man, was right.

When once the right of all men to the use of the earth is recognized and land is free for all to use as long as they pay to the community the value of that use, then labor will be really free and employers will find that they cannot get a man to work for them unless they treat him justly and fairly.

Imagine a man saying to his physician, "I will not employ you unless you will trade at my store, profess my religion and vote the ticket I tell you to!" The idea is preposterous; yet it is not essentially different from what we see about us everywhere. The sick man employs his physician in essentially the same way that he employs his coachman or his tailor, but the physician is a free agent and the coachman is not, yet both do him a service.

It is seldom that people see that anyone who works for them does them a service, yet that is the case. A rather amusing incident which illustrates this point happened not so long ago at an out of the way town where there are no very poor and no very rich people. A lady who was spending the summer in this place needed extra help and went to ask for it from a woman who had occasionally helped in an emergency, but who at this time did not, for reasons of her own, care to go out to cook even for a day. The burden of the would-be employer's sad song was not so much that she was inconvenienced by the woman's refusal, but that she (the lady) had so kindly and generously offered work and it was scorned. The truth probably was that the woman did not want the small amount of money she would have received as much as she wanted to stay at home and, fortunately, she was free to make her own choice which is not often the case. The reverse of this is so generally the rule that it is a pleasure to occasionally find workers who can afford to be independent. Sometime, when enough people see the injustice of our present social conditions, when we have real freedom and equality, men will not need to almost sell their souls in order to keep their bodies alive for employers will not ask anyone to do it, as they would know it would be useless. Competition will be free and both sides can make a fair bargain, not only between employers and employes, but between all business men.

Among the proper subjects for ownership the one which stands pre-eminent among the others is the man himself. A man's ownership of himself is one of the most sacred things in the world, for it includes his right to freedom of thought, speech and action and the just claim to the product of his labor. It means that every man will have a chance to make the most of himself without interference from anybody.

Let us, then, do what we can to bring about this condition that the world may be the better for our having lived in it, and the next generation may enjoy their right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.''

The Earth-for-All Calendar: June 21 -- Ernest Jones

The land it is the landlord's,
The trader's is the sea,
The ore the usurer's coffers fills —
But what remains for me?

— ERNEST JONES (1819-1868), The Song of the Wage-Slave, Songs of Freedom, p. 130.

Resource Rentals for Revenue -- The 3 R's of fixing our economy

I came across an excellent site at http://www.resourcerentalsrevenue.org, and thought their FAQ page particularly worth sharing.   The links will take you to answers.

We don't HAVE to burden ourselves and our economy with taxes which throw a wet blanket on jobs, on production, on homes.  There is a better way to finance our common spending!

Resource Rentals for Revenue.

The following list comprises the most commonly asked questions about the concept of making land and resource rentals the source of revenue for government. As you continue this study, you will see the value from giving resources the respect they deserve and the benefits resulting from the freeing of labour, production and exchange from taxation. If you have any questions which are not covered here, or observations you would like to put to our panel, please feel free to do so by sending your question as an e-mail query and we will attempt to respond.

The inclusion of land and resources in the economic equation is central to any solution for revenue raising. A taxation solution which does not consider the nature of taxation itself and allows the continuing private monopolisation of community land and resources fails to recognise the essential role land plays in the economic equation and will not work. Land is the only element in the economic equation which is both fixed and finite. It can be monopolised. It is a unique class of asset which must be treated accordingly. If we were to wrest not the land itself, but its unimproved value from private monopolies and return the value to the community — whose very presence creates it — then we would have reduced many problems in one stroke with great benefit to production, to the environment and to the cause of individual freedom and justice.

On the subject of land and resource rents, Henry George said this:

The tax upon land values is the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by nature be attained.

1.Understandings

• What’s with all the terminology?
• Won’t the site rent be passed on to the tenant?
• It sounds too simple
• What is the difference between Land Value and Land Price?
• What is meant by ‘unimproved’ value?
• Why is income from land ‘unearned’ income?
• There is no such thing as a free lunch.
• There is no unimproved land value!
• This tax, like a debits tax, ignores two of the basic principles of raising tax
• It’s incorrect to suggest that income derived from holding land or resources out of use is not a productive activity. It is, since it produces income for the owner.

2.Interest Groups

• Will I be better off with Resource Rentals?
• Are resource rentals fair?
• Wouldn’t the wealthy simply find some way of evading it?
• Wouldn’t the wealthy sell up and flee with their wealth?
• Won’t the poor get caught, while the rich escape as usual?
• Would farmers be able to afford the tax?
• How will it affect multinationals (MNC’s)?
• How will it affect lenders and borrowers?
• Entrepreneurs and Manufacturers?
• Exporters and Importers?
• Environmentalists?
• Won’t it fall harder on the prince in his mansion than on the pauper in his hovel?
• How would old age pensioners on valuable sites be able to pay the site rent as suggested?
• What happens to the self-funded or partly self-funded retiree?
• Unemployed adults - currently untaxed but perhaps owning their own home? Will they have to pay as well?
• The investor in a site has taken a risk, and tied up their capital – who else could possibly be entitled to their capital gain?

3.Implementation

• How would such a system be implemented?
• What would happen to Land Prices?
• If resource rentals are such a good idea, why don’t we have them?
• Why would anyone want to own land under this system?
• How do I buy a property?
• If site values fall, won’t revenue fall too?
• How will it curb unemployment?
• Wouldn’t we run out of space?
• Who wins; who loses?
• Will pensioners and retirees - currently untaxed but living in their own property, be liable for site rents? Will they be reimbursed for past taxes paid?
• New enterprises - yet to realise any profit but paying tax on the property from which they operate? If you tax them, won’t they fail?
• Why don’t we impose reciprocal import duties?
• What about anti-pollution tax rebates?
• What about a Debits Tax?
• Site Rent for Revenue is a crackpot idea.
• Why put the entire burden of taxation on one area of economic activity?

Good questions -- and good answers!

From "The Price of Inequality: Joseph Stiglitz on the 1 Percent Problem | Vanity Fair

This excerpt makes some important points about a number of topics this blog focuses on:

• why wealth and income concentration are not good for the economy;
• rent and rent-seeking behavior 
• the extent to which the financial sector is absorbing the profits made by the productive sectors of our economy

I look forward to reading the book.  I'll be curious to see whether Professor Stiglitz gets into what we can do via reforming our tax system to reduce the amount of rent that is available for private and corporate rent-seekers.  Treat rent as our COMMON asset... Natural Public Revenue!!  Don't leave it there for corporations to privatize.

From The Price of Inequality: Joseph Stiglitz on the 1 Percent Problem | Politics | Vanity Fair.

It is no accident that the periods in which the broadest cross sections of Americans have reported higher net incomes — when inequality has been reduced, partly as a result of progressive taxation — have been the periods in which the U.S. economy has grown the fastest. It is likewise no accident that the current recession, like the Great Depression, was preceded by large increases in inequality. When too much money is concentrated at the top of society, spending by the average American is necessarily reduced — or at least it will be in the absence of some artificial prop. Moving money from the bottom to the top lowers consumption because higher-income individuals consume, as a fraction of their income, less than lower-income individuals do.

In our imaginations, it doesn’t always seem as if this is the case, because spending by the wealthy is so conspicuous. Just look at the color photographs in the back pages of the weekend Wall Street Journal of houses for sale. But the phenomenon makes sense when you do the math. Consider someone like Mitt Romney, whose income in 2010 was $21.7 million. Even if Romney chose to live a much more indulgent lifestyle, he would spend only a fraction of that sum in a typical year to support himself and his wife in their several homes. But take the same amount of money and divide it among 500 people — say, in the form of jobs paying $43,400 apiece — and you’ll find that almost all of the money gets spent.

The relationship is straightforward and ironclad: as more money becomes concentrated at the top, aggregate demand goes into a decline. Unless something else happens by way of intervention, total demand in the economy will be less than what the economy is capable of supplying — and that means that there will be growing unemployment, which will dampen demand even further. In the 1990s that “something else” was the tech bubble. In the first dec­ade of the 21st century, it was the housing bubble. Today, the only recourse, amid deep recession, is government spending — which is exactly what those at the top are now hoping to curb.

The “Rent Seeking” Problem

Here I need to resort to a bit of economic jargon. The word “rent” was originally used, and still is, to describe what someone received for the use of a piece of his land — it’s the return obtained by virtue of ownership, and not because of anything one actually does or produces. This stands in contrast to “wages,” for example, which connotes compensation for the labor that workers provide. The term “rent” was eventually extended to include monopoly profits — the income that one receives simply from the control of a monopoly. In time, the meaning was expanded still further to include the returns on other kinds of ownership claims. If the government gave a company the exclusive right to import a certain amount of a certain good, such as sugar, then the extra return was called a “quota rent.” The acquisition of rights to mine or drill produces a form of rent. So does preferential tax treatment for special interests. In a broad sense, “rent seeking” defines many of the ways by which our current political process helps the rich at the expense of everyone else, including

• transfers and subsidies from the government,
• laws that make the marketplace less competitive,
• laws that allow C.E.O.’s to take a disproportionate share of corporate revenue (though Dodd-Frank has made matters better by requiring a non-binding shareholder vote on compensation at least once every three years), and
• laws that permit corporations to make profits as they degrade the environment.

The magnitude of “rent seeking” in our economy, while hard to quantify, is clearly enormous. Individuals and corporations that excel at rent seeking are handsomely rewarded. The financial industry, which now largely functions as a market in speculation rather than a tool for promoting true economic productivity, is the rent-seeking sector par excellence. Rent seeking goes beyond speculation. The financial sector also gets rents out of its domination of the means of payment — the exorbitant credit- and debit-card fees and also the less well-known fees charged to merchants and passed on, eventually, to consumers. The money it siphons from poor and middle-class Americans through predatory lending practices can be thought of as rents. In recent years, the financial sector has accounted for some 40 percent of all corporate profits. This does not mean that its social contribution sneaks into the plus column, or comes even close. The crisis showed how it could wreak havoc on the economy. In a rent-seeking economy such as ours has become, private returns and social returns are badly out of whack.

In their simplest form, rents are nothing more than re-distributions from one part of society to the rent seekers. Much of the inequality in our economy has been the result of rent seeking, because, to a significant degree, rent seeking re-distributes money from those at the bottom to those at the top.

But there is a broader economic consequence: the fight to acquire rents is at best a zero-sum activity. Rent seeking makes nothing grow. Efforts are directed toward getting a larger share of the pie rather than increasing the size of the pie. But it’s worse than that: rent seeking distorts resource allocations and makes the economy weaker. It is a centripetal force: the rewards of rent seeking become so outsize that more and more energy is directed toward it, at the expense of everything else. Countries rich in natural resources are infamous for rent-seeking activities. It’s far easier to get rich in these places by getting access to resources at favorable terms than by producing goods or services that benefit people and increase productivity. That’s why these economies have done so badly, in spite of their seeming wealth. It’s easy to scoff and say: We’re not Nigeria, we’re not Congo. But the rent-seeking dynamic is the same.

LVTfan here: Think what would happen if we SOCIALIZED rents, and substituted them as our revenue source for all the taxes we pay ... sales taxes, wage taxes, building taxes, excise taxes ... 

Recall what Leona Helmsley told us:  "WE don't pay taxes.  The little people pay taxes."  Think what a weight would be lifted off our economy if those taxes were taken off the produces of labor, and put onto Rent, in all its forms! 

Royalties on Natural Resources on Federal Lands, dropping from 6% to 2%

S. 1144, Soda Ash Competition Act

As introduced on June 6, 2011

S. 1144 would require the Department of the Interior (DOI) to charge a 2 percent royalty on the value of soda ash produced on federal lands through 2016. Under current law, CBO expects that the royalty rate would remain at 6 percent over that period. CBO estimates that implementing S. 1144 would reduce net federal offsetting receipts from soda ash royalties by $75 million over the 2013-2016 period; therefore, pay-as-you-go procedures apply. Enacting S. 1144 would not affect revenues.

CUI BONO?   Seems to me that the states involved lose revenue and the Federal Government loses revenue!  What a deal!!! A lose, lose, lose situation! Whose resources are we talking about anyway?  (Hint: corporations are not we-the-people!  Aren't WE nice to give THEM low royalties on OUR natural resources?)

 

Here's more from the CBO paper; I've omitted the tables because they don't reproduce well:

S. 1144 contains no intergovernmental or private-sector mandates as defined in the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act (UMRA).

ESTIMATED COST TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
The estimated budgetary impact of S. 1144 is shown in the following table. The costs of this legislation fall within budget function 300 (natural resources and environment).

By Fiscal Year, in Millions of Dollars
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2013-2017  2013-2022
CHANGES IN DIRECT SPENDING
Estimated Budget Authority 30 15 15 15 0 0 0 0 0 0 75 75
Estimated Outlays 30 15 15 15 0 0 0 0 0 0 75 75

BASIS OF ESTIMATE
For this estimate, CBO assumes that the legislation will be enacted near the end of 2012.

S. 1144 would reduce the royalty rate on the value of soda ash produced on federal lands from 6 percent to 2 percent over the 2013-2016 period. Based on information from the Bureau of Land Management, CBO expects that, under the bill, firms that paid 6 percent in royalties during 2012 would receive refunds in 2013 of any amounts in excess of the 2 percent rate established by the bill. In addition, because CBO expects that royalty rates charged for soda ash production on state and private lands would be higher than 2 percent, we also expect that, under the bill, the amount of soda ash produced on federal lands would be higher over the next four years than it would be under current law. However, CBO estimates that any increase in production would only partially offset the loss of receipts from lowering the royalty rate through 2016.

In 2011, the last time the royalty rate was set at 2 percent, firms produced 8.8 million tons of soda ash on federal lands and paid royalties totaling $22 million. Based on information from DOI regarding soda ash production and royalty collections through the first half of 2012 (when the royalty rate increased to 6 percent), CBO estimates that firms will produce 7.2 million tons of soda ash on federal lands in 2012 (a decline of roughly 20 percent from 2011) and will pay gross royalties totaling $44 million (double the amount collected in 2011). Thus, under current law, we estimate that, after payments to states of half the gross proceeds, net receipts to the federal government in 2012 will total $22 million. If S. 1144 is enacted, we expect that DOI would refund about $15 million of that amount to firms in 2013. CBO also estimates that implementing the bill would reduce receipts in each year over the 2013-2016 period by a similar amount. In total, CBO estimates that enacting S. 1144 would reduce net offsetting receipts from soda ash royalties by $75 million over the 2013-2016 period.

PAY-AS-YOU-GO CONSIDERATIONS

The Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010 establishes budget-reporting and enforcement
procedures for legislation affecting direct spending or revenues. The net changes in outlays
that are subject to those pay-as-you-go procedures are shown in the following table.

CBO Estimate of Pay-As-You-Go Effects for S. 1144 as introduced on June 6, 2011
By Fiscal Year, in Millions of Dollars
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2012-2017  2012-2022
NET INCREASE OR DECREASE (-) IN THE DEFICIT
Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Impact 0 30 15 15 15 0 0 0 0 0 0 75 75
3
INTERGOVERNMENTAL AND PRIVATE-SECTOR IMPACT
S. 1144 contains no intergovernmental or private-sector mandates as defined in UMRA.
The royalty reduction required by the bill would temporarily reduce federal payments to California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming by a total of $75 million over the 2013-2016 period.

 
PREVIOUS CBO COST ESTIMATE
On June 5, 2012, CBO transmitted a cost estimate for H.R. 1192, the Soda Ash Royalty Extension, Job Creation, and Export Enhancement Act of 2012, as ordered reported by the House Committee on National Resources on May 16, 2012. S. 1144 is similar to H.R. 1192, and the CBO cost estimates are the same for those bills.

ESTIMATE PREPARED BY:
Federal Costs: Jeff LaFave
Impact on State, Local, and Tribal Governments: Melissa Merrell
Impact on the Private Sector: Amy Petz

ESTIMATE APPROVED BY:
Theresa Gullo, Deputy Assistant Director for Budget Analysis

The Earth-for-All Calendar: June 6 -- Coleridge

I should myself deny that the mineral treasures under the soil of a country belong to a handful of surface proprietors in the sense in which these gentlemen appeared to think they did.

— LORD CHIEF JUSTICE COLERIDGE, The Laws of Property, Address before the Glasgow Juridical Society, Macmillan's Magazine, April, 1888, p. 407.

From "The New Earth," December 1899

The masthead for "The New Earth" -- by 1899 already in volume XI -- says "Devoted to the study and illustration of Social Problems on Moral and Religious Grounds." 

Below that, each issue says,

WE DEMAND

The opening of all natural opportunities to Labor and Capital, so that both may be fully and constantly employed and receive their full earnings.

TO EFFECT THIS,

We would take through taxation the rental value of land, completely exempting improvements, and would use this revenue for public purposes in lieu of the taxes that now oppress labor and Capital and restrict their productive employment.

 

In our address "To our readers " last month we advanced the proposition, which indeed is an almost self-evident truth, that the better side of human nature, the side of him which lifts man above mere animalism and materialism, which enables him to transcend mere self-seeking and to find his highest delight in ministering to the welfare of others, requires for its orderly growth and development, social and material conditions which shall parallel, correspond to or embody this better side of us. We maintained that it was as irrational on the part of sincere religious-minded people to expect the graces of the spirit to flourish in social conditions which bear no relation to these graces save that of inveterate antagonism to them as it would be on the part of a farmer to expect a crop of wheat from seed sown on the sand of a rainless desert. Social conditions are, of course, no more the cause of the higher life of man, than fertile ground is the cause of the crop. They are simply the soil in which the higher life can germinate and be nursed to maturity. The cause in the one case is within man himself, as in the other it is within the seed; in both cases it is the creative energy.

But man, both as an individual and as a race, is at first unconscious of this better nature of his, as well as of the kind of life of which it is capable, and through which it must eventually express itself. He becomes conscious of this part of himself by degrees, one step at a time. This process is called evolution. But all evolution necessitates a corresponding previous involution. No plant can grow, or be evolved, from a seed unless the germ of the plant first exist within the seed. So in the case of mankind, no advance in social development is possible unless the germ of better social conditions be within man himself.

Of this germ within it mankind becomes conscious slowly and as the years and ages roll by. It first takes the form of aspirations, and longings and hopes for gentler, humaner and juster relations between men, and of clearer and ever clearer perceptions in respect to the character of the Creator and His relations to His creatures. But these aspirations and perceptions must ever remain as dreams more than any thing else, and even then be confined to a few, until they become sensibly imaged or embodied in corresponding social conditions.

That society as at present organized bears true relation neither to our best aspirations nor to the conceptions of the character of the Creator entertained by every intelligent mind needs no showing. That our Creator and source of life should be a respecter of persons, that He should consider some of His creatures as more fitting objects of His regard than others, that He should provide for the eternal progress of some and leave that of others unprovided for, is a conception of Him utterly discarded by every man today whose mental growth has gone beyond that of the dark ages. But such gross conception of the Creator is just that of which organized society at this day is an embodiment. The kind of ownership of the natural opportunities with which we invest some among us is a representative picture of a conception of the Creator that makes Him a capricious, unjust monarch, granting privileges to a few favorites, and venting His spleen on all others. This is the only kind of conception of His character possible to the great mass of human beings as long as such conditions exist. Preach as we may, institute revivals of religion as we may, no other conception of the Creator can germinate, bear fruit and be a reality among us than this pagan and savage one.

To every honest holder of the more enlightened conceptions of the character of the Creator, then, the questions at once present themselves: What are the principles which society must recognize in order that social and material conditions may fittingly reflect these conceptions; and what can I do to bring about these conditions? True belief, especially on a subject of this kind, must lead to action. The self-satisfaction of entertaining more enlightened convictions than others, and being content with that, is the most hideous form of unbelief.

The answer to these questions is not hard to discover. Organized society, in order that it make any approach to the conditions required of it as a soil in which may flourish true ideas of spiritual life must recognize the equal right of all its members in the bounties of nature and the opportunities offered by the general advance of civilization. It must find means jealously to protect these rights amid all the changing and more and more complex conditions which every progressing body of people must experience.

We, now, unhesitatingly assert that only by building upon the Single Tax ideal can these rights be maintained. In no other way can any real equality of opportunity be assured to every one. When the rental value of land, and nothing but that, is taken through taxation and spent for public needs, opportunities for making a living become open to all more equally than would be possible under any artificially devised scheme of government control. The Single Tax would do the work automatically, and without the the friction and consequent waste of power involved in any direct control and allotment of opportunities by the government.

The Single Tax would, moreover, provide another requirement of orderly social conditions. It would make every man work out his own material salvation, and so embody to us the truth that every man must work out his own spiritual salvation. Under the Single Tax there would be no royal road to the acquisition of material wealth, even as there is no royal road to the acquisition of mental wealth or of spiritual riches.

No one generation of people has ...

I came across this in my files, and thought it worth sharing.  It fills a regular sheet of paper.

No one generation of people

has a greater right to the

use of the planet

than succeeding

generations.

God didn't make a plan like

that.

 

Inquire within or call 727-784-3543

The Earth-for-All Calendar: April 23 -- Simon Newcomb

It is well known that these materials and agencies, as fast as they become available, are in the main appropriated by individuals, through the agency or consent of the government, and are then held as private property. Such is the case with the soil and the minerals beneath it. The owners of this property charge as much for the use of it as if it were their own creation, and not that of nature.

— PROF. SIMON NEWCOMB, The Labor Question, North American Review, July, 1870, p. 151.

a link and a longer except follow ...

 

The Earth-for-All Calendar: March 30 -- Emperor Joseph II

Land, which nature has destined to man's sustenance, is the only source from which everything comes, and to which everything flows back, and the existence of which constantly remains in spite of all changes. From this unmistakable truth it results that land alone can furnish the wants of the state, and that in natural fairness no distinctions can be made in this.

— EMPEROR JOSEPH II., in Oestreichische Geschichte fur das Volk, Vol. XIV. (Vienna, 1867).