The Earth Is The Lord's
Robert V. Andelson
[A paper delivered at the 1979 Joint Georgist
Conference, San Francisco, California]
In focusing upon the moral and religious aspects of the subject of
this conference, I am sensible that I run the risk of seeming to
overload my topic with verbiage which may strike you as high-flown or
overblown.
Yet the property tax reform proposal which has been presented here is
not just a fiscal measure (although it is a fiscal measure, and a
sound one; not just a method of urban redevelopment (although it is a
method of urban redevelopment, and an effective one); not just a means
of stimulating business (although it is a means of stimulating
business, and a wholesome one); not just an answer to unemployment
(although it is an answer to unemployment, and a powerful one); not
just a way to better housing (although it _is a way to better housing,
and a proven one); not just an approach to rational land use (although
it is an approach to rational land use, and a non-bureaucratic one).
It is all of these things, but it is also something infinitely more:
it is the affirmation, prosaic though it be, of a fundamental
spiritual principle - that "the earth is the Lord's, and the
fullness thereof."
It is the affirmation of the same principle to which Moses gave
embodiment in the institution of the Jubilee, and in the prohibition
against removing ancient landmarks, and in the decree that the land
shall not be sold forever. It is the affirmation of the same principle
to which the prophets of old gave utterance when they inveighed
against those who lay field to field, and who use their neighbor's
service without wages. It is the affirmation of the same principle to
which Koheleth gave voice when he asserted in the fifth chapter of
Ecclesiastes that "the profit of the earth is for all."
The earth is the Lord's! Consider what this means. It means that our
God is not a pale abstraction. Our God is not a remote being who sits
enthroned on some ethereal height, absorbed in the contemplation of
his own perfection, oblivious to this grubby realm in which we live.
Our God is concerned with the tangible, with the mundane, with what
goes on in the field, in the factory, in the courthouse, in the
exchange. Our God is the maker of a material world - a world of eating
and sleeping and working and begetting, a world he loved so much that
he himself became flesh and blood for its salvation. In this sense,
then, our God is eminently materialistic, and nowhere is this more
clearly recognized than in the Bible, which, for that very reason, has
always been a stumbling-block and an offense to those Gnostics, past
and present, whose delicacy is embarrassed by the fact that they
inhabit bodies, and for whom religion is essentially the effort to
escape from or deny that fact.
Our God is not a dainty aesthete who considers politics and economics
subjects too crass or sordid for his notice. Neither is he a
capricious tyrant who has enjoined an order of distribution which
condemns retirees after a lifetime of toil to subsist on catfood while
parasitic sybarites titillate palates jaded by the most refined
achievements of the haute cuisine. It is men who have enjoined
this order in denial of his sovereignty, in defiance of his righteous
will.
The earth is the Lord's! To the biblical writers, this was no mere
platitude. They spelled out what it meant in concrete economic terms.
For them, it meant that the material universe which had been provided
as a storehouse of natural opportunity for the children of men was not
to be monopolized or despoiled or treated as speculative merchandise,
but was rather to be used reverently, and conserved dutifully, and,
above all, maintained as a source from which every man, by the
application of his labor, might sustain himself in decent comfort. It
was seen as an inalienable trust, which no individual or class could
legitimately appropriate so as to exclude others, and which no
generation could legitimately barter away.
The earth is the Lords! With the recognition of this principle comes
the recognition of the right of every man to the produce which the
earth has yielded to his efforts. As the Apostle Paul says in his
first letter to the Church at Corinth, if the ox has a right to a
share in the grain which it treads out, surely a human being must have
a right to the fruits of his labor. For the exercise of this right, he
is, of course, accountable to God. But as against the world, it holds.
To one who takes seriously, as I do, that insight about human nature
which the Church expresses in its doctrine of Original Sin, there can
be nothing self-evident about the rights of man. In the words of my
friend, Edmund A. Opitz, "the idea of natural rights is not the
kind of concept which has legs of its own to stand on; as a deduction
from religious premises it makes sense, otherwise not." The
French Revolution and its culmination in the Reign of Terror
demonstrated that humanistic assumptions afford no secure foundation
for the concept of human rights. That concept, for the Christian, can
be neither understood nor justified except in terms of what Lord Acton
so eloquently speaks of as "the equal claim of every man to be
unhindered in the fulfillment by man of duty to God" - a claim
which would be rendered nugatory by the Fall were it not for the
atoning work of Christ.
But I was not invited here to discuss theological subtleties. If you
care to pursue my treatment of this point, you can find it detailed at
length in my book, Imputed Rights. I was invited here to share
with you some of my thoughts about the moral and religious dimensions
of site value taxation. Yet this is what it comes down to: How can a
person be "unhindered in the fulfillment of duty to God" if
he be denied, on the one hand, fair access to nature, the raw material
without which there can be no wealth; and on the other, the full and
free ownership of his own labor and its earnings?
You who have studied the history of the Peasants' Revolt in sixteenth
century Germany know that in calling for the abolition of serfdom and
the restoration of the common lands, the peasants were simply voicing
demands which were "logically implied by Luther's doctrine of the
priesthood of all believers - that the service of God to which all the
faithful are elected requires, as I have said, access to the land and
its resources, and the free disposal of one's person and of the
guerdon of one's toil. Despite the excesses which accompanied this
rising, Luther's part in the suppression of a movement which stemmed
logically from his own teaching must always be a source of pain to
those of us who revere him for his spiritual genius and integrity.
The earth is the Lords! The same God who established the just
authority of governments has also in his providence ordained for them
a just source of revenue. Allow me to quote from Henry George:
... "In the great social fact that as population
increases, and improvements are made, and men progress in
civilization, the one thing that rises everywhere in value is land,
we may see a proof of the beneficence of the Creator. ...In a rude
state of society where there is no need for common expenditure,
there is no value attaching to land. The only value which attaches
there is to things produced by labor. But as civilization goes on,
as a division of labor takes place, as men come into centers, so do
the common wants increase and so does the necessity for public
revenue arise. And so in that value which attaches to land, not by
reason of anything the individual does, but by reason of the growth
of the community, is a provision, intended - we may safely say
intended - to meet that social want. Just as society grows, so do
the common needs grow, and so grows the value attaching to land -
the provided fund from which they can be supplied."
On another occasion, he wrote:
"The tax on land values is the most just and equal
of all taxes. It falls only 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."
And yet, my friends, in the topsy-turvy world in which we live, this
provided fund goes mainly into the pockets of "speculators and
monopolists, while the body politic meets its needs by extorting from
individual producers the fruits of honest toil. If ever there were any
doubt about the perversity of human nature, our present system of
taxation is the proof! Everywhere about us, we see the ironic
spectacle of the community penalizing the individual for his industry
and initiative, and taking away from him a share of that which he
produces, yet at the same time lavishing upon the non-producer
undeserved windfalls which it - the community -- produces. And, as
Winston Churchill put it, the unearned increment, the
socially-produced value of the land, is reaped by the speculator in
exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done. "The
greater the injury to society, the greater the reward".
We hear constantly a vast clamor against the abuse of welfare. I do
not for a moment condone such abuse. Yet I ask you, who is the biggest
swiller at the public trough? Is it the sluggard who refuses to seek
work when there is work available? Is it the slattern who generates
offspring solely for the sake of the allotment they command? Or is it
the man -- perhaps a civic leader and a pillar of his church - who
sits back, and with perfect propriety and respectability, collects
thousands and maybe even millions of dollars in unearned increments
created by the public as his reward for withholding land from those
who wish to put it to productive use. Talk about free enterprise! This
isn't free enterprise; this is a free ride.
But if that same person were to improve his site - if he were to use
it to beautify his neighborhood, or to provide goods for consumers and
jobs for workers, or housing for his fellow-townsmen - instead of
being treated as the public benefactor he had become, he would be
fined as if he were a criminal, in the form of heavier taxes. What
kind of justice is this, I ask you? How does it comport with the
Divine Plan, or with the notion of human rights?
The theme of human rights has been trumpeted by the current national
administration in its approach to foreign policy. Yet the
administration's rhetoric would have far more credibility if this
glaring anomaly did not exist at home. You here in the nation's
capital have a unique opportunity to help provide such credibility,
and in so doing, to make this federal city truly a city set upon a
hill, a model to the nation and to the world. Washington's official
motto is "Justitia Omnibus" -- Justice for All. You have it
in your power to see to it that these words represent something more
than just a pious hope.
Let me make this clear: Concupiscence, or the "profit motive"
if you will, is a well-nigh universal fact of human nature, and I have
no wish to suggest that the land monopolist or speculator has any
corner on it. Even when I speak of him as a parasite, this is not to
single him out for personal moral condemnation. He is not necessarily
any more greedy than the average run of people. As the late Sidney G.
Evans, whom some of us in this hall remember fondly, used to say: "If
you have to live under a corrupt system, it's better to be a
beneficiary than a victim of it." But the profit motive can be
channelled in ways which are socially desirable as well as in ways
which are socially destructive. Is it not our duty to do everything we
can to build an order without victims - one in which the profit motive
is put to use in such a way that everybody benefits?
I do not harbor the illusion that the millenium is going to be
ushered in by program of social betterment. My theological orientation
does not happen to be one which minimizes the stubbornness of man's
depravity. Yet to make the depth of human wickedness an alibi for
indifference to the demands of social justice is to ignore the will of
him who said:
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice 'roll down like waters,
And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
To some of you, the promotion of specific programs for social justice
is seen as part of the responsibility of the institutional church; to
others it is not. But all of us, I am sure, can agree that the
individual Christian (or Jew or Moslem, as the case may be), and in
particular the clergyman in his personal capacity, has a solemn moral
obligation to study the issues carefully, and then involve himself
strenuously in whatever social and political efforts his informed
conscience tells him best advance the cause of right.
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