Rivadavia's Idea Sprouts Forth In Australia

C. Villalobos Dominguez

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, July-August 1927. Translated from Mundo Argentina, Buenos Aires]

Canberra: A city where all will be able to live and work without being overloaded with the heavy burden of taxes and all will be able to have a house of their own without having to buy the land.

IN this month of May, which is consecrated to the memory of the birth of the Argentine nation, the most positive tribute for the perpetuation of one of its most outstanding creators has been provided, not by Argentines, but by men of another country and another race; to be exact, by our antipodeans, in the Australian continent.

There, not with flattering words, but with enduring deeds, on the 9th of May was inaugurated the Federal Parliament Building and in the act celebrated the founding of a great city, which will be the capital of a great democratic nation like our own, but showing itself to be more capable, as we shall see, of real and transcendental progress.

The Australian nation, formed of autonomous states, was constituted in the year 1901, and thus arose the necessity of giving to it a national capital as seat of the federal government. It was considered advisable to found a new city, just as was done here in the case of the city of La Plata, in order to provide a capital for the province of Buenos Aires.

On studying the best way of organizing the economic bases for the new metropolis, the Australian authorities, in harmony with advanced science and enlightened patriotism, decided to establish, as regards the ground upon which it was to stand, a system of leasing which turns out to be similar if not exactly the same as the system which was conceived and implanted with success in our own country by our great Argentine patriot, Bernardino Rivadavia.

The incipient civic culture of our country in those first days of its national life was unable to appreciate sufficiently the extraordinary gift that was bestowed upon it. It could not resist the reactionary movement under Rosas, the tyrant, which annulled or postponed this and so many other advanced reforms.

But a great and true thought never dies. Soon or late, it revives. And it is with reflective emotion that we must observe the marvelous fact that, on the other side of the globe and a century removed in time, there arises in full vigor the same ideas which Rivadavia and his friends fervently upheld as the guarantee of the future greatness and happiness of the Argentine people.

Rivadavia's idea consisted, briefly, in affirming the principle that the land of the country must not be sold to anyone, foreigner or native; that said land must remain the common property of all men who at any given time live there. It also established that each man can use in any way any portion he may need in order to till it and occupy it with his dwelling, factory or business, the only condition being that of paying into the common treasury the economic rent attaching to the portion he occupies.

This fundamental idea and principle, inculcated in the teachings of the learned French physiocrats and the illustrious ministers of Charles II, Campomanes and Floridablanca, was completed by the enlightened intuition of Bernardino Rivadavia and shaped into a practical procedure for carrying it out, utilizing the advantageous position presented by the Republic, as a new country where at that time almost all of the land was public property, not having been sold, save to a very small extent, to private individuals.

By a special law decreed in 1826, the ancient Roman system of "enfiteusis" was adopted, but improved by an innovation as admirable as it was fundamental and fruitful. Instead of handing over the land to private individuals for a long and indefinite period and at a fixed rate or rental, it was conveyed to him at a variable rental. That is to say, for a term equally long and undefined, but subject to revaluation every ten years, after the first twenty years.

In this way the State accompanied step by step the natural course of rising values and in the name of the common interest, collected for the community the increased rental values which are the fruit, not of the effort of the individual, but of the general progress and activities of the community.

The ideal of Rivadavia may in concrete be described as creating a nation in which all citizens would be equally landlords, a nation in which there would be no taxes (since the rent of the common land would more than suffice for the public expenses), a nation, finally, in which all the inhabitants would be rich, since the abovementioned economic bases would make easy for all the access to the land (which is the primary, inevitable and constant basis of all industrial processes), and also make easy production and consumption, with all due respect for the private ownership by each individual of goods produced by himself.

That accurately conceived plan, which was so lament ably defeated, is what has just been revived, even though only locally, in the new city of Canberra. There the ground is not sold to anybody; it is given in lease for ninety nine years, on a rental or rate fixed by public auction, said rental or rate being valid for twenty years, renewable every ten years after on a new valuation. Upon this economic basis, which has already been tested tentatively in the neighboring city of Adelaide and in many other Australian and New Zealand communities, there is no doubt that the new capital will develop extraordinarily, along the lines of the admirable plan prepared by the architect, Mr. Walter Burley Griffin, who incidentally is an old disciple of Henry George.

The analogy between the economic system implanted in Canberra and that of Rivadavia is complete, with the exception of minor executive details.

The genesis of this innovation did not arise in Australia from the direct study of Rivadavia's plan (although that is familiar to Georgists all over the world), but rather to the campaign which the great North American economist, Henry George, carried on there about the year 1880. (Incidentally it may be stated that, at that very time, the Uruguayan, Dr. Andres Lamas, was composing in Buenos Aires his splendid work upon the Agrarian Law of Rivaavia.)

Nevertheless, in the profound teachings of Henry George there is no trace of plagiarism, as might be supposed. On the contrary, the doctrines of George sprang spontaneously from his intelligence, in the natural evolution of his own observations and reasoning, without any acquaintance with the Rivadavian precedents. Others also, in other countries, have arrived close to the same solution. And this is comprehensible; because, when related facts are found incarnate in reality, it is not astonishing that several thinkers should discover and formulate them in scientific laws or practical measures of action. As Henry George once said, it is not impossible that, from widely different observation points, two men looking at the sky should discover the same star.

Looking upon the soil of his country, and filled with an intense desire to discover its secret possibilities for the luxuriant growth of the human flora, Rivadavia and then George saw the truth. The former established a plan for preserving the common property where it already existed; the latter, to restore it to common property when, as with us it happens, the ignorance and carelessness of past govern ments committed the frightful folly of alienating it.

Other men with good intentions have tried to remedy the grave evils of social injustice under the inspiration of false European doctrines, without realizing that here in America they had at hand a solution that was higher and truer. As Lamas well understood (and experience has confirmed his opinion) the modern pseudoscience of political economy in Europe, whether posing as conservative or advanced, cannot be accepted as a proper and safe guide.

Down through the years the message of those great men reaches us, preserved and disseminated by the prodigious invention of the printing press. The greatest mission of the present generation is to bring it to pass. And the example of Canberra, a decisive experiment of worldwide importance, is a call to study and to action on the part of all men of heart and intellect, since our glorious constitution and the providential Law of Saenz Pena place within the hands of the people the possibility of bringing it to pass, with ease, in order and in peace.

What the people have first to learn is to hold as treason to the nation the sale to private persons of another inch of Argentine land still remaining public property.