Line Between Unjustly Rich, Poor is Erasable

Stan Frederiksen

[Reprinted from the Illinois Georgist, Vol.5, No.1, Winter 1993]

It's "in" to soak the rich and give handouts to the poor. But who are the rich? And who are the poor?

Aren't we ignoring basic justice? Who is enriched justly, who unjustly? And who's impoverished justly, who unjustly?

Let's consider:

1) The Rich

1.1) The Justly Rich

The justly rich are those who work and produce, and thus earn. They give full value for value received. Henry Ford made millions, and yet for every $285 an original customer paid him, he provided a $285 Ford. Both he and each customer were better off after every transaction because each had satisfied a previous unfulfilled desire.

1.2) The Unjustly Rich

The unjustly rich are those made wealthy without productive effort, by pocketing wealth produced by others. Illegally gained wealth (via theft, fraud, drug traffics or "Insider trading") is the most obvious.

But those unjustly enriched within the law are the most Insidious and the most scary. Most notable are the land speculators, who acquire unused or underused locations at low prices (or even for free, through government grants"), then sit on them watching their values escalate as the community builds up around them.

Think of It. The surrounding public creates the location values, then the title-holders pocket them without lifting a finger.

2) The Poor

2.1)The Justly Poor

The justly poor are those who "want It that way". Their poverty Is voluntary. (Witness the numbers of people who refuse to work productively, preferring to beg and otherwise follow poverty as their chosen lifestyle.) Leave them alone. It's their "right to choose".

2.2)The Unjustly Poor

The unjustly poor are those honest and able-bodied who want to produce and earn, but cant find jobs or have no access to land on which they could exert their labor and eke out a living from the soil.

The plight of the landless Is due to the fact that alt of the earth from which they could produce is "owned" -- some, of course, by people who produce wealth from it, and thus earn. But vast areas are held out of use by land speculators whose Idea of "earning" consists simply of doing nothing at all.

There are "gray" areas, of course. A person is entitled to all he/she can earn by working/producing. But it's obscene to let the same person, who also owns unused locations, pocket the unearned wealth from escalating location values produced by the surrounding community.

The community is robbed not only of the location values it produces, but also, through confiscatory taxation of large chunks of what it collectively produces through honest labor.

Let's design our public revenue system to erase the ever widening gap between the unjustly rich and the unjustly poor. We can accomplish this by ensuring that Individuals keep ail the products of their labor, and the community keeps, as public revenue, what the public produces as location values. This could replace all penalty-type taxes.

We can start by adjusting our revenue system to permit collecting public revenue via raising charges for owning valuable locations, while at the same time reducing (eventually to zero) the confiscatory "taxes" on buildings and improvements.

After that, we can continue to raise charges on locations, as necessary to meet budget requirements, and gradually eliminate penalty-type "taxes" on Income, gasoline, all sales and everything else.