Land, Labor, and Wealth
Albert Jay Nock
[The following excerpts come from The Freeman
and its later successor, The New Freeman. Although these
writings are not attributed to a single author, many, if not most,
were written by Albert Jay Nock during his tenure as editor. These
excerpts were compiled in 1942 by Ellen Winsor and Rebecca Winsor
Evans in a book with the above title, published by The Caxton
Printers, Ltd., Caldwell, Idaho]
INDUSTRIAL exploitation can not possibly take place until people are
expropriated from the land; and after they are reimpropriated, it can
not possibly continue. The best and simplest mode of reimpropriation
is surely by the confiscation of economic rent, one hundred cents in
the dollar.
Here, then, seems to be a prospect of what labour really
wants-freedom from industrial exploitation. . . . Labour
unquestionably has the power everywhere to enforce its will, if it has
a will. So far, it has acted not like an economic organization bent on
economic change, but like a political organization bent upon
negotiable superficialities. If labour in any country should inform
itself t6 the point of becoming economically-minded and should enforce
upon the State a simple programme consisting of the confiscation of
every penny of economic rent, no tariffs or any form of taxation upon
labour or the products of labour-freedom of production and freedom of
exchange -- one demonstration of direct action to achieve such a
programme would be enough. It could then hang the strike-weapon over
the fireplace for the grandchildren in the happier days to come to
look at in wonderment that any such awkward and clumsy thing had ever
to be used.
The Freeman, Vol.11, p.150
IN THE popular mind, the whole complex struggle for and against the
economic reorganization of society has come to be regarded as
primarily a matter of strikes and lock-outs, of war to the death
between "capital", regarded as the employer, and "labour",
the employee. Right or wrong, this concept rules the conduct of many
millions of persons, and nowhere is it held in higher regard than
among those engaged in attacking and defending the present order.
In view of the actual conditions of life where labour is most highly
organized, it is, perhaps, only natural that the great forces now
taking the offensive should look upon the employer as "the enemy".
Eyes of no more than ordinary keenness can see here and there an
employer who wears fine raiment, rolls about in a fine car, and lives
in a fine house; and any soapbox-orator can supply the information
that besides the visible employers who work-sometimes-in their
factories, there is no end of invisible ones, who have never seen
these factories, but who still manage somehow to live in grand and
glorious style as a result of the work done in them. The reasons for
this contrast in well-being between employers and employees are
theoretical and obscure. But whether the worker is well or poorly
paid, the contrast itself is obvious, insistent, and provocative of
antagonism....
It would seem then that the worker has come by his convictions
naturally enough, as a result of his every-day experience; and the
business of attack and defence is about what one would expect it to be
under the circumstances. The employees get all they can; the employers
keep all they can; and whoever tries to turn attention from the matter
immediately in hand receives small thanks for his pains. Suppose the
workers in a copper-smelter have gone on strike for higher wages; it
is difficult, then, to persuade them that their real oppressor is not
the owner of the plant, but the owner of the economic rent of the
copper-mine which supplies the plant with ore. And, perhaps, it is
even harder to convince the strikers that they have interests in
common with their employer, as against the monopolist of raw material.
It may be pointed out that a heavy tax is laid upon the employer,
while the monopolist escapes almost scot-free; that the employer's
profits depend, in part at least, upon his own exertions, while the
monopolist's returns keep rolling in, irrespective of his own efforts,
as population increases, and the demand for access to available
resources of nature increases likewise; that these resources were not
created by anybody's efforts, and ought therefore to be everybody's
heritage; that a properly administered fiscal system would take for
the people the economic values created by the can; the employers keep
all they can; and whoever tries to turn attention from the matter
immediately in hand receives small thanks for his pains. Suppose the
workers in a copper-smelter have gone on strike for higher wages; it
is difficult, then, to persuade them that their real oppressor is not
the owner of the plant, but the owner of the economic rent of the
copper-mine which supplies the plant with ore. And, perhaps, it is
even harder to convince the strikers that they have interests in
common with their employer, as against the monopolist of raw material.
It may be pointed out that a heavy tax is laid upon the employer,
while the monopolist escapes almost scot-free; that the employer's
profits depend, in part at least, upon his own exertions, while the
monopolist's returns keep rolling in, irrespective of his own efforts,
as population increases, and the demand for access to available
resources of nature increases likewise; that these resources were not
created by anybody's efforts, and ought therefore to be everybody's
heritage; that a properly administered fiscal system would take for
the people the economic values created by the people, set competitive
production free, and open all natural resources for full
exploitation-to the great profit of employers and employees alike.
The Freeman, Vol.11, p.220
How in the world can labour, intensely preoccupied with [the]
minutiae of trade-unionism, be made to see the simple and indubitable
truth that economic rent can and will dislocate and devour socialized
industry just as handily as it now dislocates and devours capitalist
industry; that if economic rent be confiscated, the relations of
labour and capital will adjust themselves, and that until it be
confiscated, no power on earth can adjust them?
The Freeman, Vol.1, p.364
THE REMEDY of the future is a universal, not a class, remedy. It is
the change in fundamental economics that will keep up wages by pulling
down the bars to opportunity. This will provide more jobs than there
are men. There will be no need of unionism as we now know it. This can
only be done by the unlocking of the earth's resources to free
utilization by all who are willing to work. Untax everything but the
land values created by everybody and held by a few. Let the only title
to land be that of use. There will be no land then held out of use for
speculation on other men's need of it. Rent will not eat up wages. An
economic equilibrium will be established. There will be no strikes nor
threats of strikes; and there will be no plutocracy owning men's jobs
and charging for access to them. There will be no labour-question
because there will be no land-question.
William Marion Reedy quoted in The Freeman,
Vol.1, p.603
CAPITAL
THAT PART of wealth which is used to facilitate the production of
more wealth.
The Freeman, Vol.1, p.148
IT IS ONLY when associated with privilege that it shares the
advantages of monopoly.
The Freeman, Vol. IV, p.222
WEALTH
LABOR applied to natural resources produces wealth.
The Freeman, Vol.1, p.148
INDUSTRY has for its object the production of wealth, and in the
production of wealth there are three factors. The first is natural
resources, which are the pure gift of nature; no one made them, no one
can increase the supply of them; and all wealth, of whatever kind, is
produced from them. The second factor is labor. Wealth can not be
produced in any other way than by the application of labor to natural
resources. The third is capital; and capital is that portion of wealth
which is devoted to the production of more wealth.
The New Freeman, Vol.11, p.389
ECONOMIC RENT
THE SINGLE TAX ... is a tax upon the site-value of land; not upon its
use-value or its superficial content. All other forms of taxation,
direct or indirect, are ab6lished. There is no tax upon industry or
the products of industry, i. e., upon wealth, or, specifically, upon
that portion of wealth which is used to facilitate the production of
more wealth, i. e., capital; or, again specifically upon labour. There
is no tax of any kind upon enterprise.
The Freeman, Vol. IV, p.247
EVERY community in the country has a communal asset that would take
care of its taxes, namely: the site-value of land. Let people freely
hold and keep, buy, sell and bequeath, all of the land they like; but
let them pay to the community the full rental value of that land,
instead of putting it in their pockets. One must speak with due
deference in calling attention to the errors of the Physiocrats, even
in the matters of terminology, but it was a mistake for them to call
this plan l'impot unique, or the single tax. The essence of
this plan is that under it a community does not live on taxes at all,
not even on one single tax. It lives exclusively on rent, the rent of
its natural resources; and the rent would be determined under that
plan, just as it now is, by a landlord's valuation based on what
amounts to free competitive bidding.
The Freeman, Vol. VIII, p.2
IT IS a little difficult to discuss relative degrees of inequity in
income-taxes, since they are all bad, being founded upon the entirely
erroneous principle that the citizen should be forced to contribute
toward the expense of government in proportion to his ability to pay.
This is a plausible theory, but one for which there is no
justification in natural law, since taxes are assumed to be paid for
services rendered, and it by no means follows that the recipient of a
large salary, or a large income from investments, is given more
protection or other governmental service than his neighbour with a
much smaller income. So when it is urged that earned incomes should be
taxed more lightly than the income from a business or investment, it
is competent for the defenders of the income tax to show that either
method satisfies the demand for equity in apportioning taxes. If taxes
on earned incomes are unsound, so are taxes on income from business
or investments, since they are revenues derived from earned and saved
capital. The plea for lighter taxes on earned incomes leads clearly to
the imposition of all taxes on the only form of income that is really
unearned, namely: that derived from the ownership of land, including
all natural resources properly coming within that term, where the
income is paid for the privilege of living upon, or drawing materials
from, the earth whose ownership enables one set of men to exact
tribute from their less fortunate brothers.
The Freeman, Vol. VIII, pp.321-22
TAXATION of the land-values is simply a means of using ground-rent
for the benefit of the whole population instead of leaving it in
private hands, where it acts as the fundamental monopoly and fruitful
cause of the conflict between capital and labour. ...It would at once
put an end to speculation in the land on which homes are built,
business is conducted and farms are operated; that it would destroy
the present monopoly in natural resources such as water-power, oil and
minerals, forests and grazing lands; that it would assure the
wage-earner the full product of his labour by providing him with
alternative employment in the use of land. Being free, he would have
no need of laws to enforce collective bargaining, the eight-hour day,
insurance and pensions, and the other kinds of legal protection that
bulk so large in the mind accustomed to servitude. Having abolished
monopoly, it would be neither just nor necessary to plunder private
incomes and inheritances, or to tax industry. The ground-rent would
suffice for the just needs of a government which respected elementary
human rights. In the words of Sir John Macdonell:
We vex the poor with indirect taxes, we squeeze
the rich, we ransack heaven and earth to find some new impost
palatable or tolerable, and all the time these hardships are going on,
neglected or misapplied there have lain at our feet a multitude of
resources ample enough for all just common wants, growing as they
grow, and so marked out that we may say they form Nature's budget....
The Freeman, Vol.1, pp.606-07
EVERY improvement of the soil, every railway and road, every
bettering of the general condition of society, every facility given
for production, every stimulus supplied to consumption, raises rent.
The landowner sleeps but thrives. He alone, among all the recipients
in the distribution of products, owes everything to the labour of
others, contributes nothing of his own.
Thorold Rogers in The Freeman, Vol.1,
p.206
THE capitalistic system arose from the expropriation of the mass of
the people from the soil. That is the fundamental fact pointed out by
Marx in "Das Kapital," but as he does it in the last
chapter, most of his disciples have never discovered it and are
unaware that he has pointed it out at all. That was the way by which
the worker was deprived of his economic alternative, and the worker
without an alternative is in a hopeless position. Strikes and
industrial revolutions take place with increasing frequency, bringing
only an illusion to the landless, to the expropriated masses who have
been thrust into the labour market, there to compete with one another
and depress wages. These strikes and revolutions have value of the
kind that we have often remarked, and are not to be deprecated; but
otherwise they are futile. The only soun4 beginning is by first
undoing the wrong that Marx referred to, by dealing scientifically
with the land-question. The labour-question is the land-question.
...Not until this economic lesson is thoroughly learned can any
effective reform of industry take place. It must be clearly understood
that private ownership of economic rent is the root of all the present
industrial discontent. No one has put this quite so clearly as
Tolstoy:
It is sufficient to understand all the
criminality, the sinfulness, of the situation in this respect, in
order to understand that until this atrocity, continually being
committed by the owners of the land, shall cease, no political reforms
will give freedom and welfare to the people, but that, on the
contrary, only the emancipation of the majority of the people from
that land-slavery in which they are now held can render political
reforms, not a plaything and a tool for personal aims in the hands of
politicians, but the real expression of the will of the people.
Neither political nor industrial reforms will give freedom to the
people.... There is only one thing to be done first, and this is to
re-impropriate the mass of the people upon the soil by the
confiscation of economic rent. Mere haphazard and superficial
revolutionary activity, whatever its collateral value -- and it is
bound to be relatively slight -- is sterile.
The Freeman, Vol.11, p.30
MILLIONS of unemployed people are seeking employment while billions
of dollars worth of goods remain unused. We suffer from
underconsumption not from overproduction, but how can the workers of
our nation buy back the goods they produce and pay landlords annual
land rent of thirteen thousand million dollars for nothing? *
(Landlords do not provide land.) The payment of that tremendous land
rent to landlords for nothing leaves the workers thirteen thousand
million dollars short of their purchasing power and that is why
factories are clogged with goods, business men fail and millions of
unemployed people are forced to compete for the jobs of others.
The New Freeman, Vol.11, pp.17-18
WE HAVE always been interested in farming, for two reasons. First,
farming is, in point of sheer size, the greatest industry in the
country. Second, unless our view is wholly wrong, all other industries
depend upon it. To keep industries going, people must be kept going;
to keep people going, they must first of all be fed; their food must
come from the land; and the only way to get food out of the land is by
farming. Hence it has always seemed to us that farming is the primary
industry, and that unless farming goes well, no other industry can go
well.
We have long noticed too, that farming does not go well, and we
suspected a reason for it beyond those generally assigned; namely,
that the farming business is too much mixed up with what is
euphemistically called the real-estate business. Land, bearing as it
does a monopoly-value, is priced too high for the industry. The farmer
can pay either set of charges on the industry -- his capital-charge in
the land, or the rest of his fixed charges -- but when he tries to do
both, the industry breaks down. Either he would be a farmer, as Abe
Potash might say, or either he would be a real-estater; but he can't
be both at the same time without one interest or the other going by
the board. Our notion is that the farmer, by and large, has been quite
extensively using the farming-business to float the real-estate
business, and that thus the farming-business has gone to pot. Further,
too, we have thought that as the farming-business is the more
important and fundamental of the two, any possible interference or
readjustment should be directed against the real-estate business; and
therefore we suggested as a practical and just mode of readjustment, a
breaking up of the private ownership of economic rent. The country can
get along very comfortably without this private monopoly, but we see
no way for it to get along at all without agriculture; and quite
clearly the two enterprises are at a point of development where
further accommodation seems impossible.
The Freeman, Vol.11, p.510
WAGES
WAGES are determined, like the price of all other commodities, by the
law of supply and demand.
The Freeman, Vol. V, p.323
THE ONLY right method of determining wages is the natural method. Put
the natural resources of the country in free competition with industry
in the labor-market, and the wage problem would disappear.
The Freeman, Vol. VI, p.217
INTEREST
THE JUSTIFICATION of interest is twofold: first, it pays for the
depreciation of capital; second, it pays for the element of time saved
by the use of capital in the process of production.
The New Freeman, Vol.11, p.390
CREDIT
A DEVICE for facilitating the exchange of wealth. But where does all
wealth come from but from the land, produced therefrom by the common
enterprise of labor and capital. Hence, if the source of wealth be
freed from monopoly-control, and the exchange of wealth be freed
likewise, any device or convenience for facilitating this exchange
could not possibly be improperly controlled.
The Freeman, Vol. IV, p.247
WE DO NOT see, since the land is the final basis of credit, how it is
possible to effect more than a slight and temporary disturbance of
credit-monopoly without breaking up land-value monopoly, and we
suspect that the reaction from that slight temporary disturbance would
bring about a last state worse than the first. Moreover, suppose one
could deal effectively with credit-monopoly, land-value monopoly would
still be left and would, as it always does, swallow every benefit
accruing from the redistribution of credit. On the other hand, with
the suppression of land-value monopoly, credit-monopoly disintegrates
of itself, it must disintegrate, there is no way to keep it
up. But credit-monopoly is so much the immediate thing, the obvious
and apparent thing, that it is hard, we acknowledge, to take one's
eyes off it long enough 'to examine the foundation that it rests on.
The Freeman, Vol.11, p.484
TARIFF
THE COMMON forms of privilege are tariffs, private land-monopoly,
concessions, franchises, patents. Each of these is a governmental
license to rob the public, i.e., to appropriate the earnings of other
people's labor without compensation; and the more lucrative of these
licenses, next to private land-monopoly, is a tariff. In a letter
written to a Massachusetts Congressman in 1908, and quoted in the New
York
World of March 13, Charles Francis Adams... uses language
quite as explicit as ours about the nature of a tariff. He says:
Speaking after the fashion of men,
they (i.e. those who seek tariffs or profit by them) are either
thieves or hogs. I myself belong to the former class. I am a tariff
thief, and I have a license to steal. It bears the broad seal of the
United States. I stole under it yesterday. I am stealing under it
to-day. I propose to steal under it to-morrow. The Government has
forced me into this position, and I both do and shall take advantage
of it. The other class comes under the hog category; that is, they
rush, squealing and struggling to the Great Washington Protection
Trough, and with all four feet in it, they proceed to gobble the
swill. …To this class I do not belong. ...I would like to see
every protective schedule swept out of existence, my own included.
The New Freeman, Vol.1, p.55
PRIVILEGE
OPPENHEIMER has produced an hypothesis which, whether it can be
sustained or not, throws considerable light on the vagaries of
political leaders. By tracing the origin of the State he comes to the
conclusion that political governments were formed for the purpose of
protecting privileged classes in the exploitation of the producers of
wealth. The surplus wealth originally surrendered at the point of the
sword, was later handed over more or less willingly as a tribute to
military pr6tectors. The political organism has undergone important
modifications in the course of time, but it has developed along the
lines of its own nature and has continued to function for the benefit
of the groups enjoying special privileges. It is still a compact power
composed of statesmen, supported by the army, the law, and the Church,
holding in check the popular impulse for freedom in the processes of
production and trade.
In order to stop the secular spoliation of the many by the few, it is
necessary first to understand the nature of the privileges upon which
the whole system rests. This brings us back to the economic problem,
so simple in its elements, so complicated in its ramifications. The
wealth which is the subject of contention is produced by human effort
applied to the raw materials of nature. Taken from the producers at
first by naked violence, and then by due process of law under slavery,
it is now abstracted by the more subtle and concealed method of
economic pressure, and with less risk to the exploiter. He finds the
new method far more effective than the lash, and is relieved of
responsibility for the lives of the workers who, as a rule, are
personally unknown to him. The worst victims of the system come to be
either a charge upon the tax-payer or are forced to resort to private
charity. ...
The radical analyses the social problem, reducing it to its simplest
terms. He believes that he has discovered in legal privilege the germ
of the malady which afflicts civilization. He points to the land as
the common storehouse and workshop of the race, and seeks to establish
justice at the basis of life, believing that a proper understanding
between men obliged to exchange their services with each other in the
effort to turn natural resources into wealth will make superfluous the
swollen powers of government.
The Freeman, Vol.111, pp.77-78
THERE IS reason to believe that 'the tax on the use of land is in
even a greater ratio than five to one as compared with the tax on the
privilege of holding. ...
It has been estimated by a committee of the Boston Chamber of
Commerce that in 1920, the taxes, municipal, State and Federal, for
Massachusetts amounted to $457 million. But the tax on land exclusive
of buildings in that year was only about $48 million, and since a
portion of that land-tax was laid on improvements other than
buildings, something should properly be deducted from the above figure
in order to arrive at the actual tax levied on the value of sites
without regard to use.
One need look no farther than the above facts for the cause of
recurring business depression, of unemployment accompanied by low
wages, of poverty, disease and crime. Throughout the country industry
and enterprise are loaded down with taxes and restrictions in order
that those who control opportunity may escape with a trifling payment
for the privilege. Why rail against profiteers and monopolists when we
deliberately encourage monopoly and speculation by not requiring
adequate payment for the holding of opportunities? Why break our
hearts over depression in business and all the horrors that go with
it, when we not only allow the opportunities indispensable to business
to be withheld from use but, in addition, ruin business with the
penalties which we impose upon it? Under the circumstances, the fact
that industry accomplishes what it does, proves not only the
remarkable ability of individuals and groups to make headway under the
most difficult conditions, but also the equally remarkable stupidity
of the people as a whole in permitting such difficult conditions to
exist.
Unemployment will remain and business depressions will continue to
occur until those who own the opportunities to produce are required to
pay adequately for the privilege, whether they utilize their
opportunities or not. Then the power to forestall opportunity in order
to get an unearned share of the product of industry will cease to
exist.
The Freeman, Vol. V, pp.538-39
THE TOTAL industrial values of the United States are estimated at 130
billion dollars [1920]. The total value of one form of privilege alone
-- the private ownership of economic rent -- is about the same amount.
The amount of Federal taxation that this 130 billion dollars' worth of
privilege bears is approximately only 600 million dollars; while the
amount of Federal taxation borne by the 130 billion dollars' worth of
industry comes to four billion dollars. From the standpoint of
capital, capital invested in industry, this is a criminal outrage; and
capital is under the obligation that injustice always imposes,
precisely the same obligation that is imposed upon labour, to defend
itself against it. ...Why, then, should capital invested in such
industry submit to this monstrous and crippling exaction of four
billion dollars upon its legitimate thrift and enterprise, while
privilege-and only one form of privilege at that-in value equal to
itself, gets off with a paltry 600 million?
The Freeman, Vol.1, p.197
MONOPOLY
MAN, being a land-animal, must have access to the source of his
subsistence in order to produce from the land, through his labour,
those things which are necessary to his existence. When certain
individuals, under the protection of a Government organized for that
purpose, can monopolize land and thereby fix the terms upon which man
shall have access thereto, then the people thus excluded are in a
condition of economic slavery; and until monopoly, with the political
institutions of its making, is done away with, the evils of this
slavery will afflict the race; easy living and "conspicuous waste"
of wealth for the few, poverty and conspicuous deprivation for the
many. The problem, then, as we see it, is how to free the source of
man's subsistence from monopoly, and restore to him his natural right
of access thereto.
The Freeman, Vol. IV, p.222
SOMETHING comes in as an interference with the free action of labor
and capital upon natural resources, and as an interference with the
normal relations between these two factors in production. That
something is monopoly. Natural resources, unfortunately, can be
monopolized; labor and capital can be forestalled and kept out of free
access to them, and this is done by means of a purely legal or
legislated ownership, which has no semblance of right or justice.
Labor and capital therefore must pay the monopolist for access to
natural resources; and this means that production must bear a third
charge, in addition to wages and interest, which is rent; and rent is
fixed always at the maximum that the monopolist can get.
The monopolist, qua monopolist, makes no investment of any
kind in the processes of production. He invests no labor; that is
clear; and it is equally clear that he invests no capital. He does
nothing whatever for production except levy a tribute on it Therefore,
since everybody is conscious of an economic crisis and thinking up
ways to deal with it to the advantage of both labor and capital, we
suggest as a first step the abolition of this utterly unproductive
charge upon both. As we see it, production is getting sway-backed
under the increasing burden of rising wages, rising interest and
rising rent. We want labor and capital, the two active factors in
production, to get their full share on the ground of simple justice
... they both invest, put something in. If something must go by the
board, and apparently it must, we suggest that it should be the
intruding and unproductive element, the mere parasite, who does not
invest, puts nothing in, and whose title to monopoly is purely
law-made and exists in contravention of every principle of justice and
natural right.
We think that if monopoly were abolished and the burden of rent were
removed from industry, the disagreements between capital and labor
would pretty well subside automatically. We are aware that many people
will not agree with this -- the followers of Marx, for example, who,
if we interpret them correctly, believe that private ownership of the
tools of production is quite as unfair to labor as private ownership
of the source of production. If we had sufficient space, we think we
could make a good case for the view that capital is never a menace to
labor-which is to say that it is never in a position to levy tribute
on labor-save in those cases where it is a direct beneficiary of
monopoly in the form of tariffs, franchises, patents, or ownership of
natural resources, or, where it enjoys a fortuitous advantage from
monopoly, as when the overcrowding of the labor-market brought about
by expropriation enables the capitalist. to pay a wage determined not
by the producing power of the~ laborer but by the number of his
competitors.
The New Freeman, Vol.11, p.390
THE VIEW of this paper is not that the capitalist is a protector of
the workingman ... but that he is rather a co-partner with him in the
business of production, that the tools of the capitalist help the
labourer to achieve a greater output than could be produced without
them, and that if the labourer fails to receive his just share of the
wealth produced, it is not the fault of the capitalist, but of the
monopolist who is the real enemy of both capital and labour, enjoying
the legal privilege of taking toll from them for the right to use the
earth.
The capitalist has won an evil reputation partly because the word is
used as an epithet without regard for its true meaning, and partly
because the same individual is often both capitalist and monopolist. A
compositor going into business on his own account with a press and a
few fonts of type w6uld be both a labourer and a capitalist, but not a
monopolist. He can not do business, however, until he has made terms
with a landlord who names a price that includes, besides payment for
the use of the building (capital), a charge for the use of the land
which ought to belong equally to everyone. Both printer and landlord
in their capacity of capitalists are co-operating with the workmen in
an effort to increase the production of wealth; but the landlord as a
monopolist of the limited area suitable for printers, has first call
on the proceeds.
The Freeman, Vol.1, pp.367-68
I SUPPOSE that in the end, all human affairs come down to an economic
law, just as the symphony is reducible to the mathematics of
vibrations. But inasmuch as we still do lip-service to morality, is it
not about time to begin to get ready to admit that nothing like a
decent Way of Life can be founded on a system where land can be held
as a means of taxing one's fellow-men? If one prefers, one can
calculate the untold billions that are today drained off in this
manner, and the far vaster sums that have been ploughed into the price
of everything on earth. I prefer to think of the whole thing as a
gigantic absurdity. The sums to which I refer are colossal. They stand
as evidence of what is to me the most debasing practice that man has
yet devised for continuously enslaving his kind. The act of taking
them is so shamefully unprincipled, and ill-mannered that nothing but
human devilment and chicanery can be expected to follow in its train.
The New Freeman, Vol.11, p.564
ECONOMIC power was always the real power, ever since the world began;
but as long as people could be kept afraid of kings and Constitutions
and Federal courts, their minds were pretty effectively taken off the
scent that led to the centre of real power. Now that their fear has
been so generally transferred to bankers, it shows they have at least
struck that scent. That is the important thing; they have come to
understand that those who control the economic destiny of a people
control not only the people but the kings, Constitutions, courts and
all the rest. Now that people at large are on that scent, we, for our
part, are not anxious about its leading them straight. They will pause
at the bankers awhile, sniff at them and worry them a little, but
presently they will see that the trail leads beyond the bankers,
beyond credit-monopoly, and they will follow it until they reach its
end in natural-resource monopoly.
The Freeman, Vol.11, p.484
THE HISTORY of the decline in home-ownership in this land of the
free-now a statistical fact - is founded squarely on land monopoly and
the other monopolies engendered thereby. These monopolies now ramify
throughout the entire economic structure. They have been capitalized,
not on any real value, but upon the earning-power derived from
monopoly. This inflation in the form of land-rents, stocks, bonds and
price-fixing, is called "water". The amount of it is
enormous. savings banks and life-insurance companies invest their
assets, the savings of millions of people, in these capitalized
monopolies, while small investors are induced to put their savings
there as well. Thus it is extremely difficult to dislodge the chief
beneficiaries because of the host of small fry who, with
interest-payments and dividends, are fooled into thinking that they
are getting a little slice, too. It is practically impossible to
invest money without accepting the principle of monopoly. To attack
this principle by competitive methods and low prices is suicide. The
monopolist managers will break such a man in a twinkling; they have no
alternative.
The Freeman, Vol. VI, p.78
NATIONALIZING the land, as in Russia, assumes ownership to rest with
the State, whether representative of the people or no; merely a
transfer of individual ownership to a group ownership called the
State, whose powers are delegated or, as in most instances, usurped.
Now ownership of land by the individual is ethically untenable. How,
then, may the individual delegate to the State powers or rights which
he does not possess? Nationalization therefore leaves the individual
in a bad fix; for once ownership is admitted, the owner may determine
the condition of use. Monopoly is set up, and where are you, if you
are a dissenter?
As rent is a payment for the use of something not owned, the State,
no more than the individual, can own land. Rent is a payment to one's
fellows for the privilege of exclusive occupancy. One can move off if
one does not like it to land where no rent arises and no monopoly
exists-one is free. Such rent as may arise belongs to the community
which creates it-not to the State.
The New Freeman, Vol.11, p.65
HAVE labour and capital any natural ground of quarrel; and is that
ground sufficient to account for the phenomena before us? Let us see.
Labour applied to natural resources produces wealth; capital is that
part or portion of wealth which is used to facilitate the production
of more wealth. With free access to natural resources, the passive
factor in production, it does not seem that there should be much
disharmony between the two active factors, labour and capital; in
fact, it is hard to see how there could be any essential disharmony.
But there is no such free access. Natural resources are held under
monopolist control, and access to them is legally shut off. This
control is called privilege. It has nothing to do with capital, being
an entirely different thing. Now let the public consider, first,
whether it is possible, even by magic or miracle, to heal the
dislocations between labour and capital until their free co-operation
upon the passive factor is restored; second, how many of those
dislocations would automatically heal themselves if this free
co-operation were restored, if privilege were abolished; third,
whether, in view of such conclusions as may follow, the first and
foremost thing for labour and capital alike to go at, is the
abrogation of privilege. If the public will give these three questions
a competent consideration, we shall have gotten a very long way with
our industrial difficulties.
Labour has always been a distinct class, privilege and capital have
never been distinct classes, unfortunately. The owners of privilege
have been largely also the owners of capital. Thus it is, certainly,
that capitalists have been unable or unwilling to see that privilege
is just as detrimental to their interests as capitalists, as it is to
the interest of labour. Thus it is, probably, that the words "capital"
and "capitalism" have generally taken on an objectionable
and misleading significance and that capitalism has been blamed for
the sins of privilege. Capitalism never produced the economic system
which forced men into a congested labour market where wages were borne
down to the subsistence level. It could not have done it. The
encroachments of privilege, expressed through the Enclosures Acts,
were what did it. When the factory-system was introduced in England,
it found whole hordes of miserable beings reduced to the
starvation-point by being driven off the land, ready and waiting for
it. Land-enclosure depopulated the countryside and drove the people
into the towns and villages, full seventy years before the inventions
of Watt and Arkwright changed the mode of industry. Capital and
capitalism do not maintain this system now; they could not. If we had
a distinct monopolist class and a distinct capitalist class, as we
have a distinct labouring class, it would be easy to perceive where
the responsibility for maintaining this system rests. As a matter of
fact, no involuntary industrial servitude ever did, or ever possibly
could take place except through the antecedent monopolization of
natural resources; no such servitude could last two months unless this
monopoly-control were maintained.
Hence, in its thought upon these matters, the public should learn to
discriminate between the capitalist and the monopolist, even where --
especially where -- the two roles are sustained by the same person. We
should learn to distinguish between the effects of capitalism and the
effects of monopoly, and not go on attributing to the one the effects
produced by the other.
The Freeman, Vol.1, pp.148-49
FARM-LAND in the United States bears a monopoly-value; it has done so
since about 1890. That is the whole story. The land is all taken up,
no more can be had, none can be manufactured; and the price charged
for access to it is, as in the case of all monopolies, measured only
by what the traffic will bear. Access to it must be had, because
nowhere else can the population get its means of subsistence. Thus
with every increase in population comes an increase in this
monopoly-value; the ante must be met by a corresponding raise in the
price of farm-products to the consumer; and between the pressure of
land-monopoly and the pressure for lower consumer's-prices, the
producer simply can not do a stable business.
For our part, we see no way in the world to rehabilitate agriculture
except by first abolishing this prior lien and breaking up
land-monopoly. Every other plan has been tried and has failed; and
every consideration of natural justice indicates a trial of this one.
We urgently commend this view to the agricultural organizations
throughout the country.... Our own notion of the best way to break up
land-monopoly... is by the confiscation of economic rent at one
hundred cents in the dollar; but if any one can suggest a better way,
we shall be glad to advocate it. We are not now troubling our heads
much with considerations of method, but with getting people to see the
necessity of the thing itself; method can come later.
The Freeman, Vol.11, p.388
LAND monopoly is the mother of unemployment. However careless of
human happiness nature may be, it offers unmeasured opportunities for
the employment of human energy in the production of wealth. Free
competition cannot exhaust these opportunities. It is our land laws
which, by restricting them, produce cut-throat competition and wage
slavery. By the simple expedient of taking ground-rent for public
expenses, and abolishing taxation, we can restore the natural balance
of supply and demand, and liberate men from a state of unwilling
dependence. Nature's employment bureau would never have to turn an
applicant away, and nature's minimum wage would insure the
independence of the labourer.
The Freeman, Vol. I, p. 206
THE LIBERAL appears to recognize but two factors in the production of
wealth, namely, labour and capital; and he occupies himself
incessantly with all kinds of devices to adjust relations between
them. The radical recognizes a third factor, namely, natural
resources; and is absolutely convinced that as long as
monopoly-interest in natural resources continues to exist, no
adjustment of the relations between labour and capital can possibly be
made, and that therefore the excellent devotion of the liberal goes,
in the long-run, for nothing. Labour, applied to natural resources,
produces wealth; capital is wealth applied to production; so long
therefore as access to natural resources is monopolized, so long will
both labour and capital have to pay tribute to monopoly and so long,
in consequence, will their relations be dislocated. The liberal looks
with increasing favour upon the socialization of industry or as it is
sometimes called, the democratization of industry. The radical keeps
pointing out that while this is all very well in its way,
monopoly-values will as inevitably devour socialized industry as they
now devour what the liberals call capitalistic industry. What good
would possibly come to labour or capital or to the public, from
democratizing the coal-mining business, for example, unless and until
monopoly-interest in the coal-beds themselves were expropriated? ...
What use in democratizing the business of operating railways, so long
as the franchise-value of railways remains unconfiscated? What use in
democratizing the building industry, so long as economic rent
continues to accrue to monopoly? No use, whatever, as the radical sees
it, except for a very moderate amount of educative value that may
probably be held to proceed from the agitation of such projects.
The Freeman, Vol.1, pp.52-53
/I>. "Political government" signifies the samething; it
means the sort of government that has for its primary purpose the
maintenance of economic exploitation through privilege.
The Freeman, Vol. VII, pp.344-45
CO-OPERATION
CO-OPERATION is a system for the production and distribution of
wealth (in the economic sense, i. e., commodities of all kinds). It is
a first-class system, and the one to which we shall all, no doubt,
finally come. But all wealth is produced from land, from natural
resources; and all the natural resources of the United States are
privately owned and held, either in use or out of use, at a
monopoly-price. Very well, then: who, in the long run is going to
absorb every blessed cent of the savings that will be effected -- as
undoubtedly great savings will be effected -- by the introduction of
the co-operative system of production and distribution? Why, the
natural-resource monopolist, the same person, and the only one, who
has ultimately profited by every saving hitherto effected in the whole
general mechanism of production and distribution. His price is
invariably all that the traffic will bear; and whenever a saving is
effected anywhere in the processes of production and distribution, his
price goes up just enough to absorb it. Co-operation, then, unless
combined with the collective ownership of the economic rent of natural
resources, strikes us as a good thing for the monopolist, and for no
one else.
The Freeman, Vol. VI, p.462
THE PURELY co-operative production, distribution and exchange of
wealth are not in themselves, perhaps, as valuable, as they are now
thought to be. All wealth comes from land; and as long as land is
monopolized, all the savings effected by the co-operative method in
production and exchange, must finally and rather quickly, be absorbed
by the landowner in the form of increased economic rent. There is no
way to escape this. At the same time, there is nothing like the
co-operative experiment to bring producers and consumers face to face
with this fact; and therein, to our way of thinking, lies the chief
value of the movement. When co-operative production and exchange are
thoroughly organized, the producers and consumers simply can not help
seeing where their money goes; and then they will see that they can
not come clear without collective ownership of the economic rent of
land.
From this, too, it will be a very short step to an understanding of
the nature of the State and of the mischievous superfluity of
political government. When people own the economic rent of the source
of production; when they co-operate in the means of production and
distribution; when they do their own banking and manage their
transportation co-operatively; when they maintain their own public and
semi-public utilities, employing their own fire-department and their
own police for the protection of their own property; when they
establish, as is even now the case in some places, their own courts
for the adjustment of disputes: when they come to doing all these
things for themselves, the sight of a tax-bill will certainly raise in
their minds the question, What is political government for?-what does
it do for us that we can not do for ourselves? Free co-operation on
unmonopolized land means the disappearance of the State, as we now
know it; and because the co-operative movement leads so inevitably to
the contemplation of this end, we regard it as the most significant
movement of the times.
The Freeman, Vol. IV, p.122
LAISSEZ-FAIRE
TURGOT agreed with Gournay, author of the motto, Laissez faire,
laissez passer, that men know their own interests better than
Governments can, and that abundance and amity are the offspring of
freedom and not of prohibitions. It was for this reason that he
desired "to give back to all branches of trade that precious
freedom of which they had been deprived by centuries of ignorant
prejudice," and by the facility of government in lending itself
to private interests. It is clear that there can not be privileges
without exploitation. The
laissez-faire ideal was a society freed from monopoly, in
which agreements uninfluenced by violence, fraud or compulsion would
necessarily be fair.
The Freeman, Vol.11, p.56
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