Ramsay MacDonald on "Housing"

Thorold Rogers

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, July-Augut 1927]

WRITING to the chairman of the National Association of Building Societies, the Labor leader says: "A house should be an expression of a personality, and wherever it is possible it ought to be owned, not merely rented. Would that every workman could own his own house, just as he owns his clothes."

There would be no difficulty whatever in realizing this aspiration once the [Commonwealth Land Party] C. L. P. plan were in operation. It is the mystery in which the lawyers have shrouded the business of owning a house that has contributed to prevent their owner ship by those residing in them. Let the land be restored to the community, and its full annual rent be collected into the public treasury, and there would be no more "buying or selling" of land. The buying or selling of the house would then be a perfectly simple transaction, and as easily effected as the buying or selling of a loaf of bread, a hat, or any other product of human labor. No lawyer would be needed: the builder of the house would sell and give a receipt to the purchaser, which receipt would be evidence of title; subsequent sales would be a matter of mutual agreement between a willing buyer and a equally willing seller, and the original receipt, endorsed with a record of the subsequent transfer of interest in the house, would pass in return for the purchase money, and would remain with the new owner as his title. This could be repeated each time the property changed hands. No matter who might own the house, the same obligation to pay the full annual rent of the land would rest and remain upon the occupier of the site. Just as the purchaser of a leasehold house today takes over the obligation to pay the agreed ground rent upon which the lease was granted, so the purchaser of the house (or other building or fixed improvement) upon the site would take over the obligation to pay the rent of the land.

If Mr. MacDonald really means what he wrote, let him have the courage to abandon the timeserving "Land Policy" of his party a policy framed in the interests of the Land Lords and come honestly into the open as an opponent of these parasites upon the community. Today, in spite of his words, he is fighting on their side. Commonweal, London, England.

EVERY permanent 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 land owner sleeps, but thrives. He alone, among all the recipients in the distribution of products, owes everything to the labor of others, contributes nothing of his own. He inherits part of the fruits of present industry, and has appropriated the lion's share of accumulated intelligence.

THE justice of the Pittsburgh tax plan rests upon the principle of equal rights to the earth that has been recognized by such great statesmen and philosophers as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Henry George, and upon the fact that land values are socially created, growing with the growth of population and the extension of public improvements, and are, therefore, in a peculiar sense, a natural and logical source of public revenue. PERCY R. WILLIAMS in Kiwanis Magazine.