Your Rent
George Bernard Shaw
[Reprinted from The Intelligent Woman's Guide to
Socialism,
Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism, Vol. 1, 1937, Chapter 32, pp.
128-132]
When we come from your rates and taxes to your rent, your grievance
is far clearer, because when you pay your rent you have to hand your
money directly to your exploiter to do what she or he likes with
instead of to a public treasurer who gives you value for part of it in
public service to yourself, and tells you nothing about the remainder
which goes to septuagenarians, paupers, ground land- lords,
profiteering contractors, and so forth, some of whom are poorer than
you, which makes for equality of income and is therefore a move in the
right direction, and others richer, which aggravates inequality and is
therefore a move in the wrong direction.
Rent paying is simpler. If you rent a piece of land and work on it,
it is quite clear that the landlord is living on your earnings; and
you cannot prevent him, because the law gives him the power to turn
you off the land unless you pay him for leave to use it. You are so
used to this that it may never have struck you as extraordinary that
any private person should have the power to treat the earth as if it
belonged to him, though you would certainly think him mad if he
claimed to own the air or the sunlight or the sea. Besides, you may be
paying rent for a house; and it seems reasonable that the man who
built the house should be paid for it. But you can easily find out how
much of what you are paying is the value of the house. If you have
insured the house against fire (very likely the landlord makes you do
this), you know what it would cost to build the house, as that is the
sum you have insured it for. If you have not insured it, ask a builder
what it would cost to build a similar house. The interest you would
have to pay every year if you borrowed that sum on the security of the
house is the value of the house apart from the value of the land.
You will find that what you are paying exceeds this house value,
unless you are in the landlord's employment or the house has become
useless for its original purpose: for instance, a medieval castle. In
big cities like London, it exceeds it so enormously that the value of
the building is hardly worth mentioning in comparison. In
out-of-the-way places the excess may be so small that it hardly goes
beyond a reasonable profit on the speculation of building the house.
But in the lump over the whole country it amounts to hundreds of
millions of pounds a year; and this is the price, not of the houses,
but of the landlords' permission to live on the native earth on which
the houses have been built.
That any person should have the power to give or refuse an
Englishwoman permission to live in England, or indeed-for this is what
it comes to-to live at all, is so absurdly opposed to every possible
conception of natural justice that any lawyer will tell you that there
is no such thing as absolute private property in land, and that the
King, in whom the land is vested, may take it all back from its
present holders if he thinks fit. But as the landlords were for many
centuries also both the lawmakers and the kingmakers, they took care
that, king or no king, land should become in practice as much private
property as anything else, except that it cannot be bought and sold
without paying fees to lawyers and signing conveyances and other
special legal documents. And this private power over land has been
bought and sold so often that you never know whether your landlord
will be a bold baron whose ancestors have lived as petty kings on
their tenants since the days of William the Conqueror, or a poor widow
who has invested all her hard- earned savings in a freehold.
Howbeit the fact remains that the case of landlord and tenant is one
in which an idle and possibly infamous person can with the police at
his back come quite openly to an industrious and respect- able woman,
and say "Hand me over a quarter of your earnings or get off the
earth". The landlord can even refuse to accept a rent, and order
her off the earth unconditionally; and he sometimes does so; for you
may remember that in Scotland whole populations of fishermen and
husbandmen with their families have been driven from their country to
the backwoods of America because their landlords wanted the land on
which they lived for deer forests. In England people have been driven
from the countryside in multitudes to make room for sheep, because the
sheep brought more money to the landlord than the people. When the
great London railway stations, with their many acres of sidings, were
first made, the houses of great numbers of people were knocked down,
and the inhabitants driven into the streets; with the result that the
whole neighbourhood became so overcrowded that it was for many years a
centre of disease infecting all London. These things are still
happening, and may happen to you at any moment, in spite of a few laws
which have been made to protect tenants in towns in times of great
scarcity of houses such as that which followed the war, or in Ireland,
where the Government bought the agricultural land and resold it to the
farmers, which eased matters for a time, but in the long run can come
to nothing but exchanging one set of landlords for another.
It is in large towns and their neighbourhood that the Intelligent
Woman will find not only how much the landlord can make her give up to
him, but, oddly enough, how devoutly he believes in equality of income
for his tenants, if not for himself. In the middle of the town she
will find rents very high. If she or her husband has work to do there
it will occur to her that if she were to take a house in the suburbs,
where rents are lower, and use the tram to come to and fro, she might
save a little. But she will find that the landlord knows all about
that, and that though the further she moves out into the country the
lower the rents, yet the railway fare or tram fare will bring up the
yearly cost to what she would have to pay if she lived close enough in
to walk to her market or for her husband to walk to his work. Whatever
advantage she may try to gain, the landlord will snatch its full money
value from her sooner or later in rent, provided it is an advantage
open to everyone. It ought to be plain even to a fairly stupid woman
that if the land belongs to a few people they can make their own terms
with the rest, who must have land to live and work on or else starve
on the highway or be drowned in the sea. They can strip them of every-
thing except what is barely enough to keep them alive to earn money
for the landowner, and bring up families to do the same in the next
generation. It is easy to see how this foolish state of things comes
about. As long as there is plenty of land for everybody private
property in land works very well. The landholders are not presenting
anyone else from owning land like themselves; and they are quite
justified in making the strongest laws to protect themselves against
having their lands intruded on and their crops taken by rascals who
want to reap where they have not sown. But this state of things never
lasts long with a growing population, because at last all the land
gets taken up, and there is none left for the later corners. Even long
before this happens the best land is all taken up, and later comers
find that they can do as well by paying rent for the use of the best
land as by owning poorer land themselves, the amount of the rent being
the difference between the yield of the poorer land and the better. At
this point the owners of the best land can let their land; stop
working, and live on the rent: that is, on the labour of others, or,
as they call it, by owning. When big towns and great industries arise,
the value of the land goes up to enormous heights: in London bits of
land with frontages on the important streets sell at the rate of a
million pounds an acre; and men of business will pay the huge rents
that make the land worth such a figure, although there is land forty
miles away to be had for next to nothing. The land that was first let
gets sublet, and yet again and again sublet until there may be half a
dozen leaseholders and sub-leaseholders drawing more rent from it than
the original ground landlord; and the tenant who is in working
occupation of it has to make the money for all of them. Within the
last hundred and fifty years villages in Europe and pioneer
encampments in the other continents have grown into towns and cities
making money by hundreds of millions; yet most of the inhabitants
whose work makes all this wealth are no better off, and many of them
decidedly worse off, than the villagers or pioneer campers- out who
occupied the place when it was not worth a pound an acre. Meanwhile
the landlords have become fabulously rich, some of them taking every
day, for doing nothing, more than many a woman for sixty years
drudgery.
And all this could have been avoided if we had only had the sense and
foresight to insist that the land should remain national property in
fact as well as in legal theory, and that all rents should be paid
into a common stock and used for public purposes. If that had been
done there need have been no slums, no ugly mean streets and
buildings, nor indeed any rates or taxes: everybody would benefit by
the rent; everybody would have to contribute to it by work; and no
idler would be able to live on the labour of others. The prosperity of
our great towns would he a real prosperity, shared by everyone, and
not what it is now, the enslavement and impoverishment of nine persons
out of every ten in order that the tenth should be idle and rich and
extravagant and useless. This evil is so glaring, so inexcusable by
any sophistry that the cleverest landlord can devise, that, long
before Socialism was heard of, a demand arose for the abolition of all
taxation except the taxation of landowners; and we still have among us
people called Single Taxers, who preach the same doctrine.
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