About two thirds involved open fields belonging to cottagers while one third involved commons such as woodland and heath. In the census of , more than half the arable land belonged to the villagers.
By , only 2, people owned half the agricultural land in England and Wales and that 0. As the cash economy developed, the rent money accumulated into the hands of the landholders and the plight of the people worsened. To survive, they sometimes were forced to borrow money from the landholders at high rates of interest. In Britain made Ireland part of its empire and dissolved the Irish Parliament.
By now the Protestants had the upper hand and were given a voice in the British Parliament while the Catholic majority had none. Tenant farmers had to give their entire crops to the landlords as rent. When their subsistence potato crops failed from blight, there was nothing to fall back on. Some three million people died of starvation and disease between and , while one million fled to the US and Canada.
Let us go to America now and examine the foundations of liberty and democracy. To fully understand the severe limitations in our current form of democracy it is necessary to trace the thread of the democratic ideal back to its fundamental tenets. Pondering the problem of persistent poverty within a democratic system of government, Richard Noyes - a former recent New Hampshire State Representative and editor of the book, Now the Synthesis: Capitalism, Socialism, and the New Social Contract - identifies the current land tenure system as "the one great imperfection, the snag on which freedom catches.
Noyes shows us that the "Age of Reason gave us a thesis with flaws. The securing of this right was to be the main duty of a democratic government. But the trouble lies with Locke's Second Proviso regarding property. Because they didn't have titles to the land, that made it vacant. In the Second Proviso the reasoning of the primary mentor of the founding father was faulty and limited.
Values and representations
In his justification for land enclosures and privatization Locke failed to grasp the consequences for democracy of a time like ours when so few humans would come to control so much of the earth, to the exclusion of the vast majority. Nor could he have known how the forces of a industrial economy would drive land values to such heights, to the benefit of landowners and bank lenders rather than wage earners.
The property-in-land problem, insufficiently scrutinized by John Locke and the founding fathers, is the crack in the Liberty Bell. It is the root dilemma of democracy. Having life and liberty without land rights breeds unhappiness, unemployment, wage slavery, suffering, militarization and even death. Democratic government as presently constituted, because it is not grounded and embedded in the principle of equal rights to the earth, cannot build a world of peace and justice. He was Speaker of the House for many years, a radical advocate of the abolition of slavery and the major proponent of land reform during Reconstruction.
He wanted the fertile plantation lands of the South to be allocated to the freed slaves and poor whites. In his view this plan would also help to solve the race problem by uniting freed slaves and poor whites on an economic basis. This would do justice to those whose uncompensated labor had cleared and cultivated the southern land, he reasoned. He envisioned a land of productive and independent small farms. After this allocation there would still remain millions of acres - 90 percent of the land in fact - which could be sold to help pay the national debt, reduce taxes, and provide pensions for Union soldiers and reimbursement for citizens whose property had been destroyed during the war.
Confiscation was very much a live political issue in , but the forces against Stevens prevailed and his land reform work failed. No man in America has any right to anything which he has not honestly earned, or which the lawful owner has not thought proper to give him. If Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital It is a question, not of human loyalty, but of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North Any attempt to justify the confiscation of Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen, strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections.
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It concerns Massachusetts quite as much as Mississippi. They secured 4, acres of land in Georgia for African Americans. New Communities and the Featherfield Farm project remains the largest Black owned single tract farm in America. Martin Luther King, Jr. For nine years following we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam.
After the French were defeated it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva agreements.
Land Value Rights
But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho [Ho Chi Minh] should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators -- our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the north.
The peasants watched as all this was presided over by U. Let us now focus for a moment on Jimmy Carter, an American president who started out with kind intentions and ended up with cruel ones. The Carter team had pledged itself to non-intervention in the Third World, to a sincere commitment to arms control, and to work for worldwide human rights.
Carter accomplished much along these lines in the beginning of his term in office, but in the end he reversed himself and fell victim to Cold War fever. Klare so clearly describes in his important new book, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict , the United States began a military build-up in the Persian Gulf area at that time which has continued to this day. The remarkable transformation of Carter-the-kind-Christian from peacemaker to warmonger showed his susceptibility to Cold War fever and lack of any firm ground to stand on regarding the relationship of human rights to land rights and democracy.
He played into fears that the godless communists were conspiring to take over the world, ignored the true economic principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and seemed to be unaware of the imperialist forces at play in the U. All over the world we are claiming vital mineral, oil, and land resources as part of our national security and militarizing those areas. What or who will stop us if we cannot stop ourselves? Stiglitz is one of three economists to win the Nobel Prize in economics in In he was fired from his position as Chief Economist with the World Bank after he began to speak about his concerns.
In an interview in with Greg Palast, 36 a writer for The Observer London , Stiglitz described in detail the four-step plan used by the international banking institutions to extract wealth from around the world. In his view the process leads to financial barbarism, pillage and plunder and has resulted in immense suffering, starvation and destruction. Growing numbers of us are appalled and chilled to our bones at what the World Bank in which the U. Treasury has a 51 percent controlling interest , the International Monetary Fund, and other instruments of international finance and control are doing to our world.
Placing our country and our state, county and city or town on the firm and fair foundation of the human right to the earth is one of the most important endeavors of our age. In I was giving a workshop in Pasadena about Henry George and land rights economics when an elder raised her hand and said: Now what are we going to do about it?
Some called her the grandmother of the counterculture. She was a close friend of Ralph Borsodi and in association with him played an influential part in founding the modern intentional community movement. Mildred also kept in touch with the land-value-tax movement and clearly understood how both of these approaches to land rights drew from the important work of Henry George.
I have thus far presented several dimensions of the great and unsolved land problem from various vantage points. Now I will describe five way by which the earth can be claimed for the benefit of the people as a whole, detailing ways and means for securing common rights to water, oil and mineral royalties, and the rent of surface land:. An example of direct action by exploited and mobilized citizens is the story of the Bolivian Water War, as Maude Barlowe told it in her article on water privatization in the summer Bulletin of the International Forum on Globalization.
International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies have given corporate access to many water systems in developing countries. After privatization, with the water system in the control of this company, rates increased and even tripled for some of the poorest customers. Water was shut off completely for others. No infrastructure improvements were made. Citizens who had built family wells or water irrigation systems decades earlier suddenly had to pay the company for the right to use the water.
An alliance of labor, human rights, environmental, and community leaders organized and fought back with peaceful marches. A public referendum showed that the vast majority wanted the company out, but they were either ignored or met with police violence. Using Gandhian tactics they engaged in strikes and blockades to take back their water. The government declared a state of siege, arrested the protest leaders, shut down radio stations, and sent in a thousand soldiers.
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A teenager was killed and many others wounded. After weeks of confrontation the government backed down and ended the contract with the corporate raiders. Bechtel then threatened to sue the national government for lost investments and potential lost profits based on a bilateral investment treaty. No one was providing the city with water while the government and the corporation were in dispute. Then the water company workers began running the water system themselves with the help of the coalition that had been built.
The water workers held regular community meetings to determine the need for water; they reduced prices, built new tanks, and laid pipes to bring water service to neighborhoods that had never had it before. The service was fairly and efficiently cooperatized with the full support and inclusion of the workers and the community. The Cochabamba Declaration, the basis for coalition actions, follows:.
Under the Alaska Constitution all the natural resources of Alaska belong to the state to be used, developed and conserved for the maximum benefit of the people. The Alaska Permanent Fund was established in as a state institution with the task of responsibly administering and conserving oil royalties and other resource royalties for the citizenry. In , after a four year debate, the Alaska Legislature established the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation to manage the assets of the Fund.
That same year the Legislature also created the Permanent Fund Dividend Program to distribute a portion of the income from the Permanent Fund each year to eligible Alaskans as direct personal dividend payments. Earnings of the Fund undergo special public scrutiny. Beautifully designed literature describes in detail the various components of the Fund. An Annual Report is distributed each year. There is an extensive accountability program and open meetings with opportunity for citizen participation.
The Alaska Permanent Fund website keeps current all investment and distribution activities of the Fund. The history of the development of the Fund, its incorporation, details concerning its management, and information on the Fund portfolio and dividend pay-out amounts are on the website. One can email questions and receive a direct reply from a knowledgeable Fund trustee or employee. Also posted on the website are stories, puzzles and games for teachers to use in their classes to educate their students about the Fund. The Alaska Permanent Fund is a well managed and transparent earth rights institution.
It is a remarkable pioneering model of a fair and effective way to secure common heritage wealth benefits for the people as a whole. Public officials who sincerely see their role as servants of the common good can be found in most of our towns and cities. Once they understand practical earth rights policies they will help put them in place. This has been true in Pennsylvania, where local officials are implementing a property tax reform which is direct lineage of the land rights ideas of Henry George and, even further back, of Thomas Paine.
It is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds. This value is created by the existence of and functioning of the whole community. To allow this value to be appropriated by individuals means that land can be used not only for the production of wealth but also as an instrument of oppression of human by human. This leads to severe social consequences which are everywhere evident.
In Pennsylvania civic officials in twenty municipalities are implementing a local tax reform based on this understanding. Shifting the tax burden from buildings to land values promotes a more efficient use of urban infrastructure and urban land while decreasing the trend towards sprawl. The benefits of development can be broadly shared when housing maintains affordability and public coffers are solvent. The City of Harrisburg continues in the view that a land value taxation system, which places a much higher tax rate on land than on improvements, is an important incentive for the highest and best use of land in already developed communities, such as cities With over 90 percent of the property owners in the City of Harrisburg, the two tiered tax rate system actually saves money over what would otherwise be a single tax system that is currently in use in nearly all municipalities in Pennsylvania.
We therefore continue to regard the two tiered tax rate system as an important ingredient in our overall economic development activities. I should note that the City of Harrisburg was considered the second most distressed in the United States twelve years ago under the Federal distress criteria. None of this happened by accident and a variety of economic development initiatives and policies were created and utilized.
The two rate system has been and continues to be one of the key local policies that has been factored into this initial economic success here. Here are a few of the improvements mentioned in the Harrisburg literature:. The city of Allentown, also in Pennsylvania, showed us how this policy can be voted in by an enlightened earth rights citizenry. Vincent saw that the effort to put the land tax back on the ballot and defeat it was being driven largely by used-car dealers with large lots and shareholders of the Allentown Fair Grounds, an immensely valuable acre site in the middle of the city that had always enjoyed a sweetheart property tax deal.
But the pro-land-tax forces, lead by a former city councilman who had been pushing for it for twenty years, mounted an intense grassroots education effort -- and the tax passed again by a comfortable margin. Since the move towards land value taxation, Allentown has been experiencing steady gradual improvements, as have all the Pennsylvania cities that have been implementing earth rights policy. The state of the earth now requires that the costs of industrial production and human commercial activity no longer be externalized onto the global commons.
The environmental movement has been discovering how to harness tax policy in order to protect the earth. Sufficiently high user fees and pollution permits encourage business and industry to find more efficient and cost-effective controls. Pollution taxes function as pay-for-use fees for common heritage resources of land, water and air and make the tax system work for the people and the planet.
Green taxers also aim to eliminate numerous subsidies deemed no longer necessary, environmentally or socially harmful, or inequitable. Green tax policy is poised to radically redirect the incentive signals of the world's taxation systems that now promote waste, not work. A mere 4 percent of global tax revenues is captured from natural resource use and access fees.
This past decade the Russian parliament, the Duma, has been grappling with the question of land privatization as it relates to the transition to a market economy. Earth rights colleagues in Britain and the US - Fred Harrison, Nic Tideman and others - have been working quite closely with certain Russian leaders as they search for a different kind of economy, one beyond both Left and Right. Many Russian officials in positions of power are pushing the policy of land rent for the people.
This effort is an uphill struggle against the neocolonizers and the international banking institutions. Battle lines are drawn between those who would privatize rent, meaning concentrate land wealth into the hands of a few, and those who would socialize rent, which means basing the Russian state on the common right of the people to the land of mother Russia as financed by land rent for the people as a whole. In the Dominican Republic my friend Lucy Silfa is hard at work as she has been for the past fifty years.
As director of the Henry George School of Social Science there, she has educated tens of thousands of people about earth rights principles and policies. Journalists, government representatives, economists, military top brass, and prisoners have graduated from her classes. The President of the Dominican Republic was one of her students.
Recently he gave her a letter to take to others in the government. She is now trying to pry land ownership and valuation information out of a bureaucracy so that a feasibility study can be done before recommending a tax shift plan for this small island state. Philadelphia, where Henry George was born in , is one of the most exciting points of play in the land value tax movement at this time. There has been sporadic interest in land value taxation over the years, but the movement is coming into its own.
Support for the idea is rapidly growing. Well, land value tax is a pro-active, practical and sensible approach to the revitalization of the city. It is highly unifying because nearly everyone benefits. Those most likely to be against it are land speculators and people who profit from high land and housing costs. There is a possibility that certain banking interests could also try to stand in the way, the reason being that when land becomes more affordable and purchasing capacity rises as the result of shifting taxes from labor to the land, banks will then be unable to capture as much interest from mortgages.
These vested interests will be outvoted and voted out as the people learn once again how to make democracy work for the good of the whole. The powerful tools of information technology can well serve our work in securing the earth as our birthright. Cities and towns are putting property values and tax information into computer databases and onto the web, where this information is transparent and easily accessible.
Geographic information systems GIS are computer maps containing detailed data. The use of GIS for land value tax research is being pioneered by city assessors like Ted Gwartney and political scientists like Bill Batt. Information technology will be of great assistance to us in finding answers to these important questions: Who owns the earth? How much do they profit? How much land rent do they pay into the common fund? Those indicators can serve as red flags indicating the need to levy pollution taxes or fines. All of these concerns can be monitored by the masses via computer technology.
The Next Economy will deeply respect and value all life on earth. It will recognize that we as human beings are trustees and caretakers of the many life forms that dwell here with us. The Next Economy will extend the democratic mandate to solve the land problem by affirming the equal right of all people to the earth. It will have a balanced and just relationship of citizenry to government with enlightened public finance policy based on land and land rent for the people.
Money will be issued and circulated as a service for the people as a whole rather than used as a mechanism for the exploitation of the many by the few. As land and natural resource rent is socialized and wages are fully privatized meaning untaxed capital will cooperatize in ways similar to the Mondragon cooperatives of the Basque region and the models described by E. Schumacher, Louis Kelso and others.
E.F. Schumacher Lecture: Democracy, Earth Rights and the Next Economy
The Next Economy will be global, as people are freed to move beyond borders and boundaries and claim the whole earth as their birthplace. It will be highly decentralized as well, with people living and producing for their basic human needs within the constraints and parameters of local ecological systems. The Next Economy will build a world that works for everyone, with plenty of time to expand our minds and elevate our spirits. Will we live to experience the Next Economy? Will we see it come of age?
We each have a role to play to bring it forth. Alanna Hartzok is an educator and activist in the areas of economic justice, land rights, and tax reform. The Union has sixty member organizations worldwide. Vice-president of the Council of Georgist Organizations, which has thirty-five member organizations nationwide, and state coordinator of the Pennsylvania Fair Tax Coalition, her published articles on tax reform have been useful to legislators in the states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York.
In she founded the Earth Rights Institute to provide an organizational base for her research, writing, and speaking. She may be contacted at:. Earth Rights Institute P. Box , Scotland, PA This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The answer seems to me to be quite clear: Schumacher, Think About Land. Edited for print edition by Hildegarde Hannum Copywrite E. Schumacher Society and Alanna Hartzok. May be reproduced or transmitted only with permission of the author and the E.
Among the many contributions to the debate on economic policy, the works of E. Schumacher present a clear, integrated vision of a decentralized and sustainable economy that nourishes the earth and its inhabitants. Ernst Fritz Schumacher was born in Bonn, Germany, in After a short spell of teaching Economics at Columbia University, New York, followed by dabbling in business, farming and journalism, he became an economic adviser to the British Control Commission in Germany , followed by a long career in the National Coal Board in Britain.
He realized that the Western pursuit of unlimited economic growth on a gigantic scale is neither desirable nor practicable for the rest of the world. If anything, the West itself needs to learn the simplicity, spirituality and good sense of other cultures which are not yet in the grip of technological imperatives. The turning point came in when he was sent as Economic Development Adviser to the government of Burma.
He was supposed to introduce the Western model of economic growth in order to raise the living standards of the Burmese people. But he discovered that the Burmese needed no economic development along Western lines, as they themselves had an indigenous economic system well suited to their conditions, culture and climate.
Schumacher was perhaps the only Western economist to dare to put these two words, Buddhism and economics, together. The essay was printed and reprinted in numerous journals and anthologies. ITDG became the practical expression of respect for cultural diversity. Complementary to Intermediate Technology was his involvement with sustainable agriculture; he spent much time on his organic garden and became President of The Soil Association.
To Schumacher it was logical and natural to produce, consume and organize as locally as possible, which inevitably meant on a smaller scale. Therefore, to him the question of size was an overriding and overarching principle. Beyond a certain scale the people involved are disempowered and a bureaucratic machine takes over.
For example, in a school of 1, children, parents do not know the teachers, teachers cannot know all the children, the children cannot know each other, and the surrounding community is overwhelmed by the influx of pupils who do not belong to that community. Similarly, large hospitals, large factories and large businesses lose the purpose of enriching human wellbeing and become obsessed with maintaining and perpetuating the organization for its own sake.
Therefore, it could be said almost invariably that if there is something wrong, there is something too big.