“There is no such like a good landlord” is a rallying cry from angry tenants. In the future, it could be conventional morality that it is simply wrong to own land.
In our times, owning land seems as natural as owning cars or houses. And this makes sense: the general assumption is that you can privately own anything, with rare exceptions for items like dangerous weapons or archeological artifacts. The idea of controlling territory, specifically, has a long standing. Animals, warlords and governments do it, and the modern conception of land ownership “fee simple”, that is, unrestricted, perpetual and private, has existed in English common law since the 13th century. .
However, in 1797, the founding father of the United States, Thomas Paine I was discussing that “land, in its natural uncultivated state” would always be “the common property of the human race”, and therefore landlords owed compensation to non-landlords “for the loss of their natural inheritance”.
A century later, the economist Henry George saw that poverty was increasing although the increase in wealth and blamed it on our land ownership system. He proposed that land should be taxed up to 100 percent of its “unimproved” value (we’ll get to that in a moment), allowing other forms of tax (certainly including property taxes, but also potentially income taxes) are reduced or reduced. abolished. George became a sensation. Your book progress and poverty it sold 2 million copies and polled 31 percent of the vote in the 1886 New York mayoral race (finishing second, well ahead of 31-year-old Teddy Roosevelt).
George was a reformer, not a radical. The abolition of land ownership requires neither communism on the one hand nor hunting-gathering on the other. This is because the land can be separated from the things we do on top of it, be it farming or building towers. Colloquially, the term “land owner” often combines actual ownership of land with various additional functions: constructing buildings, providing maintenance, and creating flexibility to live somewhere on short notice. These additional services are valuable, but they represent a diminishing part of the cost of housing. In New York, 46 percent of the value of a typical home it’s just the cost of the land it’s built on. In San Francisco it is 52 percent; in Los Angeles, 61 percent.
The key idea of the Georgists is that the “unimproved” value of land can be taxed separately from everything else. At this time, if you improve a piece of land (for example, by building a house on it), you will pay additional taxes due to the increase in value of your property. According to Georgism, you would pay the same tax on your house as you would on an equivalent vacant lot in the same location, because both your building and the vacant lot use the same amount of finite land.
Today, Georgism as a political movement has stagnated like a wasteland. But one day, we believe, people will see Georgian taxes as not just economically efficient but morally just.
The right to live it is generally considered the first of natural rights. But living requires physical space, a volume of at least several dozen liters for your body to occupy. There is no point in declaring that someone is entitled to something if he cannot acquire the basic requirements of it. For example, as a society we think that everyone is entitled to a fair trial; Since you cannot have a fair trial without a lawyer, if someone cannot afford a lawyer, we provide one. Similarly, at least on planet Earth, occupying space necessarily implies occupying land. Top floor apartments or underground bunkers still need the rights to the land below or above them. Thus, the right to life actually derives from the more primary right to physical space, and the right to space derives from the right to land.
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