Agrarian Justice

Recently, I drove up the California coast along Highway 1 for my honeymoon. Along the way, my wife Averil and I stopped at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. While I was there, I bought three books. One of them was Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, because I read a blurb on a plaque placed beside one of the many pieces of art strewn about the front yard of the Library that it was "one of the most important books of the 20^th century."

The other two books I purchased as much because of how they looked as for their content, for they are members of the "Great Ideas" series by Penguin Books, which feature some of the most striking covers I have ever seen on paperbacks. Anyway, I bought Why I Write by George Orwell and Common Sense by Thomas Paine.

The second of these not only contained Paine's famous call-to-arms, but also another of his pamphlets which is just as great, called Agrarian Justice. I was delighted to find this unexpected little gem in an already small book! In beautifully concise and precise language, Paine constructs an argument in favor of using a portion of all land values within a society in order to create a fund for the purpose of supporting the old and infirm for the duration of their lives, as well as to provide a small kickstart for everyone upon reaching 21 years of age. His justification for creating the fund based upon land values stems from his belief that prior to the arrival of civilization all people "owned" all of the land with equal shares, and that it was only with the advent of agriculture that land became "property" due to the development of inherently stationary agricultural improvements.

I was quite impressed to read Paine's insights concerning the fundamental shift in the human condition that came with agriculture (i.e. "the civilized state"):

It is always possible to go from the natural to the civilized state, but it is never possible to go from the civilized to the natural state. The reason is that man in a natural state, subsisting by hunting, requires ten times the quantity of land to range over to procure himself sustenance, than would support him in a civilized state, where the earth is cultivated.

I was reminded of one of the major themes of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel -- that agriculture became the foundation upon which the great civilizations of the world were built. For it was agriculture that allowed human populations to multiply, and it was agriculture which motivated humans to domesticate any suitable wild animals that might be available for exploitation.

But, Paine points out, civilization has been a double-edged sword. While the "natural state is without advantages which flow from agriculture, arts, science, and manufactures," it is also true that "there is not, in that state, any of those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes in all the towns and streets of Europe."

Modern America can hardly escape this same criticism, when we consider that the latest U.S. Census Bureau statistics list 37 million Americans as living "under the poverty line" (which for a single person household is roughly $10,000/year). Estimates of the numbers of children who go to sleep each night feeling hungry also reach the millions.

This state of affairs should outrage us as much as it did Paine over 200 years ago. In his words:

...the first principle of civilization ought ... to be that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period.

While we can certainly point to many wonderful advantages that have been extended to many of our citizens due to the great technological advances of the ensuing years, I still do not think that we can boast that everybody who lives within our current economic-political system is better off now than if they had been born on this continent 1,000 years ago. That is something we should not be complacent about!!

Paine was a man far ahead of his time for recognizing the wisdom of providing a safety net for the elderly (anticipating the eventual creation of Social Security by almost 150 years!), and I think he was spot-on in advocating that the funds should come from a tax on land, as opposed to any other possible taxation schemes (e.g. the current method of taxing income that the U.S. uses).

I won't get into the specifics for why I'm convinced that a full land tax is a fantastic idea, but if you're interested you should read this site and this article, both by Steven Cord.