Читать книгу Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth - John A. Ryan - Страница 20

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"The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air—it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in the world, and others no right.

"If we are here by the equal permission of the Creator, we are all here with an equal title to the enjoyment of his bounty—with an equal right to the use of all that nature so impartially offers.... There is in nature no such thing as a fee simple in land. There is on earth no power which can rightfully make a grant of exclusive ownership of land. If all existing men were to grant away their equal rights, they could not grant away the rights of those who follow them. For what are we but tenants for a day? Have we made the earth that we should determine the rights of those who after us shall tenant it in their turn?"[22]

The right to use the goods of nature for the support of life is certainly a fundamental natural right; and it is substantially equal in all persons. It arises, on the one hand, from man's intrinsic worth, his essential needs, and his final destiny; and, on the other hand, from the fact that nature's bounty has been placed by God at the disposal of all His children indiscriminately. But this is a general and abstract right. What does it imply specifically and in the concrete? In the first place, it includes the actual and continuous use of some land; for a man cannot support life unless he is permitted to occupy some portion of the earth for the purposes of working, and eating, and sleeping. Secondly, it means that in time of extreme need, and when more orderly methods are not available, a man has the right to seize sufficient goods, natural or produced, public or private, to support life. So much is admitted and taught by all Catholic authorities, and probably by all other authorities. Furthermore, the abstract right in question seems very clearly to include the concrete right to obtain on reasonable conditions at least the requisites of a decent livelihood; for example, by direct access to a piece of land, or in return for a reasonable amount of useful labour. All of these particular rights are equally valid in all persons.

Does the equal right to use the bounty of nature include the right to equal shares of land, or land values, or land advantages? Since the resources of nature have been given to all men in general, and since human nature is specifically and juridically equal in all, have not all persons the right to share equally in these resources? Suppose that some philanthropist hands over to one hundred persons an uninhabited island, on condition that they shall divide it among themselves with absolute justice. Are they not obliged to divide it equally? On what ground can any person claim or be awarded a larger share than his fellows? None is of greater intrinsic worth than another, nor has any one made efforts, or sacrifices, or products which will entitle him to exceptional treatment. The correct principle of distribution would seem to be absolute equality, except in so far as it may be modified on account of varying needs, and varying capacities for social service. In any just distribution account must be taken of differences in needs and capacities; for it is not just to treat men as equal in those respects in which they are unequal, nor is it fair to deprive the community of those social benefits which can be obtained only by giving exceptional rewards for exceptional services. The same amount of food allotted to two persons might leave one hungry and the other sated; the same amount of land assigned to two persons might tempt the one to wastefulness and discourage the other. To be sure, the factor of exceptional capacity should not figure in the distribution until all persons had received that measure of natural goods which was in each case sufficient for a decent livelihood. For the fundamental justification of any distribution is to be sought in human needs; and among human needs the most deserving and the most urgent are those which must be satisfied as a prerequisite to right and reasonable life.

Now it is true that private ownership of land has nowhere realised this principle of proportional equality and proportional justice. No such result is possible in a system that, in addition to other difficulties, would be required to make a new distribution at every birth and at every death. Private ownership of land can never bring about ideal justice in distribution. Nevertheless it is not necessarily out of harmony with the demands of practical justice. A community that lacks either the knowledge or the power to establish the ideal system is not guilty of actual injustice because of this failure. In such a situation the proportionally equal rights of all men to the bounty of nature are not actual rights. They are conditional, or hypothetical, or suspended. At best they have no more moral validity than the right of a creditor to a loan that, owing to the untimely death of the debtor, he can never recover. In both cases it is misleading to talk of injustice; for this term always implies that some person or community is guilty of some action which could have been avoided. The system of private landownership is not, indeed, perfect; but this is not exceptional in a world where the ideal is never attained, and all things are imperfect. Henry George declares that "there is on earth no power which can rightfully make a grant of exclusive ownership in land"; but what would he have a community do which has never heard of his system? Introduce some crude form of communism, or refrain from using the land at all, and permit the people to starve to death in the interests of ideal justice? Evidently such a community must make grants of exclusive ownership, and these will be as valid in reason and in morals as any other act that is subject to human limitations which are at the time irremovable.

Perhaps the Single Taxer would admit the force of the foregoing argument. He might insist that the titles given by the State in such conditions were not exclusive grants in the strict sense, but were valid only until a better system could be set up, and the people put in possession of their natural heritage. Let us suppose, then, that a nation were shown "a more excellent way." Suppose that the people of the United States set about to establish Henry George's system in the way that he himself advocated. They would forthwith impose upon all land an annual tax equivalent to the annual rent. What would be the effect upon private land-incomes, and private land-wealth? Since the first would be handed over to the State in the form of a tax, the second would utterly disappear. For the value of land, like the value of any other economic good, depends upon the utilities that it embodies or produces. Whoever controls these will control the market value of the land itself. No man will pay anything for a revenue-producing property if some one else, for example, the State, is forever to take the revenue. The owner of a piece of land which brings him an annual revenue or rent of one hundred dollars, will not find a purchaser for it if the State appropriates the one hundred dollars in the form of a tax that is to be levied year after year for all time. On the assumption that the revenue represents a selling value of two thousand dollars, the private owner will be worth that much less after the introduction of the new system.

Henry George defends this proceeding as emphatically just, and denies the justice of compensating the private owners. In the chapter of "Progress and Poverty" headed, "Claim of Land Owners to Compensation," he declares that "private property in land is a bold, bare, enormous wrong, like that of chattel slavery"; and against Mill's statement that land owners have a right to rent and to the selling value of their holdings, he exclaims: "If the land of any country belong to the people of that country, what right, in morality and justice, have the individuals called land owners to the rent? If the land belong to the people, why in the name of morality and justice should the people pay its salable value for their own?"[23]

Here, then, we have the full implication of the Georgean principle that private property in land is essentially unjust. It is not merely imperfect,—tolerable while unavoidable. When it can be supplanted by the right system, its inequalities must not continue under another form. If inequalities are continued through the compensation of private owners, individuals are still hindered from enjoying their equal rights to land, and the State becomes guilty of formal and culpable injustice. The titles which the State formerly guaranteed to the private owners did not have in morals the perpetual validity which they professed to have. Since the State is not the owner of the land, it was morally powerless to create or sanction titles of this character. Even if all the citizens at any given time had deliberately transferred the necessary authorisation to the State, "they could not," in the words of Henry George, "grant away the right of those who follow them." The individual's right to land is innate and natural, not civil or social. The author of "Progress and Poverty" attributes to the individual's common right to land precisely the same absolute character that Father Liberatore predicates of the right to become a private land owner.[24] In the view of Henry George, the State is merely the trustee of the land, having the duty of distributing its benefits and values so as to make effective the equal rights of all individuals. Consequently, the legal titles of private ownership which it creates or sanctions are valid only so long as nothing better is available. At best such titles have no greater moral force than the title by which an innocent purchaser holds a stolen watch; and the persons who are thereby deprived of their proper shares of land benefits, have the same right to recover them from the existing private owners that the watch-owner has to recover his property from the innocent purchaser. Hence the demand for compensation has no more merit in the one case than in the other.

To the objection that the civil laws of many civilised countries would permit the innocent purchaser of the watch to retain it, provided that sufficient time had elapsed to create a title of prescription, the Single Taxer would reply that the two kinds of goods are not on the same moral basis in all respects. He would contend that the natural heritage of the race is too valuable, and too important for human welfare to fall under the title of prescription.

To put the matter briefly, then, Henry George contends that the individual's equal right to land is so much superior to the claim of the private owner that the latter must give way, even when it represents an expenditure of money or other valuable goods. The average opponent does not seem to realise the full force of the impression which this theory makes upon the man who overemphasises the innate rights of men to a share in the gifts of nature. Let us see whether this right has the absolute and overpowering value which is attributed to it by Henry George.

In considering this question, the supremely important fact to be kept in mind is that the natural right to land is not an end in itself. It is not a prerogative that inheres in men, regardless of its purposes or effects. It has validity only in so far as it promotes individual and social welfare. As regards individual welfare, we must bear in mind that this phrase includes the well being of all persons, of those who do as well as of those who do not at present enjoy the benefits of private landownership. Consequently the proposal to restore to the "disinherited" the use of their land rights must be judged by its effects upon the welfare of all persons. If existing landowners are not compensated they are deprived, in varying amounts, of the conditions of material well being to which they have become accustomed, and are thereby subjected to varying degrees of positive inconvenience and hardship. The assertion that this loss would be offset by the moral gain in altruistic feelings and consciousness, may be passed over as applying to a different race of beings from those who would be despoiled. The hardship is aggravated considerably by the fact that very many of the dispossessed private owners have paid the full value of their land out of the earnings of labour or capital, and that all of them have been encouraged by society and the State to regard landed property in precisely the same way as any other kind of property. In the latter respect they are not in the same position as the innocent purchaser of the stolen watch; for they have never been warned by society that the land might have been virtually stolen, or that the supposedly rightful claimants might some day be empowered by the law to recover possession. On the other hand, the persons who own no land under the present system, the persons who are deprived of their "birthright," suffer no such degree of hardship when they are continued in that condition. They are kept out of something which they have never possessed, which they have never hoped to get by any such easy method, and from which they have not been accustomed to derive any benefit. To prolong this condition is not to inflict upon them any new or positive inconvenience. Evidently their welfare and claims in the circumstances are not of the same moral importance as the welfare and claims of persons who would be called upon to suffer the loss of goods already possessed and enjoyed, and acquired with the full sanction of society.

Henry George is fond of comparing the private owner of land with the slave owner, and the landless man with the man enslaved; but there is a world of difference between their respective positions and moral claims. Liberty is immeasurably more important than land, and the hardship suffered by the master when he is compelled to free the slave is immeasurably less than that endured by the slave who is forcibly detained in bondage. Moreover, the moral sense of mankind recognises that it is in accordance with equity to compensate slave owners when the slaves are legally emancipated. Infinitely stronger is the claim of the landowner to compensation.

If the Georgeite replies that the landless man is at present kept out of something to which he has a right, while confiscation would take from the private owner something which does not really belong to him, the rejoinder must be that this assertion begs the question. The question is likewise begged when the unreasonable defender of private property declares that the right of the landless is vague and undetermined, and therefore morally inferior to the determinate and specific right of the individual landowner. This is precisely the question to be solved. Does the abstract right of the landless man become a concrete right which is so strong as to justify confiscation? Is his natural right valid against the acquired right of the private proprietor? These questions can be answered intelligently only by applying the test of human welfare, individual and social. To say that land of its very nature is not morally susceptible of private ownership, is to make an easy assertion that may be as easily denied. To interpret man's natural right to land by any other standard than human welfare, is to make of it a fetish, not a thing of reason. Henry George himself seemed to recognise this when he wrote that wonderfully eloquent but overdrawn and one-sided description of the effects of private ownership which occurs in the chapter entitled, "Claim of Landowners to Compensation."[25]

When we say that human welfare is the final determinant of the right to land, we understand this phrase in the widest possible sense. To divide the goods of the idle rich among the deserving poor, might be temporarily beneficial to both these classes, but the more remote and enduring consequences would be individually and socially disastrous. To restore a legacy to persons who had been defrauded of it when very young, would probably cause more hardship to the swindler than the heirs would have suffered had there been no restitution; nevertheless the larger view of human welfare requires that the legacy should be restored. When, however, two or three generations have been kept out of their inheritance, the civil law permits the children of the swindler to retain the property by the title of prescription; and for precisely the same reason, human welfare.

The social consequences of the confiscation of rent and land values, would be even more injurious than those falling upon the individuals despoiled. Social peace and order would be gravely disturbed by the protests and opposition of the landowners, while the popular conception of property rights, and of the inviolability of property, would be greatly weakened, if not entirely destroyed. The average man would not grasp or seriously consider the Georgean distinction between land and other kinds of property in this connection. He would infer that purchase, or inheritance, or bequest, or any other title having the immemorial sanction of the State, does not create a moral right to movable goods any more than to land. This would be especially likely in the matter of capital. Why should the capitalist, who is no more a worker than the landowner, be permitted to extract revenue from his possessions? In both cases the most significant and practical feature is that one class of men contributes to another class an annual payment for the use of socially necessary productive goods. If rent-confiscation would benefit a large number of people, why not increase the number by confiscating interest? Indeed, the proposal to confiscate rent is so abhorrent to the moral sense of the average man that it could never take place except in conditions of revolution and anarchy. If that day should ever arrive the policy of confiscation would not stop with land.