Re: The Foundation of Understanding
From: Rue The Day (ruetheday_at_outgun.com)
Date: 07/12/04
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Date: 12 Jul 2004 16:06:58 -0700
Johnny 5 <johnny5@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<Xns95243DCB013BCJohnny5yahoocom@65.32.1.7>...
> The market knows best, landowners are in the mix for a reason, from what
> I see
Read and try to understand the following parable.
*****************************************************
http://www.progress.org/archive/thanksgi.htm
A Thanksgiving Story
For Want of a Landlord
told by Mason Gaffney
In 1620 the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock with its intrepid band,
and supplies and provisions for the first winter. These Pilgrims were
of the working poor, ready and able to turn their hands to labor. They
had carpenters, masons, joiners, bakers, farmers, chandlers, boatsmen,
fishers, hunters, and other useful types. They knew enough physick to
stay healthy. Brewster could preach, Standish drill and shoot,
Bradford write and govern, John Alden speak. The women could cook and
sew and wash and harvest and peel and all those workwomanlike things.
All stood as one in faith and purpose, giving mutual aid, but owning
and trading goods too, knowing the arts of bargaining, the power of
self-interest and the usages of the market. They never ate the seed
corn, but consumed little, storing up capital to make tools and
provision their winters. By Christian humility and fair dealing they
made friends of the neighbors, and wasted little on vain warfare.
Yet all their hard work and frugality and mutual aid and shrewd
trading availed them nought, God did not prosper their ventures.
Poverty and distress prevailed; crops withered; timbers rotted; stores
spoiled; women sued for divorce; discontent ran riot. The Elders
pondered.
As luck would have it, one bachelor had packed along a book on
Political Economy for the lonely evenings. Studying one night he
suddenly cried "Eureka! Political Economy will save us!"
"What! What could it be?" cried the Elders all together. "Tell us,
prithee, before the vision leaveth!"
"You forgot the most important thing: you forgot to bring a landlord!"
The Elders were puzzled. "Of what use is a landlord?" said one boldly.
"God already put the land here."
"Obviously," said the bachelor, "you never studied Political Economy.
You think working, saving, building and trading make an economy? Ha!
It is not enough for land simply to be: it must be supplied. Landlords
supply land."
"But how have we survived thus far, then?" asked another Elder, a bit
awed. The bachelor turned some pages. "By non-land activities," he
declared, "like trading, fishing and woodworking. Political Economy is
so clear. Land is not essential to those, or to the housing we have.
If you want to make it in farming, however, you must have a landlord."
"Can't we be our own landlords?" asked another. "That will hardly do,"
said the scholar, standing taller. "It is a skilled specialty.
Landlords don't just supply land, they allocate it. They bear the
financial burdens of ownership: carrying title, lending to tenants who
can't make the rent, that sort of thing don't you know.
"They hold land and provide the service of 'waiting' while it ripens
into higher uses. They collect rent, a most onerous burden; they help
young tenants get started on the agricultural ladder; they pledge land
for loans and undergird our financial structure. They invest in land,
and you know how vital investment is to an economy; they reap
increments to value, lest these go to waste; they sell land and raise
capital to buy more land: lots of difficult things like that.
"You can see supplying these services calls for special skill and
acumen since you don't understand them, do you?" The Elders didn't,
and the point was made. A New England without landlords? What
self-willed fools they had been!
They straightway did God's will, as revealed by Political Economy.
They sent to England for the missing specialist and, by God's grace
found one. This charitable soul took on the grievous burden of
ownership; he also served by collecting rent. He supplied, allocated
and withheld ripening land, and helped young tenants get started. He
borrowed on rising land values to invest in more land, whose sellers
invested in more land, sending out shock-waves of induced investment.
He even saved them the cost of a passage, for he did all this from a
bar in Piccadilly.
The newly dynamic economy expanded: it had to, because the landlord
was allocating most of its land into higher uses yet to come. The
emigrants founded new colonies patterned on the original, in this way
leapfrogging outwards and - Excelsior! - upwards to the bracing
mountainsides. The Elders were embarrassed, however, at their original
error. To distract the people they declared a Thanksgiving, which we
still celebrate. The true story has been suppressed to this day.
Somewhat later Americans shamefully regressed from those true
principles, causing President Andrew Jackson to offend God by
solemnizing Thanksgiving in 1835 with prideful boasting:
"We thank Thee for the bountiful supply of wild life with which Thou
has blessed our land; ... deer, antelopes and buffaloes that roam the
boundless plains ... We thank Thee for the burning rock recently
discovered in the wilds of Pennsylvania which, added to the water
power of New England, will materially reduce the burden of manual
labor ... We thank Thee for the absence of unemployment which in the
King-ridden countries of the world is causing widespread suffering
among the toiling masses and has led to riots ...
And if the time should ever come ... when our ... industries can no
longer employ all the labor tendered, our public domain of thousands
of millions of acres of virgin soil will offer them welcome sustenance
and fortune so that no willing worker shall ever be begging for bread
...
"And finally, we thank Thee for (this, that) thanks to the blessings
... enumerated, there will be none to freeze, starve, or be beset by
the fear of want this winter or the winters yet to come."
Fortunately, in our own times, changes have been made. We have
rediscovered political economy, given more favor to landlords, and are
no longer cursed with the kind of labor shortage that distressed
employers at the time of Jackson.
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