Re: Winston Churchill: Land Price as a Cause of Poverty
From: Michael Price (nini_pad_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 02/28/05
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Date: 27 Feb 2005 18:42:20 -0800
Considering that Winston Churchills efforts with the vastly
overpriced Sterling went a long way to causing the great depression
that's pretty rich.
Quirk wrote:
> LAND PRICE AS A CAUSE OF POVERTY
>
> Winston Churchill's Speech in the House of Commons, 4 May 1909,
> in response to Mr AJ Balfour, Leader of the Opposition
>
> The immemorial custom of nearly every modern State, the mature
> conclusions of many of the greatest thinkers, have placed the tenure,
> transfer, and obligations of land in a wholly different category from
> other classes of property. The mere obvious physical distinction
> between land, which is a vital necessity of every human being and
which
> at the same time is strictly limited in extent, and other property is
> in itself sufficient to justify a clear differentiation in its
> treatment, and in the view taken by the State of the conditions which
> should govern the tenure of land from that which should regulate
> traffic in other forms of property.
>
> Unearned Increment When the Leader of the Opposition seeks by
> comparisons to show that the same reasoning which has been applied to
> land ought also in logic and by every argument of symmetry to be
> applied to the unearned increment derived from other processes which
> are at work in our modern civilisation, he only shows by each example
> he takes how different are the conditions which attach to the
> possession of land and speculation in the value of land from those
> which attach to other forms of business speculation.
>
> "If," he inquires, "you tax the unearned increment on land, why don't
> you tax the unearned increment from a large block of stock? I buy a
> piece of land; the value rises. I buy stocks; their value rises." But
> the operations are entirely dissimilar. In the first speculation the
> unearned increment derived from land arises from a wholly sterile
> process, from the mere withholding of a commodity which is needed by
> the community. In the second case, the investor in a block of shares
> does not withhold from the community what the community needs. The
one
> operation is in restraint of trade and in conflict with the general
> interest, and the other is part of a natural and healthy process, by
> which the economic plant of the world is nourished and from year to
> year successfully and notably increased.
>
> Landowner and Railway Co. Then the right hon. gentleman instanced the
> case of a new railway and a country district enriched by that
railway.
> The railway, he explained, is built to open up a new district; and
the
> farmers and landowners in that district are endowed with unearned
> increment in consequence of the building of the railway. But if after
a
> while their business aptitude and industry create a large carrying
> trade, then the railway, he contends, gets its unearned increment in
> its turn.
>
> But the right hon. gentleman cannot call the increment unearned which
> the railway acquires through the regular service of carrying goods,
> rendering a service on each occasion in proportion to the tonnage of
> goods it carries, making a profit by an active extension of the scale
> of its useful business - he cannot surely compare that process with
the
> process of getting rich merely by sitting still? It is clear that the
> analogy is not true.
>
> The Glasgow Example I do not think the Leader of the Opposition could
> have chosen a more unfortunate example than Glasgow. He said that the
> demand of that great community for land was for not more than forty
> acres a year. Is that the only demand of the people of Glasgow for
> land? Does that really represent the complete economic and natural
> demand for the amount of land a population of that size requires to
> live on? I will admit that at present prices it may be all that they
> can afford to purchase in the course of a year. But there are one
> hundred and twenty thousand persons in Glasgow who are living in
> one-room tenements; and we are told that the utmost land those people
> can absorb economically and naturally is forty acres a year.
>
> What is the explanation? Because the population is congested in the
> city the price of land is high upon the suburbs, and because the
price
> of land is high upon the suburbs the population must remain congested
> within the city. That is the position which we are complacently
assured
> is in accordance with the principles which have hitherto dominated
> civilised society.
>
> The "Poor Widow" Bogey But when we seek to rectify this system, to
> break down this unnatural and vicious circle, to interrupt this
> sequence of unsatisfactory reactions, what happens? We are not
> confronted with any great argument on behalf of the owner. Something
> else is put forward, and it is always put forward in these cases to
> shield the actual landowner or the actual capitalist from the logic
of
> the argument or from the force of a Parliamentary movement.
>
> Sometimes it is the widow. But that personality has been used to
> exhaustion. It would be sweating in the cruellest sense of the word,
> overtime of the grossest description, to bring the widow out again so
> soon. She must have a rest for a bit; so instead of the widow we have
> the market-gardener - the market-gardener liable to be disturbed on
the
> outskirts of great cities, if the population of those cities expands,
> if the area which they require for their health and daily life should
> become larger than it is at present.
>
> What is the position disclosed by the argument? On the one hand, we
> have one hundred and twenty thousand persons in Glasgow occupying
> one-room tenements; on the other, the land of Scotland. Between the
two
> stands the market-gardener, and we are solemnly invited, for the sake
> of the market-gardener, to keep that great population congested
within
> limits that are unnatural and restricted to an annual supply of land
> which can bear no relation whatever to their physical, social, and
> economic needs - and all for the sake of the market-gardener, who can
> perfectly well move farther out as the city spreads and who would not
> really be in the least injured.
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