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A better world? It starts with fair deals.

With land rent, ordinary people know there is always land available at a good price. With land rent, businesses cannot pollute without paying the full costs. With land rent, military powers cannot occupy land without paying rent. In short, people get a fair deal.

All the benefits of land rent come from the idea of a fair deal. People who can work hard and make the world better have their opportunity and are rewarded. People who don’t work or make the world worse, have increased costs. This fairness leads to numerous benefits.

Fixing the environment

Land rent is so environmentally friendly that the land rent movement and the environmental movement are sometime hard to tell apart. One of the biggest causes of environmental damage is poverty - people make short term decisions because they are desperate. By eliminating poverty, land rent eliminates all this needless destruction.

Less pollution, more beauty

Land rent is calculated as the value of land created by society. But the same calculation also works for individuals. If an individual can prove that they make others’ land more valuable, they can claim that value from society. So creating parkland is profitable because it raises local land values. And creating pollution is extremely expensive because it lowers land values (who wants to live near a smelly factory?) So land rent creates more parks and less pollution.

An end to ugly urban sprawl

If land owners need to make more money from their land, will this lead to ugly factories where there is now farmland? No, quite the opposite. First, it leads to more compact cities. Urban sprawl is ended because empty plots of land are quickly sold, and people tend to use land more efficiently, since every acre costs them rent.

But this does not mean horribly compressed cities. As people choose not to use the land outside cities, that land price goes down. So a happy equilibrium is reached, where people use the land they need for a good life, but no more. Contrast this with the present system, where anyone with enough money is driven to occupy more and more land, because once they pay the high entry price the land is practically rent free. This land speculation ensures that the price will always rise, encouraging more desire for land, and ever higher prices. With land rent there is no land speculation. With land rent, land prices are low and stable, reflecting the actual need to use land, and not the bubble of speculative profit.

Another advanmtage pof compact cities is that public transport becomes far more efficient, thus saving money, reducing pollution, increasing efficiency (because roads are emptier) and making more connections between people.

More national parks, more forests

With land rent, the government does not need endless tax inspectors trying to trace difficult to find transactions, Instead, the only skill they need is to measure land values and what changes those values. As this skill improves, it becomes possible to measure the economic value of national parks. At present we have national parks because of a gut feeling that they are somehow useful, but this is difficult to prove, so parks are always under pressure from developers. But when their value to society is measured accurately, everything changes.

The total economic value of wild habitats (including much more than just tourism and logging) is almost never measured. But when we measure all the long term benefits, we discover that:

Putting a money value on these benefits is extremely difficult, as many of them do not involve goods and services traded in markets. One study in 1997 put their combined worth at about US$38 trillion a year, roughly equal to the global economy itself.
...
In every case, the so-called Total Economic Value (TEV) of the [wild, undeveloped] habitats was higher when they remained intact. On average about 50% of TEV was lost upon conversion [by building on them, etc.].
...
If ~50% of TEV is lost on conversion, then a single year's loss of natural habitats can be estimated to cost humanity more than US$200 billion that year, and every year into the future.
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...protected area networks would, however, cover around 15% of the land and 30% of the sea, and ensure the continued delivery of goods and services with an annual value (net of benefits from conversion) of around US$5,000 billion. Based on this, the benefit to cost ratio of a reserve system meeting minimum safe standards is around 100 to 1. Greatly expanding conservation efforts thus makes sound economic as well as moral sense.
- “The Economic Value of Conserving Wild Nature” RSPB, 2002

At present, it is difficult to measure the real costs and benefits associated with development of natural land. A land rent system makes those calculations much easier to make, and so protects and expands the natural beauty of the planet.

Less crime

Criminals rely on sympathy from their friends. A lot of people have sympathy for petty criminals because they see much greater injustice in high places. They look at their friends who struggle in a harsh world, and they look at the rich and powerful who don’t seem to deserve their comfort, and they decide where their loyalties lie.

I am not saying that the underclass is right, but if we had more justice among the rich, we would get more sympathy from the poor. It would not be perfect, but it would be better. If the poor cooperate more with the authorities, there would be less crime. To see this in practice, look at any community where everyone agrees on the rules - whether based on religion, walls and gates, rural isolation, or whatever. Crime naturally falls to almost zero because everyone respects the authorities.

Land rent creates more rewards for honest work

By removing the advantages of land monopoly, land rent reduces the demand for land and also increases it supply (as land owners sell). So the price of land goes down. So anyone who wants to start a business, or have their own little farm, can do so more easily. Nobody needs to feel trapped economically.

To see the effects of lower land prices, consider the early days of the United States, land was cheap, and anyone who didn’t fit in or who wanted money could just leave and find themselves a piece of land. People often attribute this to a religious work ethic, but they forget that the USA received people of all religions, not just Puritans. The only thing they had in common was a desire for land. Congressman Henry George Jr speaks at length about this. Here is just one quotation.

While Minister to France, Jefferson explained to one of his French friends that in the ten years of his attendance as student and practitioner at the bar of the Supreme Court of Virginia there, never was a trial for robbery on the high road, and that he never heard of one in any of the other States, except in the cities of New York and Philadelphia immediately after the departure of the British army, "when some deserters infested those cities for a time." (Letter to M. Claviere, Jefferson's Writings, Ford Edition, Vol . IV, p. 402.)

Land rent creates more efficient laws

Our current legal system is slow, in part because laws are so complex and numerous, and often seem to conflict, which makes cases take longer. The laws have to be complex and conflicting because their whole approach to property is illogical. Land rent places justice at the heart of our society, and implies a logical and consistent approach to property. This allows for simpler, more effective laws, and thus a more efficient justice system.

Less war

The same principles that reduce crime also reduce war, for war is just crime on an international scale. If nations can gain more wealth through trade, and have more reason to trust each other, the reasons for war will continually decrease.

Under the present system of lands ownership, every nation knows that if it can take land and hold onto it for enough years, it will be recognized as the rightful owner, especially if it then makes token gestures of apology. This encourages wars of aggression. Land rent changes that - if we have land rent between nations, then there is no advantage in grabbing another nations’ land, unless it plainly benefits everyone involved.

It may sound unlikely that we will ever have land rent between nations. But if we have land rent within each nation, this increases the pressure for land rent between nations. And if the global system accepts wars of aggression, the nations can hardly complain if the more powerful nations swallow the less powerful ones. And remember that the more powerful nations are those with the more efficient economies. And there is nothing more efficient than land rent. Regardless of what nations think or intend, land rent nations will naturally change other nations, either by direct action against tyrants (see below) or by weak nations adapting to the pressures of the global market.

How to remove tyrants

Tyrants usually destroy their nation’s economy. Since their nations are weak, why don’t the rich democracies use their vastly superior power to simply move in and remove the tyrants?

In 2003, the American Neoconservatives gained control of the White House and tried to do exactly that with Iraq. They succeeded in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but then found that many Iraqis did not trust them. This lack of trust created an endless stream of insurgents, and support for extreme religious alternatives. So what went wrong?

Tyrants: lessons from Iraq

Why didn’t the Iraqis trust the Americans? There are two main reasons, which are really the same reason - who controls the land.

The first reason was oil. Iraqis believed, with some justification, that America simply wanted to take Iraq’s oil. This was also believed (probably with good reason) by critics in America, and this weakened the President’s power to act.

The second reason is pride. Iraqis saw America as an occupying force, and by the usual rules the people who occupy the land control it. Iraqis saw this as both dangerous and humiliating. The opposition never died down, and Iraq became almost ungovernable. So what is the solution? You guessed it, land rent.

Under land rent, land owners pay society for the natural value of the land. If Americans controlled Iraqi oil fields it would not matter, since the Iraqis could charge massive amounts of land rent for the privilege. If America wanted to control the whole nation they would have to pay for the privilege, acre by acre.

If land rent was in force, it would be plain to everyone that America could only stay if it paid massive amounts of money to the Iraqis. So no Iraqis would worry about occupation or losing oil - they would probably welcome it.

It could be argued that America is already paying massive amounts of money to Iraq, all the Iraqi oil wealth is already going to Iraq, and so on. But this is not obvious to the average Iraqi citizen or American voter. Land rent would make it obvious. Land rent would be one simple payment decided by the market. it would be plain and clear for all to see.

What if only a few more people were persuaded? You only need to persuade a small percentage more than at present. In a case such as Iraq, political opinions balance on a knife edge. The difference between success and failure can be very small. Land rent would provide that difference.

In summary, the present system creates an endless messy conflict based on stealing resources. The only winners are the other tyrants who know that, as long as they give some superficial reforms, they are probably safe for another twenty years. I contrast, land rent would make a success of liberating Iraq, and other nations would soon follow. With land rent, no tyrant would be safe.

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