Land and Libertarians

I am a "land taxer".

Some people seem to believe one cannot be both. On the one hand, we find people like Lib Dem Matthew Huntbach, who in the comments to this Lib Dem Voice piece on my opposition to the suggested "Mansion Tax" claims that as a self-described libertarian I am likely to drop the idea of land taxes, however much I may talk about them (much more than him I'd wager but there we are) as soon as the opportunity to enrich what he thinks of as my fellow wealthy libertarians allows. For the record, I don't think that I know any truly wealthy libertarians or anarchists, and indeed I know of not a few who, despite being not very well off at all, subsisting on benefits, campaign actively for the destruction of the welfare statist system that seems to sustain them at the moment. On the other hand, we find lots of other libertarians who resolutely refuse to accept even as libertarian those who would appear to want to "confiscate" the value of private property in land they hold as a near sacred element of libertarian thought.

Now I realize that one blog post by an insignificant in Oxford is not going to settle this argument once and for all. Far better economists and political theorists than I have tried. But it is a personal battle for me, because it was the ideas of Henry George that brought me to libertarianism - for his is a libertarian idea, in direct response to the "land question" raised by so many in the history of liberal and anarchist thought - from Locke, Paine, Proudhon, Spencer, Mill, and the individual anarchists Spooner and Tucker. And it is as I have heard, read and hopefully understood more by the likes of the Austrian school market anarchists that my views on George's "single tax" solution have been challenged. Yet I still hold them.

First, a bald statement: I do not believe there are many libertarians of whatever branch or flavour (and we are truly a Baskin-Robbins ideology on that score, whatever the misinformed Lib Dem detractors believe) who do not appreciate that there is an issue of equitable access to land - that which has historically been called the "land question" by many (including Murray Rothbard [pdf] even as he criticized Henry George's solution to it). Sure some place more emphasis on it than others - but I really believe that any who denies there is any issue has not thought terribly deeply about it. I'd go further - that before the early part of the twentieth century it was a touchstone of most or even all of the emerging theories of libertarianism and anarchism; that the four "great monopolies" - of land, of money, of intellectual property and of government - that the individualist anarchists and mutualists described were commonly held to lie at the root of the inequity caused by the statist systems of privilege which they wanted to smash.

It may be that it is merely a difference of emphasis. George, for example, like Proudhon believed that the land monopoly was the "mother of all monopoly" and that solving that, for Georgists as for Proudhon, will tend to render the other three insignificant. When we sat down to discuss the content of the Lib Dems ALTER's recent book "The Case for a New People's Budget" I wanted it to include pieces on the money system and intellectual property but one of the other editors, a better schooled Georgist than I felt that such was completely unnecessary, since solving the land question would solve these others.

On the other side, the Austrians today believe, perhaps, that the fiat state controlled and cartelized money system is at the root of monopolistic behaviour and that sorting that out will render the others nearly insignificant. To this extent, whilst we acknowledge there are other problems, if all we are saying is that sorting this one or that one out first will resolve those others, we are, by different means, aiming at the same ends, of equitable economic distribution of scarce goods.

Others still acknowledge that there is an historical problem - that most land title ultimately and historically descends from aggression or statist privilege - such as monarchs kicking off serfs to give rewards of land to favoured courtiers, or the state sanctioning enclosures without any recompense to those who required the land to maintain life and limb. And they might suggest, as in the excellent introduction to libertarianism by Morris and Linda Tannehill - "The Market for Liberty" (available here as a free audiobook) suggest that at the advent of a truly libertarian society such ancient titles would be revoked since they would be next to impossible to prove and that everyone would have to stake their claims anew. But to me this resolves the problem as a "one off" and not the ongoing problem that land distribution necessarily is given the propensity for populations to change and land requirements with them.

Since it is as a result of hearing Hans-Herman Hoppe on the "Idea of a Private Law Society" nearly a year ago now at last year's Libertarian Alliance Conference that I have become more interested in "full blown" non-state ideas, it is, perhaps naturally, to the Austrian School and in particular the Mises Institute that I have turned to learn more; devouring several years' worth of podcasts of the Mises University series, but also listening to various contributers to the FEE's Freedom University series. And whilst they do indeed talk very little about land, I can glean some of the following with which I find myself in agreement that relates to the "land question" in their thinking:

• If we did not have the corrupting influence of inherently inflationary and statist fiat money there would be much less speculative froth in the system to be ploughed into land values.

• If we did not have state controlled zoning and planning restrictions, more land would be made available as development was needed and land values elsewhere would tend to fall.

• If we did not have state enforceable land titles, we would have to find another mechanism for protecting our rights of ownership of land which would tend to release land that land owners felt was uneconomic to protect compared with the utility they got out of holding it.

• And, I really do appreciate the arguments in favour of the protection of private property (well, I'd rather, after Proudhon, say "possession" than "property") being the mainstay of a civil society, that without which original appropriation and therefore economic production would be all but impossible. And allied to this I feel a sense of unfairness that someone who has, in the Lockean term, "mixed his labour" with "land" and thus brought it into production in the first place, might find that simply because others have later agglomerated around his far-sighted piece of appropriation, he would be subject to paying rent on it that may price him off it.

But...and you knew there would be one...what I cannot get round is the idea that, whilst anarchists anathematize taxation as confiscation of the legitimate product of labour and therefore an attack on Lockean self-ownership, the rental value of land is really a tax on everyone else who cannot use a particular location, even though they may have a more productive capacity to use a particular piece. All of us pay for the monopolization of locations of better quality in terms of our needs, than what we are then forced to settle for. If we have to live further away from work, we pay in time and travel costs to get past those locations that would serve us better. These values feed into land values. It is not merely that land value increment is unearned by the land-owner, but it costs the rest of us in like measure. And it is a huge burden - in the UK it amounts perhaps to about a third of what is the salaries portion of GDP. This effect, whilst it may be smaller if all the other Austrian remedies above were implemented, would never, in my opinion, disappear.

Austrians, of course, reject the value theories on which this hypothesis of land values is based - the labour, or cost theories of Smith, Ricardo and other Classical Economists. They prefer their subjectivist or utilitarian theories based on the work of the likes of Carl Menger and Eugen von Böem-Bawerk. And, whilst I also do not agree with a wholly unmodified labour theory, I am becoming more and more convinced by the likes of Kevin Carson's critique of Menger's and Böem-Bawerk's criticism of the Classical cost theories in his "Studies in Mutualist Political Economy" - which is just as well since I describe myself as a "mutualist"!

On the other hand, I am with the anarchists in that I do not want a government or quasi-government institutional structure to value and collect such "rent". And so I am attracted to ideas such as those of geo-libertarian Dan Sullivan in the US, of how it could be handled by a voluntarist system of community management companies. And it is on his ideas that I think can be developed a system that fits with both the Georgist aims of collecting land rents and the anarchist aims of not having government structures impose taxes on us. In his essay "Are you a Real Libertarian or a Royal Libertarian" he says, toward the end:

Can't we do this without the state?

There are, in fact, proprietary communities operating on the single tax model. Arden, Delaware, with a population of 4900, has had no local taxes since 1900. The Arden Corporation collects a fair market rent on each land parcel, which is reappraised annually. (They actually collect only about a fourth of the rent to which they are entitled.) From that they not only pay for all the municipal services, but rebate all property taxes levied by the county and school district.

There are excellent reasons for libertarians to prefer the land trust route over the political route. Private communities can be built on explicit contracts (leases) with the citizens, can have internal democratic processes that are vastly superior to electoral democracy, can be far more flexible and free of state intervention, and can be downright profitable (even with trust investors pocketing a mere fraction of the rent). Most of all, dealing with investors is far more pleasant and self-affirming than dealing with politicians.

But what worries me about this approach, taken literally at least, is that we might end up with one agency acting as a local monopoly that becomes a de facto government, just like Nozick says that private protection would combine into one agency with a monopoly in an area (though I am yet to read "Anarchy, State and Utopia" - I bought it and promptly lost my copy! - and so haven't read his arguments, I instinctively disagree with this as an inevitable outcome) and be to all intents and purposes a coercive albeit limited government.

However, I think there is a resolution. Admittedly I have not gone into this too deeply as yet. I have not followed all the economic incentives through the processes. It is based on the idea that in a "private law society" (necessarily the case of course in a no-state anarchist system), defense of one's life and property would be handled by competing insurance, protection and arbitration agencies.

In the absence of a single, state-provided, system of land titles, one's ability to hold onto a piece of land (that is, not to fight for, but legally to defend one's right of occupancy against any other claims) would usually be handled by your insurance and protection agencies. Of course, you could opt out, but then you would have to pay for such physical protection and legal protection against claimants by yourself and on a simple division of labour basis it is likely to be more cost effective joining with others via an insurance and protection agency system. But your premiums would likely rise to be something similar to the market rent value of the location - because it is on that basis that other possible claimants would be likely to be basing their claims on. If your insurance agency were a mutual agency operating with profit policies, they would effectively disburse the equivalent of the statist "citizen's dividend" to the members with with-profit policies.

Here, there could be competition. My insurance agency would make a (probably class action on behalf of all their clients inconvenienced by your monopoly holding of land that costs us money to avoid) claim against yours, yours would pay up and that would go into the profits of my insurance firm for distribution to the with-profits members. And these firms could compete across whole areas of productive land. So, for example, you couldn't have only those in expensive locations in Mayfair joining together and insuring against each other and effectively doing so cheaply because you're hardly likely to lay claim to your neighbour's similar property if it's going to cost you money and you're both pretty happy with your lot and are not costing each other anything by your occupancy of neighbouring sites. My firm may be based in Sutton or Dagenham and have most of its clients there, but will still be likely to be making claims against yours.

Eventually it is likely that these individual claims would not be processed at all, but that reciprocal arrangements between these agencies would spread premiums around amongst them such that the dividends paid to each one's clients would tend to even out, but all the same, the claims mechanism would remain available where there were disputes, just as, for land taxers operating within a state system, there would be tribunals to adjudicate on land value disputes.

UPDATE:  I've thought of perhaps a simpler way of understanding this - it might be looked on as competing land registries paying each other premiums for recognizing and upholding each others' clients' titles.  Does that make sense?

As I say - I have not followed the economic incentives right through such a system. But I think it contains the germ of a possible solution that does not rely on confiscatory quasi-state bodies but does equitably distribute the values created by and paid for in other ways by all who need to use land within an agglomeration area.

Remember please, this is a genuine search for a reconciliation between two sets of ideas with which I generally agree but which in contemporary libertarian discourse seem to be all but irreconcilable. But if you've read this far, I'd love to hear your responses.