Progress and Poverty, Volumes I and II: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of WealthGeorge, Henry
General
Progress and Poverty, Volumes I and II: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth
George, Henry
Economics; Single tax
It is wider in this: In common speech we speak of rent only when owner
and user are distinct persons. But in the economic sense there is also
rent where the same person is both owner and user. Where owner and user
are thus the same person, whatever part of his income he might obtain
by letting the land to another is rent, while the return for his labor
and capital are that part of his income which they would yield him did
he hire instead of owning the land. Rent is also expressed in a selling
price. When land is purchased, the payment which is made for the
ownership, or right to perpetual use, is rent commuted or capitalized.
If I buy land for a small price and hold it until I can sell it for
a large price, I have become rich, not by wages for my labor or by
interest upon my capital, but by the increase of rent. Rent, in short,
is the share in the wealth produced which the exclusive right to the
use of natural capabilities gives to the owner. Wherever land has an
exchange value there is rent in the economic meaning of the term.
Wherever land having a value is used, either by owner or hirer, there
is rent actual; wherever it is not used, but still has a value, there
is rent potential. It is this capacity of yielding rent which gives
value to land. Until its ownership will confer some advantage, land has
no value.[32]
Thus rent or land value does not arise from the productiveness or
utility of land. It in no wise represents any help or advantage given
to production, but simply the power of securing apart of the results
of production. No matter what are its capabilities, land can yield
no rent and have no value until some one is willing to give labor or
the results of labor for the privilege of using it; and what any one
will thus give depends not upon the capacity of the land, but upon its
capacity as compared with that of land that can be had for nothing. I
may have very rich land, but it will yield no rent and have no value
so long as there is other land as good to be had without cost. But
when this other land is appropriated, and the best land to be had for
nothing is inferior, either in fertility, situation, or other quality,
my land will begin to have a value and yield rent. And though the
productiveness of my land may decrease, yet if the productiveness of
the land to be had without charge decreases in greater proportion, the
rent I can get, and consequently the value of my land, will steadily
increase. Rent, in short, is the price of monopoly, arising from the
reduction to individual ownership of natural elements which human
exertion can neither produce nor increase.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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