Land and property

From Land: the Challenge and the Opportunity, by Susan Witt and Bob Swann

The economist Ralph Borsodi, in his book The Seventeen Problems of Man and Society, distinguishes between those things that can be legally owned and thus traded, and those that belong in the realm of "trusteeship," to use Gandhi's term. Whatever an individual creates as a result of labor applied to land-the harvest from a garden, the home built of wood from the forest, the sweater knitted from spun wool-is private property and may rightfully be traded as commodities. However, the land itself and its resources, which are Earth-given and of limited supply, should be held in trusteeship and their use allocated on a limited basis for present and future generations. When an individual is allowed private ownership of such a limited resource, that individual has an unfair economic advantage. The scarcity of arable land and a growing demand for it result in an increase in the value of the land through no effort on the part of the landowner. The potential for speculative gain inherent in the present system of private land ownership places tremendous pressure on the landowner to maximize the dollar value of the land by developing it. The use of zoning regulations and conservation restrictions is a limited and increasingly costly method for ending our tradition of land exploitation.

A further result of the ability to commoditize land is that wealth generated by a community will flow first into land-from which high gains are anticipated-rather than into new small businesses. The local economy stagnates when a community's capital is tied up in land. Credit for the small-business owner tightens. The region loses its diversity of enterprises, which is the basis of a more sustainable economy and a more environmentally responsible business sector. When a region unties its capital from the land, it creates new investment capital, which can activate the imaginative and entrepreneurial skills of the community generating new local businesses that will produce goods and services once imported from other regions. New investment capital can facilitate increased regional production and steel regional economies against fluctuations in the broader economy.

Earth-given? Or God-given? I agree with the principle that land is given by God for the benefit of all; the question is whether private ownership should extend to land or not, and if it can, how it should be regulated (for example, whether it can be sold or not). More for me to consider...