How is it that land ownership is just, when rent, the gain in assets/income, is not a return on labor?
When a man sells 8 hours of his labor for 100$, we see that this is just because he owns his body and agrees contractually to use it in someone elses plan in exchange for money?
When that man, instead of spending his income on luxuries, saves the difference between subsistence and income he creates capital. We see that this is just, as capital is merely what returns on labor are not consumed.
When a man, sitting on a title of ownership to a plot of land, allows a farmer to work it for 500$ a month, how is this in agreement with the notion of property?
Consider that a child born into a town with a very narrow concentration of land ownership, already owes a landlord rent because of its existence on another’s supposed property.
Locke’s treatise on land declares that mixing one’s labor with a virgin plot of land transfers the just title of said land to said labormixer. But he gave a condition for the justice of that statement: that land of like quality abounded. So even if there were further plots of arable land, albeit of lesser quality than the superior homesteaded land, the standard Lockean notion does not meet the condition. Societies such as these, generally known as frontier societies, are short-lived. Men go out and claim land or states survey the land and auction it off (usually to cronies leveraged up, expecting that the land they buy will be accompanied by such an increase in population and productivity that the payments on interest will be nothing compared to the rent received.)
Locke saw a problem with private ownership of land without recompense, as did Ricardo, Smith, Mill, Spencer, Nock and Chodorov. These thinkers/writers constitute a great bulk of the classical-liberal intellectual legacy. They generally held that the justice of a system of property and free exchange was incomplete without a resolution to the problem of private ownership of land without recompense.
History is instructive on the effects of a concentration of land ownership. In the UK’s industrial revolution, approximately a quarter of England’s land was seized and sold of to industrialists. What followed was a poverty for the working class far worse than an agricultural subsistence lifestyle, precisely because there was no working-proprietor class to hold up the wage market. Their means of attaining a wage more attractive than that of working as a farmer was pulled out from underneath them and they slipped into an era of servitude, when young women had to work away their youth so as not to go the winter without a warm coat. Even if an industrialist wanted to be charitable to wage-earners he could not fight the market price of labor. Throughout all of this, productivity and population rose, boosting the value of land and enriching the land holder by virtue of his ownership.
Similar scenario’s occurred in Germany (see:http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111heil.html), where a lopsided relation of land ownership disillusioned the populace of political liberty. In the US, massive tracts of land were given away cheaply alongside railroad projects (as Rothbard documented) and in general. Mining and water rights gave landholders the right to entire veins of mineral or entire springs of water. A class of “robber-barons” ensued from these gifts of the public breast. While some American entrepreneurs were able to establish fortunes great enough to influence the institution of education in a broad and general sense, NYC residents lived in one-room-nine-person apartments. Yes one might attribute this to immigration and state handouts, but that land relations have played such an instrumental role in the distribution of wealth historically ought to invite curiousity from anyone paying attention. Those nations which have had a concentrated ownership of land have also had a class of paupers far poorer than any farmer, while those nations whose land ownership is spread broadly had independently wealthy farmers and workers.
The effects of concentrated land ownership and property in land without recompense become less significant to us now, as many Americans are homeowners (well… the banks are homeowners in essence, but you know what I mean) and technology, stock of capital goods, and division of labor are all more fully developed. But the injustice remains in visible form in countries such as Russia (which recently underwent a transition to a quasi-market economy) and third world countries, where the many serve slavishly the fantasically wealthy few.
How can you justify the continuation of private property in land without recompense to those excluded from said land when rent is not a return on labor, direct or indirect, when the fixed supply of land makes Locke’s treatise applicable to only a brief window of human history, and when the evidence of narrow ownership of land speaks volumes on the poverty of the lowest class and the wealth of the highest class?