Ethical Land Tenure
Alanna Hartzok
[A presentation delivered during a panel titled "Georgist
Values, Christian Economics" at the annual conference of the
Council of Georgist Organizations, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 23 July
2004. Reprinted in
GroundSwell, November-December 2004]
About 20 years ago I put together a paper called "Ethical
Land Tenure" distributed as a resource directory.
I want to tell you the story of Charles Avilla. A while back I
came across a book called Ownership, Early Christian Teachings.
Avilla was a divinity student in the Phillipines. One of his
professors had a great concern about poverty conditions in the
Phillipines, and was taking students out to prisons where the cooks
were the land rights revolutionaries in the Phillipines. Because
they kept pushing for land reform for the people, they had ended up
in jail. So they were political prisoners who were reading the Bible
and were asking the question, who did God give this earth to? Who
does it belong to? It isn't in the Bible that so few should have so
much and so many have so little. In the theological world in this
upscale seminary he was trying to put this together about poverty
and what the biblical teachings were. He had a thesis to write and
he was thinking he would do something about economic justice. One of
his professors thought there would be a wealth of information from
the church's early history, the first 300 years after Jesus. So he
actually went back to read the Latin and Greek about land ownership
and found a wealth of information about the prophetic railings of
the people in that early time on the rights of the land.
Let me give you a few quotes from that early period.
Nehemiah 5:11, "Restore, I pray you, to them this day their
lands, their vineyards, their olive yards, and their houses."
Ezekiel 33:24, "The land is given us as an inheritance."
Ecclesiastes 5:9, "The profit of the earth is for all."
And Isaiah 5:8, "Woe unto them that join house to house,
that lay field to field til there be no place ..." Leviticus
25:23, "The land is mine, for you are strangers and sojourners
with me."
In the Judaic tradition, and the Talmudic tradition, how much of
the Jubilee justice was actually implemented is a subject of
discussion. Some say it was a good idea but not put in place. Others
say it was substantially put into place.
The Talmudic rabinical discussion is of interest to Georgists
because they tried to allocate the land according to the richness of
the soil for agriculture. For better soil, richer for agriculture,
maybe an acre of that would be allocated. On the poorer soil, these
tribes could get five acres.
The other thing was some lands were closer to the market. Some
land was closer to Jerusalem. That is an advantage over those who
would have to travel a longer distance to get to the market. How do
you have an equal rights distribution of land allocation with
reference to the market problem? For those more advantageously
situated, the adjustment was to be made by money. Those holding land
nearer the city should pay in to the common treasury the estimated
excess of value attaining to it by reason of superior situation.
While those holding land of less value by reason of distance from
the city would receive from the treasury a money compensation. On
the more valuable holdings would be imposed a tax or a lease fee,
the measure of which was the excess of their respective values over
a given standard, and the fund thus created was to be paid out in
due proportion to those whose holdings were in less favorable
locations.
In this, then, we see affirmed the doctrine that natural
advantages are common property and may not be diverted to private
gain. Throughout the ages when wisdom is applied to land problems,
we see this emerge.
Charles Avilla in his book Ownership, Early Christian Teachings
mentioned Henry George twice as being the prophetic voice of recent
times that is most closely attuned to these ancient truths.