Human Rights
Edward J. Dodson
[A letter responding to a discussion in
The Center Magazine, the publication of the Center for the
Study of Democratic Institutions, July/August 1984]
TO THE EDITORS:
The announcement for the Center's program on human rights arrived
Just this weekend.
What I find to be most unfortunate is that such a dialogue is deemed
necessary Can there be any doubt that human rights are being violated
consistently and quite often systematically within each of the earth's
societies? What does it take for individuals of conscience to
recognize the growing terror under which so many of our species must
exist?
One thing I am sure of: of all the causes discussed and all the
solutions put forth there will be few courageous enough or
sufficiently insightful beyond that offered by a very young Winston
Churchill in his book
The People's Rights. Here early in the twentieth century came
an analysis of the human condition that demanded to be heard but has
been effectively silenced by powerful interests. Churchill writes:
"It is monopoly which is the key note, and where
monopoly prevails the greater the injury to society the greater the
reward of the monopolist will be. See how all this evil process
strikes at every form of industrial activity. The municipality,
wishing for broader streets, better houses, more health, decent,
scientifically planned towns, is made to pay in exact proportion, or
to a very great extent in proportion, as it has exerted itself in
the past to make improvements. The more it has improved the town,
the more it has increased the land value, and the more it will have
to pay for any land it may wish to acquire. The manufacturer
purposing to start a new industry, proposing to erect a great
factory offering employment to thousands of hands, is made to pay
such a price for his land that the purchase price hangs around the
neck of his whole business, hampering his competitive power in every
market, clogging him far more than any foreign tariff in his export
com petition, and the land values strike down through the profits of
the manufacturer onto the wages of the workman. The railway company
wishing to build a new line finds that the price of land which
yester day was only rated at agricultural value has risen to a
prohibitive figure the moment it was known that the new line was
projected, and either the railway is not built or, if it is, is
built only on terms which largely transfer to the landowner the
profits which are due to the shareholders and the advantages which
should have accrued to the traveling public."
There is more. At this point the author is just warming up:
"It does not matter where you look or what examples
you select, you will see that every form of enterprise, every step
in material progress, is only undertaken after the land monopolist
has skimmed the cream off for himself, and every where today the man
or the public body who wishes to put land to its highest use is
forced to pay a preliminary fine in land values to the man who is
putting it to an inferior use, and in some cases to no use at all.
All comes back to the land value, and its owner for the time being
is able to levy his toll upon all other forms of wealth and upon
every form of industry. A portion, in some cases the whole, of every
benefit which is laboriously acquired by the community is
represented in the land value, and finds its way automatically into
the landlord's pocket. If there is a rise in wages, rents are able
to move forward be cause the workers can afford to pay a little
more. If the opening of a new railway or a new tramway or the
institution of an improved service of workmen's trains or lowering
of fares or a new invention or any other public convenience affords
a benefit to the workers in any particular district, it becomes
easier for them to live, and therefore the landlord and the ground
landlord, one on top of the other are able to charge them more for
the privilege of living there."
Churchill echoed the wisdom of a contemporary British subject, Max
Hirsch, whose attacks both the monopolist and socialist structures as
the antithesis of democracy." Of socialism, Hirsch concludes (p.
326): "Instead of raising the material condition of [the]
minority, socialism must lower to their level the material condition
of all. A monotonous equality in unavoidable poverty will be the
condition of the whole people in the socialized state." Hirsch
(who dedicated his book to the memory of Henry George) would have
expressed his resounding approval as Winston Churchill zeroed in on
the underlying cause of human suffer mg: "In no great country in
the new world or the old," wrote Churchill, "have the
working people secured the double advantage of Free Trade and Free
Land together, by which I mean a commercial system and a land system
from which so far as possible, all forms of monopoly have been
rigorously excluded."
He ended with a quote from Richard Cobden whose fight against the
infamous Corn Laws has been a bright banner for the advocates of
laissez-faire:
"You who shall liberate the land will do more for
your country than we have done in the liberation of its commerce."
How do we then liberate the land" back away from the monopolists
and toward a just political economy? Through the state control and
ownership of the means of production (i.e., land and physical capital)
as proposed by the socialists? No. Not if Hirsch is to be believed,
and I think he is Rather by the simple process of collecting the "unearned
increment (i.e., the community created land value or more specifically
the annual rental value of land) This answer has been put forth for
over two hundred years, first by the Frenchmen Turgot and Quesnay,
then Herbert Spencer, Richard Cobden Henry George, Max Hirsch and yes
Winston Churchill.
To that list you can also add Leo Tolstoy and Sun Yat-sen.
Yes, a dialogue on human rights will further reinforce the magnitude
of the problem. The solutions; are there for us as echoes of a time
when wisdom almost prevailed.
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