The Need for a National Land Policy

Perry Prentice

[Reprinted from a special 84-page booklet on land,
House & Home Magazine, August, 1960]

How can we have a sound, sense-making-anti-inflation policy without paying careful heed to the most runaway inflation of all?

How can we have sense-making tax policies -- local, state, and national -- without collecting enough taxes on our principal form of wealth -- the only form of wealth whose use would be stimulated by higher taxes instead of curtailed? There would be little need or pressure for federal grants-in-aid for education, medical care, slum clearance, public housing, etc, if local governments were making better use of their exclusive power to tax land.

How can we have a sense-making farm policy without first giving careful thought to the top-heavy capital cost of farm land and adopting a sound land policy for farms? At today's land prices it takes a $20,000 investment to create one job on a good farm. If the farm problem is how to reduce farm acreage and how to get marginal farmers moved off their poor farms into industry, perhaps the best farm program would be to offer these marginal farmers up to $60 an acre to buy back and retire permanently up to 60,000,000 acres of not-too-productive land that was actually farmed this year.

How can we have a sense-making urban renewal program without first thinking through the problem of slum price inflation and adopting a sound land policy to rationalize urban land prices? Today most cities are subsidizing slums by undertaxation and discouraging improvements by overtaxation; and the federal government is making things worse by 1) letting slumlords take big depreciation write-offs on buildings that cannot possibly depreciate any further and 2) putting up land-purchase subsidies for redevelopment that push slum land prices still higher. The hundreds of millions these write-downs cost were supposed to be subsidies to give slum dwellers better homes, but they have been used as subsidies to make slum owners richer .

How can we hope to have a scandal-free highway program without giving thought to what land for the highway should cost and what the highway program would do to land prices along the routes? Some highways are enriching landowners along the way with a windfall bigger than the whole cost of the road. The canny Dutch froze the price of land along the route first. We, on the contrary, are buying the right of way for many times what the land could have sold for without the highway program to inflate its price.

How for that matter, can we have a successful foreign policy until we recognize that on every continent except Australia the land problem is a critical issue ready-made for Communist exploitation -- including, specifically, in Cuba, in Egypt, in Iran, in Iraq, in India, in black Africa, in much of South America?

Contrariwise, how can we have a realistic policy for the satellite states until we recognize that Communism is being entrenched in the rural districts of East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Rumania by the confiscation of the great estates and the redistribution of the land among the peasants. It would be still more strongly entrenched if the Reds were not foolishly trying to force the new peasant owners to pool their new land holdings in big cooperatives.