Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth

by John A. Ryan

Frequently, however, the individual Socialist forgets this materialistic theory, and falls back upon his common sense, and his innate conceptions of right and wrong, of free will and responsibility. Instead of regarding the existing land system as a mere product of blind economic forces, he often denounces it as morally wrong and unjust. His contentions may be reduced to two propositions: The proprietor who takes rent from a cultivator robs the producer of a part of his product; and no one has a right to take for his exclusive use that which is the natural heritage and means of support for all the people. Referring to the receipt of 35,000,000 pounds a year in rent by 8,000 British landlords, Hyndman and Morris exclaim: "Yet in the face of all this a certain school still contend that there is no class robbery."[9] Since the claim that the labourer has a right to the full product of his labour applies to capital as well as to land, it can be more conveniently considered when we come to treat of the income of the capitalist. With regard to the second contention, the following statement by Robert Blatchford may be taken as fairly representative of Socialist thought: "The earth belongs to the people.... So that he who possesses land possesses that to which he has no right, and he who invests his savings in land becomes the purchaser of stolen property."[10] Inasmuch as this argument is substantially the same as one of the fundamental contentions in the system of Henry George, it will be discussed in connection with the latter, in the pages immediately following.

Henry George's Attack on the Title of First Occupancy

Every concrete right, whether to land or to artificial goods, is based upon some contingent fact or ground, called a title. By reason of some title a man is justified in appropriating a particular farm, house, or hat. When he becomes the proprietor of a thing that has hitherto been ownerless, his title is said to be original; when he acquires an article from some previous owner, his title is said to be derived. As an endless series of proprietors is impossible, every derived title must be traceable ultimately to some original title. Among the derived titles the most important are contract, inheritance, and prescription. The original title is either first occupancy or labour. The prevailing view among the defenders of private landownership has always been that the original title is not labour but first occupancy. If this title be not valid every derived title is worthless, and no man has a true right to the land that he calls his own. Henry George's attack upon the title of first occupancy is an important link in his argument against private property in land.

"Priority of occupation give exclusive and perpetual title to the surface of a globe in which, in the order of nature, countless generations succeed each other!... Has the first comer at a banquet the right to turn back all the chairs, and claim that none of the other guests shall partake of the food provided, except as they make terms with him? Does the first man who presents a ticket at the door of a theatre, and passes in, acquire by his priority the right to shut the doors and have the performance go on for him alone?... And to this manifest absurdity does the recognition of the individual right to land come when carried to its ultimate that any human being, could he concentrate in himself the individual rights to the land of any country, could expel therefrom all the rest of the inhabitants; and could he concentrate the individual rights to the whole surface of the globe, he alone of all the teeming population of the earth would have the right to live."[11]

In passing, it may be observed that Henry George was not the first distinguished writer to use the illustration drawn from the theatre. Cicero, St. Basil, and St. Thomas Aquinas all employed it to refute extravagant conceptions of private ownership. In reply to the foregoing argument of Henry George, we point out: first, that the right of ownership created by first occupancy is not unlimited, either extensively or intensively; and, second, that the historical injustices connected with private ownership have been in only a comparatively slight degree due to the first occupation of very large tracts of land. The right of first occupancy does not involve the right to take a whole region or continent, compelling all subsequent arrivals to become tenants of the first. There seems to be no good reason to think that the first occupant is justified in claiming as his own more land than he can cultivate by his own labour, or with the assistance of those who prefer to be his employés or his tenants rather than independent proprietors. "He has not the right to reserve for himself alone the whole territory, but only that part of it which is really useful to him, which he can make fruitful."[12] Nor is the right of private landownership, on whatever title it may rest, unlimited intensively, that is, in its powers or comprehension. Though a man should have become the rightful owner of all the land in a neighbourhood, he would have no moral right to exclude therefrom those persons who could not without extreme inconvenience find a living elsewhere. He would be morally bound to let them cultivate it at a fair rental. The Christian conception of the intensive limitations of private ownership is well exemplified in the action of Pope Clement IV, who permitted strangers to occupy the third part of any estate which the proprietor refused to cultivate himself.[13] Ownership understood as the right to do what one pleases with one's possessions, is due partly to the Roman law, partly to the Code Napoléon, but chiefly to modern theories of individualism.

In the second place, the abuses which have accompanied private property in land are very rarely traceable to abuses of the right of first occupancy. The men who have possessed too much land, and the men who have used their land as an instrument of social oppression, have scarcely ever been first occupants or the successors thereof through derived titles. This is especially true of modern abuses, and modern legal titles. In the words of Herbert Spencer: "Violence, fraud, the prerogative of force, the claims of superior cunning,—these are the sources to which these titles may be traced. The original deeds were written with the sword, rather than with the pen: not lawyers but soldiers were the conveyancers: blows were the current coin given in payment; and for seals blood was used in preference to wax."[14] Not the appropriation of land which nobody owned, but the forcible and fraudulent seizure of land which had already been occupied, has been one of the main causes of the evils attending upon private landownership. Moreover, in England and all other countries that have adopted her legal system, the title of first occupancy could never be utilised by individuals: all unoccupied land was claimed by the Crown or by the State, and transferred thence to private persons or corporations. If some individuals have got possession of too much land through this process, the State, not the title of first occupancy, must bear the blame. This is quite clear in the history of land tenure in the United States and Australasia.

Henry George's attack upon private landownership through the title of first occupancy is therefore ineffective; for he attributes to this qualities that it does not possess, and consequences for which it is not responsible.

His Defence of the Title of Labour

Thinking that he has shattered the title of first occupancy, Henry George undertakes to set up in its place the title of labour. "There can be to the ownership of anything no rightful title which is not derived from the title of the producer, and does not rest on the natural right of the man to himself."[15] The only original title is man's right to the exercise of his own faculties; from this right follows his right to what he produces; now man does not produce land; therefore he cannot have rightful property in land. Of these four propositions the first is a pure assumption, the second is untrue, the third is a truism, and the fourth is as unfounded as the first. Dependently upon God, man has, indeed, a right to himself and to the exercise of his own faculties; but this is a right of action, not of property. By the exercise of this right alone man can never produce anything, never become the owner of anything. He can produce only by exerting his powers upon something outside of himself; that is, upon the goods of external nature. To become the producer and the owner of a product, he must first become the owner of materials. By what title is he to acquire these? In one passage[16] Henry George seems to think that no title is necessary, and refers to the raw material as an "accident," while the finished product is the "essence," declaring that "the right of private ownership attaches the accident to the essence, and gives the right of ownership to the natural material in which the labour of production is embodied." Now this solution of the difficulty is too simple and arbitrary. Its author would have shrunk from applying it universally; for example, to the case of the shoemaker who produces a pair of shoes out of stolen materials, or the burglar who makes an overcoat more useful (and therefore performs a task of production) by transferring it from a warehouse to his shivering back! Evidently Henry George has in mind only raw material in the strict sense, that which has not yet been separated from the storehouse of nature; for he declares in another place that "the right to the produce of labour cannot be enjoyed without the free use of the opportunities offered by nature."[17] In other words, man's title to the materials upon which he is to exercise his faculties, and of which he is to become the owner by right of production, is the title of gift conferred by nature, or nature's God.

Nevertheless this title is applicable only to those goods that exist in unlimited abundance, not to those parts of the natural bounty that are scarce and possess economic value. A general assumption by producers that they were entitled to take possession of the gifts of nature indiscriminately would mean industrial anarchy and civil war. Hence Henry George tells us that the individual should pay rent to "the community to satisfy the equal rights of all other members of the community."[18] Inasmuch as the individual must pay this price before he begins to produce, his right to the use of natural opportunities is not "free," nor does his labour alone constitute a title to that part of them that he utilises in production. Consequently labour does not create a right to the concrete product. It merely gives the producer a right to the value that he adds to the raw material. His right to the raw material itself, to the elements that he withdraws from the common store, and fashions into a product, say, wheat, lumber, or steel, does not originate in the title of labour but in the title of contract. This is the contract by which in exchange for rent paid to the community he is authorised to utilise these materials. Until he has made this contract he has manifestly no full right to the product into which natural forces as well as his own labour have entered. According to Henry George's own statements, therefore, the right to the product does not spring from labour alone, but from labour plus compensation to the community. Since the contract by which the prospective user agrees to pay this compensation or rent must precede his application of labour, it instead of labour is the original title. Since the contract is made with a particular community for the use of a particular piece of land, the title that it conveys must derive ultimately from the occupation of that land by that community,—or some previous community of which the present one is the legal heir. So far as economically valuable materials are concerned, therefore, the logic of Henry George's principles leads inevitably to the conclusion that the original title of ownership is first occupancy.