HISTORY OF RENT.—RENT AND THE GENERAL GOOD.
We so frequently hear rent called the result of the monopoly[159-1] of land, and an undeserved tribute paid by the whole people to landowners, that it is high time we should call attention to the common advantage it is to all. There is evidently danger that, with the rapid growth of population, the mass of mankind should yield to the temptation of gradually confining themselves to the satisfaction of coarse, palpable wants; that all refined leisure, which makes life and the troubles that attend it worth enduring, and which is the indispensable foundation of all permanent progress and all higher activity, should be gradually surrendered. (See § 145.) Here rent constitutes a species of reserve fund, which grows greater in proportion as these dangers impend by reason of the decline of wages and of the profit of capital, or interest.[159-2] Besides, precisely in times when rent is high, the sale and divisibility of landed estates act as a beneficent reaction against the monopoly of land, which is always akin to the condition of things created by rent.
But it is of immeasurably greater importance that high rents deter the people from abusing the soil in an anti-economic way; that they compel men to settle about the centers of commerce, to improve the means of transportation, and under certain circumstances to engage in the work of colonization; while, otherwise, idleness would soon reconcile itself to the heaping together of large swarms of men.[159-3] The anticipation of rent may render possible the construction of railroads, which enable the land to yield that very anticipated rent.
[159-1] "Rent is a tax levied by the landowners as monopolists." (Hopkins, Great Britain for the last forty Years, 1834.) For a very remarkable armed and successful resistance of farmers in the state of New York to the claims for rent of the Rensselaer family, represented by the government, see Wappäus Nord Amerika, 734.
[159-2] Malthus, Additions to the Essay on Population, 1817, III, ch. 10; compare also Verri, Meditazioni, XXIV, 3. The Physiocrates call the landowners classe disponible, since, as they may live without labor, they are best adapted to military service, the civil service, etc., either in person or by defraying the expenses of those engaged in them. (Turgot, Sur la Formation etc., § 15; Questions sur la Chine, 5.)
[159-3] Well discussed by Schäffle, Theorie, 65, 72, 83. Malthus considers the capital and labor expended in agriculture more productive than any other, because they produce not only the usual interest and wages, but also rent. If, therefore, the manufacturing and commercial profit of a country = 12 per cent., and the profit of capital employed in agriculture = 10 per cent., a corn law which compelled the capital engaged in manufactures and commerce to be devoted to agriculture would be productive of advantage to the national husbandry in general, if the increase in rent should amount to about 3 per cent. (On the Effects of the Corn Laws and of a Rise or Fall in the Price of Corn on the Agriculture and the general Wealth of the Country, 1815. The Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn, 1815.) Compare supra, § 55, and the detailed rectification in Roscher, Nationalökonomik des Ackerbaues, etc., § 159 ff.
CHAPTER III.
WAGES.
THE PRICE OF COMMON LABOR.