Land Ownership Makes No Sense
“There’s no such thing as a good landlord” is a rallying cry of angry renters. In the future, it might be conventional morality that is simply wrong to own land.
In our times, owning land seems as natural as owning cars or houses. And this makes sense: The general presumption is that you can personally own anything, with rare exceptions for items such as dangerous weapons or archaeological artifacts. The idea of controlling territory, specifically, has a long tenure. Animals, warlords, and governments all do it, and the modern conception of “fee simple”—that is, unrestricted, perpetual, and private—land ownership has existed in English common law since the 13th century.
Yet by 1797, US founding father Thomas Paine was arguing that “the earth, in its natural uncultivated state” would always be “the common property of the human race,” and so landowners owed non-landowners compensation “for the loss of his or her her natural inheritance.”
A century later, economist Henry George saw that poverty was rising despite Increasing wealth and blamed this on our system of owning land. He proposed that land should be taxed at up to 100 percent of its “unimproved” value—we’ll get to that in a moment—allowing other forms
