Freedoms Edge: Freedom the only end

Freedom: the only end

Rent: The rent is always due...but to whom?

This is Rent

In common speech we speak of rent only when owner and user are distinct persons. But in the economic sense there is also rent where the same person is both owner and user. Where owner and user are thus the same person, whatever part of his income he might obtain by letting the land to another is rent, while the return for his labor and capital are that part of his income which they would yield him did he hire instead of owning the land.

Rent is also expressed in a selling price. When land is purchased, the payment which is made for the ownership, or right to perpetual use, is rent commuted or capitalized.

Rent, in short, is the share in the wealth produced which the exclusive right to the use of natural capabilities gives to the owner. Wherever land has an exchange value there is rent in the economic meaning of the term. Wherever land having a value is used, either by owner or hirer, there is rent actual; wherever it is not used, but still has a value, there is rent potential. It is this capacity of yielding rent which gives value to land. Until its ownership will confer some advantage, land has no value.

...it is only necessary that rent, instead of going, as now, to individuals, should be taken by society for common purposes.

Thus rent or land value does not arise from the productiveness or utility of land. It in no wise represents any help or advantage given to production, but simply the power of securing a part of the results of production.

If the tenant refuses to pay the rent, then he tacitly lays claim to the exclusive use and benefit of the land he occupies—practically asserts that he is the sole owner of its produce; and consequently violates the law, by assuming a greater share of freedom than the rest of mankind.

The term 'rent' is preferred to 'tax' on the grounds that the latter implies a prior personal right to the value of the bare earth, which in truth, carried no value at all until the community arose to give it one. 'Rent' also acknowledges the fact that, ultimately, we are all tenants on an earth we neither created nor can exist without. Steve Wall