Part 03, Chapter 17 : 
Liberty and Property
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18971897

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Author : Benjamin R. Tucker

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Liberty and Property



[Liberty, December 31, 1892.]


To the Editor of Liberty:(115 ¶ 1)
 
I can agree with much that you say in your answer to my letter in No. 244
of Liberty, but I do not think you have proved your case.(115 ¶ 2)
 
In the first place, I object to your assumption that the plan proposed by
Anarchists would realize equal liberty with regard to the land. You praise
the idea of letting wealth distribute itself in a free market. I echo your
praises; but I cannot see that they are anything to the point of this
discussion, for you do not offer a free market.(115 ¶ 3)
 
It is part of my liberty to use any land that I can use. When another man
takes a piece of land for his own and warns me off it, he exceeds the
limits of equal liberty towards me with respect to that land. If equally
valuable land were open to me, the importance of his invasion would be
mainly theoretical; but when he shuts me out of a corner lot on lower
Broadway, and asks me to console myself by taking up a New England
abandoned farm, it seems to me that I am receiving a very practical injury.
It might be a sort of reason in his favor if he were putting the land to
better use than I could. His title rests simply on the fact that he was
there first, either by accident or because he had better speculative
foresight than I. The presence of his improvements on the land is the
result of his invasion, and therefore cannot justify it.(115 ¶ 4)
 
The case of the man who receives what you call the economic rent of
strength and skill is not parallel, for he has not gained his advantage by
hindering another from using the strength and skill which were within that
other’s reach.(115 ¶ 5)
 
Now, I say: I am not willing to waive my rights in this land unless the
holder will buy me off by paying a fair equivalent. I see no way in which I
can collect this equivalent by myself, or through an organization
representing only a part of the people. Therefore I consent that one board
of authority shall assume to represent the whole people for this purpose,
in order to prevent what seems to me a greater invasion on the part of the
land-owner. You say I consent to this invasion on the part of a bona fide
occupier, rather than to admit a compulsory tax; for I think that the
latter is in itself a greater invasion, and also that it would be an
entering wedge for the whole mass of government. Each of us proposes to
waive one part of equal liberty for the sake of preserving another part.
The only question is on which side the maximum of liberty lies. Certainly
any force which I might use in carrying out my principle would be against
force; and I think that, if private possession of land is responsible for
as much evil as I suppose, it constitutes an emergency great enough to
justify me in overriding the opposition of those who do not agree with
me.(115 ¶ 6)
 
I am not convinced by your objection that the single-tax money would be
used up in paying tax-collectors’ salaries. There is nothing to hinder
paying them by voluntary taxation. If I were enacting a law to suit my own
fancy, I would confiscate rent, and then let every one who chose draw his
per capita share, with no deduction for salaries or anything else. But I
should expect comparatively few would choose to take out their shares under
penalty of paying retail prices for privileges which would be free, or
below cost, to those who remained partners in the large fund. Collectors’
salaries should be paid out of this large, undivided fund, which would be a
voluntary tax on those who chose not to take out their shares. At any rate,
whether this is possible or not, if the people believe that the advantages
of confiscating rent are worth the sum spent for collection, they will be
willing to pay that sum voluntarily; if they do not believe so, they will
not confiscate rent.(115 ¶ 7)
 
Of course distribution at so much per capita is a terribly wooden way of
trying to give every man his own, and I should be glad of a better. Aside
from that, I cannot see how my plan, if carried out in good faith, would
disagree with the law of equal liberty. I expect you to answer that it
could not be carried out in good faith.(115 ¶ 8)
 
Your editorial makes two points against the single tax. You say first that
the money would be badly spent. I answer, then let us spend it better. Then
you say, very soundly, that it is idle to discuss what shall be done with
the confiscated rent when the question is as to the propriety of
confiscating at all. Your second point is that the single tax is
authoritarian, and you favor liberty. I answer that you propose to use
force to support the occupier of land in a plain invasion of my rights. You
have no right to call that liberty. Perhaps it may be the nearest possible
approach to liberty; I think not.(115 ¶ 9)
 
As to the relief that your system might bring, I object to your sentimental
ground for expecting rent to diminish. If I understand you, you expect the
occupier of valuable ground to sell his goods below competitive prices. The
result might be that some lucky ones would get special bargains, while
their neighbors must go without, or that people would stand in line before
this merchant’s door till they had wasted time enough to make up the
difference in price, or that he would employ extra men till the law of
diminishing returns brought his prices up to an equality with others. In
the first case the rent would simply be divided among a larger number,
while others would be left out in the cold as much as before. In the second
and third cases, it would be disposed of by what is equivalent to throwing
it into the river. Neither way suits me. Of course, the result I should
expect in practice would be a complex of the three in disguised forms.(115
¶ 10)

Stephen T. Byington.

 
Let me begin my brief rejoinder by expressing my appreciation of my
opponent. Once in a great while one meets an adversary who confines himself
to the question at issue, resorts to no evasion, reasons himself, and is
willing to listen to reason. Such a man, I am sure, is Mr. Byington, though
I know him only by his writings. It is pleasant to debate with him, after
having to deal continually with the Merlinos, the Mosts, the Hudspeths, and
the whole host of those who cannot think.(115 ¶ 11)
 
Mr. Byington’s erroneous conclusions regarding the confiscation of
economic rent are due, as I view it, to his confusion of liberties with
rights, or, perhaps I might better say, to his foundation of equality of
liberty upon a supposed equality of rights. I take issue with him at the
very start by denying the dogma of equality of rights,—in fact, by
denying rights altogether except those acquired by contract. In times past,
when, though already an Egoist and knowing then as now that every man acts
and always will act solely from an interest in self, I had not considered
the bearing of Egoism upon the question of obligation, it was my habit to
talk glibly and loosely of the right of man to the land. It was a bad
habit, and I long ago sloughed it off. Man’s only right over the land is
his might over it. If his neighbor is mightier than he and takes the land
from him, then the land is his neighbor’s until the latter is
dispossessed in turn by one mightier still. But while the danger of such
dispossession continues there is no society, no security, no comfort. Hence
men contract. They agree upon certain conditions of land ownership, and
will protect no title in the absence of the conditions fixed upon. The
object of this contract is not to enable all to benefit equally from the
land, but to enable each to hold securely at his own disposal the results
of his efforts expended upon such portion of the earth as he may possess
under the conditions agreed upon. It is principally to secure this absolute
control of the results of one’s effort that equality of liberty is
instituted, not as a matter of right, but as a social convenience. I have
always maintained that liberty is of greater importance than wealth,—in
other words, that man derives more happiness from freedom than from
luxury,—and this is true; but there is another sense in which wealth, or
rather property, is of greater importance than liberty. Man has but little
to gain from liberty unless that liberty includes the liberty to control
what he produces. One of the chief purposes of equal liberty is to secure
this fundamental necessity of property, and, if property is not thereby
secured, the temptation is to abandon the régime of contract and return to
the reign of the strongest.(115 ¶ 12)
 
Now the difference between the equal liberty of the Anarchists and the
system which Mr. Byington and the Single-Taxers consider equal liberty is
this: the former secures property, while the latter violates it.(115 ¶
13)
 
The Anarchists say to the individual: Occupancy and use is the only title
to land in which we will protect you; if you attempt to use land which
another is occupying and using, we will protect him against you; if another
attempts to use land to which you lay claim, but which you are not
occupying and using, we will not interfere with him; but of such land as
you occupy and use you are the sole master, and we will not ourselves take
from you, or allow any one else to take from you, whatever you may get out
of such land.(115 ¶ 14)
 
The Single-Taxers, on the other hand, say to the individual: You may hold
all the land you have inherited or bought, or may inherit or buy, and we
will protect you in such holding; but, if you produce more from your land
than your neighbors produce from theirs, we will take from you the excess
of your product over theirs and distribute it among them, or we will spend
it in taking a free ride whenever we want to go anywhere, or we will make
any use of it, wise or foolish, that may come into our heads.(115 ¶ 15)
 
The reader who compares these two positions will need no comment of mine to
enable him to decide on which side the maximum of liberty lies, and on
which side property, or the individual control of product, is
respected.(115 ¶ 16)
 
If Mr. Byington does not accept my view thus outlined, it is incumbent upon
him to overthrow it by proving to me that man has a right to land; if he
does accept it, he must see that it completely disposes of his assertion
that when another man takes a piece of land for his own and warns me off
it, he exceeds the limits of equal liberty toward me with respect to that
land, upon which assertion all his argument rests.(115 ¶ 17)
 
I see an excellent opportunity for some interesting and forcible remarks in
comment upon Mr. Byington’s concluding paragraph, but, desiring to
confine the discussion to essentials for the present, I refrain.(115 ¶ 18)





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     Part 03, Chapter 17 -- Publication : November 30, 1896

     Part 03, Chapter 17 -- Added : February 21, 2017

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