by S. James Clarkson, Naples, FL
(The following speech was presented on March 2,
2001 to the Marco Island Shrine Club, Naples, Florida. In
giving permission to reprint the speech, Jim Clarkson,
said: "Keep in mind that there is a moral issue involved.
I have always believed that unless we finance Land Value
Taxation from its source we are but 'sour grapes.' On the
other hand, if man seeks to satisfy his desires with the
least exertion, why destroy the system?")
In 1942, after winter tobagganing with my school
chums, I shared cocoa and doughnuts at the home of Alan
Brett in Highland Park, Michigan. His father's name was
the same as his, the importance of which I will relate
later.
During these occasions Mr. Brett Sr. would take
some of my school friends into his dining room for a
purpose I did not know, until it finally came to my turn.
The first thing he asked us was "what would constitute a
good tax plan?" After many suggestions he finally said
that the basis should be founded on the principle that one
should not steal, or positively put, to take what belongs
to you. Well, "what belongs to you?", he asked. We
finally decided that what you created you were entitled to
own.
Then came the gambit. Mr. Brett would roll out on
the dining room table a sheet of butcher block paper and on
it he would draw three circles. One was called Mars, one
was called Earth and a third he called Society.
Then he related this story. Jack was living on
Mars which was fast becoming a dried up planet. One day he
was looking through his telescope and he saw the planet
Earth, a green plush land filled with opportunities for
himself and his family. He quickly got into his rocket
ship and flew to earth, settling on Manhattan.
His buddy Bill seeing the same thing in his
telescope decided to do the same thing. After circling
Earth he decided to land on New Jersey, a garden spot for
his family. Jack was there to welcome him, thrilled that
he would have company for himself and family. Of course,
he said to Bill, you will have to pay me for New Jersey or
rent it. "By what right do you make your claim?"
"Because," he answered, "when I first came here, I took
title to Earth by right of discovery; either rent it or
buy it." "But," Bill answered, "until I came here it was
not worth anything to you."
That conclusion was quickly apparent that it was
the society of people that created the value of all land.
If that was true, then the value of all land belonged to
the people.
How could this be accomplished? It was then that
Mr. Brett handed to me a book entitled Progress and Poverty
by Henry George and said, "read it, the answer is there."
I did not then, but I did after the war. Drafted
at 18, economics was the last thing I had on my mind. That
was soon changed when, sitting in a fox hole full of water
in France as a machine gunner on the front lines, I asked
myself why was I there? What reasons could possibly
explain this madness called war. Then it came to me that
almost all wars were fought for the ownership of land.
From the dawn of humans the quest for land has been the
salient theme of recorded history. Nations and empires
have fought to expand their domains.
The Chinese created a huge land empire in the
centuries before Christ in the East. Then came The Great
Khans from Mongolia, followed by Alexander the Great who
did the same thing. The Middle East with the Israelites in
claiming the promised land, the Canaanites, Hittites,
Babylonians, Egyptians, Assyrians and the Persians, the
Gauls, the Vikings, and the Roman empire -- to name a few
more -- all fought to obtain more land than they could use.
Then came the colonial empires of the British, French,
Spanish, and Dutch, basing their title to the land in
India, Africa, and America on discovery and force.
In more modern times the Germans under Hitler, the
Russians under Stalin and the Japanese went to war seeking
to conquer more nations to obtain more and more land
containing mineral wealth and oil. It was then, in that
fox hole, that I realized that it was man's desire to rule
based upon the territorial imperative of conquest that was
necessary to accomplish this through a system of land
ownership. This system was the enemy, not the German who
was in the opposite fox hole.
I returned home and read the book, Progress and
Poverty, that was to change my life and the beginning of my
"Great Adventure", as it was called by Luke North for his
Single Tax movement in California (1914-1918). The
movement continued waging initiative campaigns until 1926.
While Henry George was primarily known for his so-
called "Single Tax", the taking of all of the unearned
increment (land rent) for the operation of all of the
government, the merit for its partial application is valid
today. We have some Land Value Taxation in the form of our
property tax. Unfortunately, because it is combined with
the improvements on the land, the average tax payer cannot
easily distinguish between the two, except where he owns
land only. In Southfield, Mich. when I became Mayor, in
order to facilitate knowing the difference, I provided that
the tax bills would carry the assessed value on buildings
and land separately, for the tax payers' edification.
What is the basis for the present system? Brevity
will not permit me to tell you of the step by step
development of the feudal system as we understand it today.
Suffice it to say, that in its refinement, the continued
"ace in the hole" was the control and distribution of the
land.
When William was crowned King of England in 1066,
he immediately distributed the land of the conquered,
rewarding his friends and punishing his foes. The land of
those who fought against the conqueror was seized and
divided among his followers and himself. No land was to be
held in absolute ownership. Every landlord would hold
directly or indirectly to the king. It is for this reason
that feudalism involved not only the proprietorship of the
soil, but also of the inhabitants living on it.
Political power could only be maintained by control
of the population and by attaching the population to the
soil and thus making them part and parcel of the land on
which they resided. This created a species of slavery as a
means for sustaining the political power of the sovereign.
In this way the people in the various lands could be
controlled by the lords above them. While a person was
merely a tenant to those above him, he was lord to those
below him and accordingly was termed "mesne or middle
lord". Thus, land held by one tenant of a superior was
known as a "feud", "fief", or a "fee" -- the term being
derived from "feudum", and was contra-distinguished from
"allodial" land (land which was possessed by a man in his
own right, not incident of another and without any
obligation of rent or services.)
King William had to solve the problem of holding
the English in subjugation while keeping a check on his
Norman followers. In the case of the English, he continued
the practice of seizing the lands of those who resisted his
authority and turning them over to Norman lords, each of
whom had to furnish a contingent of soldiers in proportion
to the size of his land grant. Secondly, William secured
every district he conquered with a castle garrisoned with
his own men.
From that date to this time, there has been no
change in the land ownership system, except by its
surreptitious refinement. Any reforms that were made were
the result of a constant whittling away of the obligation
of tenure to the government. Where did you think the title
"Land Lord" came from? It is the invention of the King in
justification of his land holdings from God. The lords
were each given titles such as Duke, Earl or Barron,
depending on the size of their respective domains.
There are no titles of Nobility given by the United
States as our Constitution prohibits it (Article I, Section
9). I am, however, a lord to the tenants in my office
building. The tenant can use the land if they pay me rent,
including interest for the use of the building. The
present legal system still refers to the rights between the
parties as Landlord and Tenant Law. In such proceedings
they refer to me as landlord. Facetiously, I just say to
them, "just call me Lord James."
The "System" has been so ingrained in our lives
that we have accepted it as a way of life. To question its
validity is next to treason. If that be the case, I am
guilty. Elected to the Michigan Legislature in 1958, I
introduced two bills in an attempt to provide cities in
Michigan with the method by which they could shift the tax
from the improvements on the land to the Land as was done
in Pennsylvania, where Pittsburgh and nineteen other
Pennsylvania cities tax land at higher rates than
buildings.
In the course of that attempt I crossed hairs with
Representative Conlin who was spear-heading an income tax
for Michigan. As you know, Marx's manifesto advocated a
progressive income tax to redistribute the wealth. He
would call me Henry George until one day I replied, "Hi,
Karl Marx," and that ended the name calling. From then on
he called me Jim.
The House Joint Resolution M provided for a
constitutional change:
Article X, Sec. 3B. "The Legislature shall provide
by law that any Assessing District levying and collecting
taxes against real property may assess improvements at a
lower rate than those imposed upon land."
House Bill No. 505 was enabling legislation
providing that the governing body of any taxation unit in
any year may levy separate and different rates of taxation
for all purposes on all real estate classified as land
exclusive of the buildings thereon and on all real estate
classified as buildings on land, etc.
In the course of that session, while I was not able
to successfully pass my bills for permissible differential
property taxation, I was able to defeat the proposed state
income tax by my single no vote, preventing a majority vote
for its passage.
When I became Mayor of Southfield, I discharged the
assessor and appointed an assessor by the name of Ted
Gwartney who favored land value taxation. Gwartney has
gone on to become one of the experts in the field of land
value taxation with USA and world recognition. After a
complete reappraisal of all of the land in Southfield that
had been appraised lower than the improvements, the result
for most residential taxpayers was that taxes went down.
Henry George, who was he? Born in Philadelphia in
1839, Henry George went on to San Francisco and became a
newspaper editor who addressed the social problems of his
day. On a visit to New York, he was shocked by the
contrast between wealth and poverty. He resolved to find a
solution, if he could, and the result in 1879 was Progress
and Poverty, which is said to be the all-time best-selling
book on economics.
George's fame led him to be drafted by the United
Labor Party to run for Mayor of New York in 1886. George
lost to Abram Hewitt (and Theodore Roosevelt came in
third). George wrote several books, including Social
Problems, Protection or Free Trade (which was read in its
entirety into the US Congressional Record) and others.
George's remedy was born out of the classical
economists Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill's beliefs that
the unearned increment from the rent of land belonged to
the people. Others who believed the same way were Thomas
Jefferson, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Mark Twain, Abraham
Lincoln and Winston Churchill (to name a few) and without a
doubt Mr. Alan Brett, my mentor whose name "Alan" I gave to
my fourth son.
My own experience of land ownership came about from
a speech I gave before the Southfield Economics Club when I
was given the name of "Sour Grapes". Why the name "Sour
Grapes", I asked the name caller. "Simply put, he said,
"you do not own any land." It was then I knew that to
prove speculating in land would reward me with unearned
wealth, I had to invest in land to prove the point.
The first of many speculative ventures, for
instance, was when a house came up for sale on Southfield
Road just North of Ten Mile Road. I convinced my law
partners to join with me in its purchase. I knew that
Southfield Road would be widened to four lanes and increase
its value. We purchased the property with $3,000 down on a
land contract for $18,000. Just over six months later we
sold it for $32,000. All the profit was from the increase
in the value of the land and was unearned.
It took some courage to practice what I preached,
but once after the first experiment in this adventure, I
was forever hooked and consequently, found myself
rationalizing my action by espousing the merit of land
value taxation and thereby justifying my investment in land
as a means to prove my point. The practical aspect of this
is easily understood when in the talks that I give, and
have given, across the nation and in Canada, I could more
easily ford the question that implied that my advocating of
land value taxation was but "Sour Grapes" for my failure to
have benefited from the system.
Not all nations or political subdivisions have
failed to "see the cat", but many have adopted various
forms of Land Value Taxation -- for example, by
differential rates of taxation by placing a higher
percentage on the land than on the improvements. The State
of Alaska, for example, has secured the value of its oil
royalties for their citizens by what is called the Alaskan
Permanent fund.
Governor Jay Hammond introduced a proposed
Constitutional Amendment to create the Permanent Fund in
1976, and it was approved by the people that fall. From
then on, 25% of all mineral lease rentals, royalties, royal
sales proceeds, federal mineral revenue sharing payments,
and bonuses received by the state were placed into the
Permanent fund. Every man, woman and child in Alaska with
a qualfying 12-month residency is entitled to a portion of
each year's earnings. In 1998 each resident received
$1,769.84, and for 1999 it was $1,963.86. Just think, a
family of four would receive $7,855.44.
This could be done in every state in America. Land
values belong to the people. Let us give it to them! It
is up to you to advocate the change or become a Land Lord.
----------------------------
Between 1959-1979, Attorney-at-law S. James
Clarkson served as a Michigan State Representative, then on
the Oakland County Board of Supervisors, then four terms as
Mayor of Southfield, MI, and then as a Judge in District
Court. He has served on numerous governmental, civic, and
professional committees and boards. Now in semi-
retirement, he has residences in Naples, Florida and also
in Port Carling, Ontario.
(Editor's note: Also see the Jan.-Feb. 1998
GroundSwell article, "A Better Way," by James Clarkson.)