Abstract
Inequitable distribution of land has been a perennial problem for human societies. Corrections have often been difficult and involved bloodshed, and they have rarely provided lasting relief. Thomas Paine struck upon a permanent, fair solution in the 1790s, drawing on the natural law tradition associated with Grotius and Locke. He proposed that landholders compensate the landless by paying into a trust fund. In Paine’s vision, the trust fund would issue universal dividends in the form of seed capital for young adults and pensions for the elderly and disabled. Paine’s 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice had little contemporary impact, but others worked out variants of the idea, most notably the American reformer Henry George. George left a lasting legacy in scholarship and policy. Although George is on record as approving a limited issuance of dividends, he is primarily known for proposing that land tax revenue be used to fund government. A useful distinction can be made between a “Paineite” approach of taxing land to fund dividends and a “Georgeist” approach of taxing land to fund government.
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Notes
- 1.
On pre-Christian precedents, see Claeys (1987, 5–6).
- 2.
There is a vast literature on George and his legacy. Gaffney (1982) maps out the fault lines within the discipline of economics over George’s central insight. The first articulation of the insight (possibly) may have been a 1782 pamphlet by the Scotsman William Ogilvie: “If the original value of the soil be the joint property of the community, no scheme of taxation can be so equitable as a land-tax, by which alone the expenses of the state ought to be supported until the whole amount of that original value be exhausted” (1782, 206).
- 3.
Social conditions might have made the idea of direct payment to individuals a harder sell in George’s time and milieu than Paine’s. Paine’s proposal that English and French nobles and gentry share a portion of their financial security with their poor tenants and neighbors would have run up against class-based prejudices, but noblesse oblige was a well-established principle. George’s post-bellum United States was much less homogenous; it was a land of immigrants and a former slave society. It is likely that the idea of universal dividends, if George had pressed it, would have been met with race prejudice and xenophobia as well as class prejudice. Over a century later, although the United States has made progress in living up to its egalitarian ideals (and conversely, as European nations have become more ethnically diverse), racism and ambivalence about immigrants still present a stumbling block for basic income advocacy.
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Ranalli, B. (2021). Thomas Paine Solves the Perennial Problem of Land Reform. In: Common Wealth Dividends. Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72416-0_2
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