The Blight We Fail To See

As land has no cost of production, what is the value which sends its price soaring – as we aptly say “through the roof”? (For in the sly umbrella term “property market” it is the LAND component which ruins the house-hunter.)

The only economic value attaching to land is community-created, reflecting overall a people’s need for their land; and, more specifically, what one site will yield of a better/easier living than another – whether from inherent natural advantage (southern prospect, superior soil, minerals, etc), or man-made improvements (such as proximity of neighbours, shops, transport, or a corner site). This community-created value is a rental value, best known as the annual rental value of land, since it obviously fluctuates according as communities develop. Now we are clear that it is a community-created value, we can see the obvious: that it should be returned annually to the community.

That community which fails to call in its rental values, negligently abandoning them to their various sites, will inevitably reap its due – and detrimental – reward! For these neglected values will then be picked up by the holders of the sites for private pocketing, while the market expectancy of similar reapings for years on-going will allow a marketing of these rental values as for a capital sum. And behold – land is capital!

But yet worse follows. For land – the essential base-plank of existence on this Planet, since without it we cannot survive – we cannot make more of. So just how foolish can we be? That which we cannot make more of, but which all must have some of, now fallen into the hands of a comparative few of us, assumes inevitably the role of a monopoly – exalting its capital and rental values alike. This, hugely advantaging the comparative few who partake of it, disadvantages the great mass of what are now “the dispossessed”. Hence, as one party is aggrandized, the other suffers increasing disempowerment and poverty.

It is this feature of today’s land tenure – the escalating monopoly element built into it – which is now thrown back at us in such reports as “Business Rents Blight”. But it is the educational blight that affects us which fabricates the business one!

Shirley Anne Hardie