Enough and As Good

The Unearned, Part 1

The whole of this series balances on five words John Locke let slip in 1689, almost in passing, in the middle of the chapter where he explains how anyone comes to own anything at all. A man takes a thing out of the common stock, Locke wrote, by mixing his labor with it, “at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.” Strike that clause and you have the standard libertarian theory of property, the one most people on my side of the aisle hold. Keep it and you have this one. The distance between the two is the distance between a law that protects everyone and a law that protects whoever reached the gate first.

From Plunder to Justice showed why the clause is the hinge of the matter. This series is its defense, because the proviso is the single point where the case against Georgism is strongest, and if it falls the rest falls with it. Locke appears to abandon the clause himself. Rothbard calls it an open door to theft. And the serious objection, the modern one, says the proviso is satisfied anyway, because no one is really left worse off at all. The last of those is the only one that can actually wound.

An honest argument names its own weak points before anyone else can. Locke himself seems to walk the clause back within a few pages of writing it. He notes that the invention of money lets a man store wealth that would otherwise rot in his barn, so he may justly pile up far more than he could ever use. And he points across the ocean to America, where the land looked endless, as proof that one man’s claim still left plenty as good for the next. Read that way, Locke hands you the proviso and then announces it has already been met.

Look at what he is actually conceding. The proviso holds, Locke says, so long as there is enough and as good left over for everyone else. In his world, he thought, it had not yet bitten. While the frontier is open the first farmer takes nothing from anyone, because there is more of the same just past him for the asking, and his fence costs the next man nothing. That is the proviso being satisfied. When the frontier closes, the clause bites, and Locke’s own escape hatch slams shut behind it. He told us the condition under which appropriation wrongs no one. He simply lived early enough to believe the condition still held. We do not have that luxury. The good land is all claimed, the frontier is a memory, and everyone born now arrives in a world already fenced. Locke’s retreat is a dated guess that the proviso was satisfied, made by a man who could not see the enclosure coming. The clause outlives its author’s optimism.

Rothbard’s attack is blunter: throw the clause out entirely. He calls it an open door through which any latecomer can declare himself short-changed and help himself to his neighbor’s land. Drop the proviso, he says, and first appropriation is simply just, and a tax on land is simply theft. From Plunder to Justice gave the short answer, that rejecting the proviso quietly kills the equal self-ownership the whole theory began with, because the people born after the land is gone own themselves on paper and own no ground to stand that self on. I will not run that argument again. What the short answer leaves out is what the propertarian is really doing when he waves the clause away.

He thinks he is defending property against the collectivist. Something stranger is going on. Every enclosure of a finite thing is two acts in one motion. A man takes a site into use, and in the same breath he removes it from the reach of everyone else alive and everyone not yet born. The first act creates value and has earned its protection. The second act lays a cost on every person now shut out. The propertarian wants the law to honor the first act and ignore the second. The proviso is nothing more exotic than the refusal to ignore it. It does not forbid the enclosure. It says the enclosure has a price, owed to the people it excludes, and that a man who pockets that price without paying it is taking something that was never his. Which is why the charge that a land tax is theft has the moral arrow pointed backwards. The tax reaches into nothing the holder made. It collects the cost of an exclusion he was imposing on his neighbors for free, and calling the collection a theft requires you to first call the free exclusion a right.

The objection that deserves real respect does not come from Rothbard. It comes from Robert Nozick, who had no wish to hand Henry George anything. Nozick looked at the proviso and offered a weaker reading of it, one that has become the most powerful weapon the modern propertarian has. Appropriation is legitimate, he proposed, as long as it does not leave others worse off than they would have been had the thing never been appropriated at all. Set the baseline at the world with no private property in it. Measure the landless latecomer against that, and the proviso is met with room to spare, because private property in land did not impoverish him. It made him rich.

The force of this is real, so take it at full strength. The man born today with no acre to his name is still better off, by an enormous margin, than the lone homesteader on open frontier ever was. He has a grocery store on the corner, antibiotics, clean water from a tap, a job, electricity, a hundred goods the homesteader could not have produced in ten lifetimes. The system that left him landless is the same system that handed him all of that. So where is the harm? No one was pushed below the state of nature. Everyone was lifted miles above it. On Nozick’s reading the proviso is satisfied, the latecomer has no complaint a court should hear, and the land tax loses its excuse. That is the strongest version of a land tax is theft. It is a serious argument, and it is wrong.

Why the state of nature? Why is the test of a just arrangement whether it beats a world with no property and no cooperation in it? Pick that floor and almost every injustice in history clears it. The medieval serf was better off than a Neolithic forager. The worker in a company town, paid in scrip and housed in a shack the company owned, was better off than a man alone in the wilderness. A test that blesses serfdom because serfdom beats subsistence has been laid so low that nothing real ever scrapes it. A proviso that can be met by any arrangement above the cave has been defined into meaninglessness.

Worse than the floor is the sleight of hand. Look again at what actually makes the latecomer rich. The grocery store, the antibiotics, the job, the electric light. Where do these come from? Not one of them comes from his exclusion from land. They come from cooperation, from accumulated knowledge, from the division of labor, from centuries of invention. The landlord provided none of it. He provided a fence. Nozick’s argument credits the man who holds the title with the entire surplus of civilization, and then dares the landless to complain about the rent. Pull the two apart and the trick stands exposed. The latecomer is handed two things at once. He gets the gains of living in an advanced society, which he is glad to have and which no landowner created. And he is dealt the loss of his share of the earth, which the landowner did impose, and charges him for daily. The first does not pay for the second. You cannot press the gifts of civilization into a man’s hands, lift his wallet with the other, and call the books balanced because the gifts came to more than the cash.

The whole picture also works only if the options are two: accept private appropriation with no compensation, or go back to the state of nature. Civilization or the cave. That was never the choice. You can keep every gain of the modern economy and still return the rent of the land it sits on. The two have nothing to do with one another. The grocery store does not shutter because the landlord pays for his exclusion. The antibiotics do not vanish. The job does not disappear. Georgism takes the deal Nozick declares impossible: hold on to all the gains, price the exclusion, owe no man a cent of his labor and owe every man his share of the earth. The latecomer is not asking to be returned to nature. He is asking why, in a world this rich, the one thing he was born without is any claim to the ground beneath the wealth.

So the question was never whether the man is better off than a caveman. He plainly is, and it proves nothing. The proviso asks whether he was left enough and as good, and he was not. He was left a prosperous economy he is happy to live in and a standing bill for the dirt he stands on, a bill the first arrivals collect for the work of having shut the gate before he was born. The proviso asks about the ground. On the ground the answer has not moved an inch. He has been fenced out of a finite thing he had as much original right to as the man holding the title, and the market rent of that bare ground is the honest measure of what the fencing is worth.

The proviso does not abolish private property in land. Anyone who reads it that way has made the propertarian’s error running in the other direction. It does not say the latecomer owns the parcel, or that “the community” owns it, or that the title is a fiction to be torn up. That foundation essay was careful on this and it bears repeating: the debt is not owed to some collective that conjured the value and is owed it back. It is owed to individuals, to every particular person shut out of a site no one made, and it is pooled and collected together only because settling it one neighbor at a time is impossible. The owner keeps his land. He keeps his title, keeps his buildings, keeps every improvement and every dollar his labor earned. He pays the rent of the bare site and nothing more. A reading that ends in the state owning the soil is a different argument, an older and a worse one, and I want no part of it.

That is the clause, defended at the point where it is hardest to hold. It survives Locke’s own optimism, it survives Rothbard’s demand that we throw it out, and it survives the far better objection that no one is really harmed, because the harm is to your share of the earth and the gifts of civilization do not pay for it. What the proviso establishes is narrow and solid: there is unearned rent in land, and capturing it wrongs no one. What it does not yet show is what that rent actually is, how it forms, who has been collecting it, and what it does to a society when it is left in private hands to swell untouched. That is the next part. The proviso tells us the landholder owes something. The tollbooth shows us, in plain daylight, what he has been charging at the gate.

Next: The Tollbooth