Read Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition Online
Authors: Charles Eisenstein
Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (11 page)
Why should someone profit from the use-value of land by the mere fact of owning it, especially when the origin of that ownership is based on ancient injustice? Accordingly, Henry George proposed his famous Single Tax—essentially a 100-percent tax on the “economic rent” deriving from land. This was to be implemented through a tax on the value of land as distinct from improvements upon it; for example, land would be taxed but not buildings or crops. It was called “single” because he advocated the abolition of all other taxes, reasoning that it is just as much theft to tax legitimate private property as it is to profit from something that belongs to all. George’s writings sparked a massive political movement that almost got him elected to the New York mayor’s office, but of course the established money power fought him at every turn.
18
His ideas have been sporadically adopted around the world (the
two places I’ve spent most of my life, Taiwan and Pennsylvania, both levy taxes on the underlying value of land) and have greatly influenced economic thought.
One of his admirers, Silvio Gesell, proposed a near-equivalent to George’s land tax: the public ownership of all land, available for private leasing at a rate that would approximate the economic rent.
19
Gesell’s reasoning is compelling and remarkably prescient in its understanding of ecology and the connected self. Read this extraordinary passage from 1906:
We frequently hear the phrase: Man has a natural right to the earth. But that is absurd, for it would be just as correct to say that man has a right to his limbs. If we talk of rights in this connection we must also say that a pine-tree has the right to sink its roots in the earth. Can man spend his life in a balloon? The earth belongs to, and is an organic part of man. We cannot conceive man without the earth any more than without a head or a stomach. The earth is just as much a part, an organ, of man as his head. Where do the digestive organs of man begin and end? They have no beginning and no end, but form a closed system without beginning or end. The substances which man requires to maintain life are indigestible in their raw state and must go through a preparatory digestive process. And this preparatory work is not done by the mouth, but by the plant. It is the plant which collects and transmutes the substances so that they may become nutriment in their further progress through the digestive canal. Plants and the space they occupy are just as much a part of man as his mouth, his teeth or his stomach.…
How, then, can we suffer individual men to confiscate for themselves parts of the earth as their exclusive property, to erect barriers and with the help of watchdogs and trained slaves to keep us away from parts of the earth, from parts of ourselves—to tear, as it were, whole limbs from our bodies? Is not such a proceeding equivalent to self-mutilation?
20
Gesell goes on, with great rhetorical flourish, to say that this mutilation is even worse than the amputation of a body part, for wounds of the body heal, but
the wound left … by the amputation of a piece of land festers forever, and never closes. At every term for the payment of rent, on every Quarter Day, the wound opens and the golden blood gushes out. Man is bled white and goes staggering forward. The amputation of a piece of land from our body is the bloodiest of all operations; it leaves a gaping, festering wound which cannot heal unless the stolen limb is grafted on again.
I think this is a wound we all feel, not only as the rent built into the cost of everything we buy, but also as a spiritual disenfranchisement. Some time ago I was driving with a woman from France down the country roads of central Pennsylvania. The gentle mountains and broad valleys beckoned to us, so we decided to walk them. It seemed as if the ground was begging for our feet, wanting to be tread. We decided to find a place to pull over and walk. We drove for an hour, but we never did find a field or forest that wasn’t festooned with “No Trespassing” signs. Every time I see one I feel a twinge, a loss. Any squirrel is freer than I am, any deer. These signs
apply to humans only. Herein lies a universal principle: the regime of property, the enclosure of the unowned, has made us all poorer. The promise of freedom inherent in that broad, verdant landscape was a mirage. Woody Guthrie’s words ring true:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
.
The sign was painted, it said private property
.
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing
.
That side was made for you and me
.
21
After three hundred years of economic expansion, we are so impoverished that we lack the wealth and freedom of a squirrel. The indigenous people who lived here before the Europeans arrived had the run of the land. They had the simple freedom to say, “Let us climb that mountain. Let us swim in that lake. Let us fish that river.” Not even the wealthiest among us have that freedom today. Even a billion-dollar landholding is smaller than the domain of the hunter-gatherer.
22
The situation is different in most of Europe; in Sweden, for instance, the right of
Allemansrätt
allows individuals to walk, pick flowers, camp for a day or two, swim, or ski on private land (but not too near a dwelling). I met a horse enthusiast who described how, in Ireland, all the gates to private farm lanes and pastures are unlocked. “Trespassing” is not a concept; the land is open to all.
The riders are respectful of the farmer and the land in turn, sticking to the perimeters to avoid disturbing animals and pasture. Hearing of this system, I don’t think any American can look out upon the vast expanses of this country with their gates, fences, and no-trespassing signs without a feeling of confinement or loss. Can you feel Gesell’s “wound”—that the very land has been severed from us?
Gesell’s huge contribution beyond George was to apply parallel thinking beyond land to money, inventing a new kind of money system that I will describe, after due groundwork, later in this book as a key element of a sacred economy.
Controversial among progressives of his time, Henry George’s insistence on taxing only land makes even less sense today because so many other commons have been brought into the realm of private property.
23
Hyde’s “marketing of formerly inalienable properties” has gone far beyond land to encompass nearly everything essential to human existence and human joy. Our connections to nature, to culture, and to community have been riven, separated off and sold back to us. I have so far focused on the land, but nearly every other commons has suffered the same fate. Intellectual property offers the most obvious example, and the royalties that derive from owning it play a role similar to land rent. (If you think intellectual property differs from land because it is created by humans, read on!) But there is one form of ownership that contains
and supersedes the rest: the ownership of money. In the realm of finance, interest plays the role of royalties and rents, ensuring that the wealth that flows from human creativity and labor flows primarily to those who own money. Money is just as criminal in its origins as are other forms of property—an ongoing robbery that both impels and embodies the expropriation of the commons.
To restore sacredness to economy, we need to redress this robbery, because it is ultimately a theft and a reduction of a divine gift. It is the conversion of what was once sacred, unique, and personal into the status of commodity. It is not immediately obvious that the right to profit from mere ownership of money is just as illegitimate as the right to profit from the mere ownership of land. After all, money, unlike land, is a human creation. We earn money from the application of our human gifts, our own energy, time, and creativity. Surely the proceeds from this labor rightfully belong to the laborer? Surely, therefore, not all money is illegitimate in its ultimate origin?
This view is naive. In fact, money is deeply and irretrievably implicated in the conversion of the land commons into private property, the final and defining stage of which is its reduction to the status of just another commodity that can be bought and sold. So too have other elements of our natural and cultural bequest been cordoned off, turned into property, and finally, as “goods and services,” into money. This is not to say that it is immoral to work for money; it is, rather, immoral for money to work for you. What rental is on land, so interest is on money. Money is the corpse of the commons, the embodiment of all that was once common and free, turned now into property of the purest form. The next several chapters will substantiate this claim, describing exactly how and why interest-bearing money, by nature, usurps the commons, ruins the planet, and reduces the vast majority of humanity to peonage.
1.
As above, so below. Having made nature into an adversary, or at best a pile of “resources,” it is no surprise that we manifest the same relationship within our bodies. The defining diseases of our time are the autoimmune diseases, the somatization of our self-other confusion. Just as the village, the forest, and the planet are inseparable parts of ourselves that we mistake as other, so our immune systems reject our own body tissues. What we do to nature, we do to ourselves, inescapably.
2.
Avila,
Ownership
, 5.
3.
Even today, we have a spiritual sense that our labor is indeed not our own. It comes through in our desire to work for something greater than ourselves—that is, to dedicate our labor to a cause beyond our rational self-interest. Religious people might describe it as “giving one’s life to God.” Another way of putting it is that we have a need to make a gift of our labor and its products, and of all the skills and talents that inform it. We then feel fulfilled, serene in the knowledge that we are fulfilling our purpose here on earth. Intuitively, we know that our gifts must be given in turn, and not hoarded for the brief and illusory aggrandizement of the separate self.
4.
See, for example, Reich’s
Sex-Pol
and Vaughan’s “Gift Giving as the Female Principle vs. Patriarchal Capitalism.”
5.
Avila,
Ownership
, 20.
6.
Xu,
Ancient China in Transition
, 112. This book seeks to interpret the Confucian position as a criticism of concentration of ownership. Deng, “A Comparative Study on Land Ownership,” 12. Deng maintains that prior to then, alienation of land was forbidden, since it was all the property of the king. Deng also argues that in practice, land was generally not alienable or fungible at least through the medieval Song Dynasty.
7.
Altekar,
State and Government in Ancient India
, 273–4.
8.
Kuhnen,
Man and Land
, Sec. 2.1.1 and 2.1.2.
9.
Deng, “A Comparative Study on Land Ownership,” 10.
10.
Hyde,
The Gift
, 121.
11.
Of course, the peasants resisted their dispossession from the commons, fomenting the bloody struggle known in Germany as the Peasants’ War. It is a struggle reenacted time and again around the globe whenever people resist the incursion of property rights into yet another sphere of human relationship. As Hyde puts it, “the Peasants’ War was the same war that the American Indians had to fight with the Europeans, a war against the marketing of formerly inalienable properties.”
12.
Avila,
Ownership
, 16, quoting a ancient source from H. F. Jolowicz and Barry Nicholas,
Historical Introduction to the Study of Roman Law
, 139.
13.
Moreover, many types of debt, such as tax debt, alimony debt, and student loans, are not affected by bankruptcy. At the present writing, student loan debt in the United States exceeds credit card debt, posing a huge burden on graduating students.
14.
In Psalmum CXVIII Expositio, 8, 22, PL 15:1303, cited by Avila,
Ownership
, 72.
15.
Avila,
Ownership
, 74.
16.
Paine,
Agrarian Justice
, par. 11–12.
17.
George “The Single Tax.”
18.
Another reason for his political defeat was that George was rigidly dogmatic, refusing political alliance with anyone who did not uncompromisingly endorse his Single Tax.
19.
Economic rent
refers to the proceeds of ownership, such as rents, royalties, dividends, and interest.
20.
Gesell,
The Natural Economic Order
, part 2, chapter 5, “The Case for the Nationalization of Land.”
21.
From “This Land is Your Land.” This verse is usually omitted from the songbooks.
22.
The reader might bring up the territoriality of animals, many of whom are not free to roam. Not all animals are territorial, however, and those that are often exhibit group territoriality, not individual territoriality. So it was with humans for most of our existence. At the very least, each person had the freedom of the entire tribal territory. Shall we today shrink our territory down to the level of the nuclear family? Or shall we expand our tribe to include the whole earth?
23.
There are other significant problems with George’s program. In particular, it is very difficult to separate the value of land from the value of improvements upon it, especially because the intrinsic value of land is determined not only by its physical characteristics, but also by its location relative to other pieces of land bearing human improvements. By building on your land, you attract others to build nearby, thus raising the value of your own land and creating a disincentive to build in the first place. This is one reason why I prefer Silvio Gesell’s leasing approach to solving the problem of economic rent.
THE CORPSE OF THE COMMONS
We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We call those the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die of hunger
.
—Peter Kropotkin
At the foundation of every great fortune lies a great crime
.
—Leo Tolstoy
