If it’s not land reform, it’s not reform.

Here’s a riddle:

“My name is the one four-letter word comedians dare not utter. No matter how much I’m used, I do not break. Billions spend their lives fighting, killing or paying for me although I offer myself for free. What am I?”

Every now and then, someone comes tantalizingly close to the answer. In a famous stand-up routine, George Carlin started on the right track, saying, “I’ll tell ya what they oughta do about homelessness. First thing: Change the name of it. It’s not homelessness …”

He’s right, I thought. Is he gonna say it?

“… it’s houselessness.” I groaned.

Can’t win ’em all, George. ❤ I know you’re down there, screamin’ up at me.

Anyone who works for a living knows that “housing,” in some way, is at the core of their struggles. Gotta pay rent, after all; gotta pay the mortgage. And anyone who notices everyone else mired in the same struggle extrapolates, correctly, that “housing” is at the core of civilization’s struggles.

And yet the problem is obviously not housing. Even a large house (2,000+ sq ft) can cost less than half a man-year of labor. Add a generous amount to cover materials and room for error, and it means that the borrower on a 30-year mortgage spends 27 years paying for something that ain’t a house.

When you’re a real estate agent and you’ve gotta sell land to pay your landlord.

This glaring difference between the cost of a house and the price of real estate, combined with even just one viewing of House Hunters, with its frequent discussions of how a buyer is “paying for location,” suggests that people are aware of the heavy role of land in the economy. The stickiness of the status quo, then, comes from people’s acceptance of it: We accept, largely without question, that we should pay land’s value to a fixed pool of security holders — “landowners” — instead of to the residents around us whom we are excluding and whose presence makes the location valuable.

We accept that the many should pay the few for the right to exist.

This is the issue that will define millenials. It is necessarily so because this issue — the struggle of land users to build meaningful, peaceful, economically secure lives despite perpetual theft by landowners— is the one that defines every generation.

Land is pure, unadulterated bargaining power.

Sadly, like our progenitors, we are well on our way to ignoring the issue completely. We’re already accepting, in suppository form, the same old placebos:

We waste energy on “bank reform” so that reduced predatory lending will make it harder to get a loan and therefore make the unchallenged land monopoly harder to enter;

We want increased healthcare benefits and vacation days so we can live longer, healthier lives, thereby feeding more rent to landlords;

We buy the myth that technology will somehow raise our living standards without realizing it will simply increase our productive power and therefore the income we have to bid up land rents (and therefore prices); and

We want “rent control,” which chokes off land from market use by entrenching privileged occupants with already-privileged title holders to create a virtually unbreakable dual monopoly on a location.

We are turning into our parents in the most tragic, dangerous way: by tacitly guaranteeing the enslavement of our children.

The Solution

“I shan’t mince words …”

If you’ve only now considered the problem, you’ve likely never been introduced to the solution. Which is too bad, considering it would:

End poverty

Maximize land use efficiency and therefore …

End the phenomenon of sprawl

Enable people to live as near work as they want

Curb pollution

Open up large tracts of land for re-wilding and conservation

Eliminate debt as a systemic feature of modern life

It’s known as “rent-sharing,” or “geoism.” In a geoist economic system, exclusive land titles are bid on and held at market rental value, and the rent is paid into the public purse. Market bids for raw, extractable natural resources like oil and diamonds are also paid into the public purse. All this value is known as “land rent.” Land rent is then paid out in equal shares to each resident of the jurisdiction (this is called a Residents’ Dividend or Citizens’ Dividend), net of whatever is withheld to fund public goods and services. Taxes do not exist. Fines on pollution may.

This is the direct implementation of the concept that nobody — or rather, everyone equally — owns nature and everyone fully owns him- or herself. There are no substitutes.

Nobody Argues (Well) Against Geoism

As you venture into the wilderness of the internet and encounter people who nominally argue against this concept, pay attention to what they say. Few arguments fall upon geoism in itself; rather, most boil down to qualms over the transition to it, one that would entail the market reduction of land title prices to $0.

The $0 price tag is a feature, not a bug. A land title is a legal privilege with a rental value, not a good or service with a cost of production. (The $0 price tag is the natural up-front price for anything that is rented at market rental value and not free-held.) But owners who currently freehold pricey titles — or, more often, mortgagors who think they do — are understandably not so concerned with market design as they are with their own personal bottom lines.

Yes, I embedded my own tweet. Get with the program and next time I’ll use yours. :-D

It should be noted that if geoism were ever effected on a large scale, it could be accomplished with a transition that compensates current landowners. This would be a political concession and not economically necessary or in my opinion desirable, but the option is there.

The remaining arguments — the ones actually levied against geoism — necessarily boil down to the emotion: “Why shouldn’t I be able to unconditionally monopolize land?”