Land & Liberty: Chapter II – Geoism and Left-Libertarianism

Abstract: This paper is a chapter from my dissertation Land & Liberty on the analytical and normative connection between anarchism and geoism, also known as Georgism or left-libertarianism. Anarchism can be understood both as the philosophical anarchist view that states lack the political authority to make morally binding, enforceable commands, and as the political anarchist position that we can and ought to abolish monopoly states. Geoists argue that everyone has an equal claim to those naturally occurring resources that no one has created. Consequently, they argue that the rental value of this land should be shared equally among everyone. I argue that there is a close analytical connection between landownership and the territorial authority claimed by states. As a consequence, the anarchist critique of states generalizes to a critique of land ownership, while the geoist critique of landownership generalizes to a critique of monopoly states. However, this argument seems to generate an issue for these views, as geoists generally argue that equal access to land could be best achieved via states. In the final part of the thesis, I consider different possibilities and challenges with implementing a geoist distribution of land independently of a state apparatus. In this chapter I outline and defend the geoist analysis of land and rent, setting the stage for the latter arguments of my thesis. Geoism could simultaneously be understood as a position within political economy and as a view within normative political theory. The chapter is divided into two major parts, exploring both these aspects. In the first part, I focus on the economic analysis of geoists. According to this geoists analysis, land is a unique factor of production that can be defined as any and all naturally occurring resources and opportunities that are used in production. Since landlords strictly speaking do not create anything, their rental revenues should be understood as a form of exploitation, capturing income at the expense of actual producers. This gives rise to systematic economic inequalities between wealthy landowners, and impoverished people who are denied access to land. These economic pathologies could be addressed by shifting taxes from production to the rental value of land. In the second part, I examine the normative claims of left-libertarians. First I discuss the concept of property rights, as understood within the libertarian literature. While all libertarians agree that people have a claim to their own person, they disagree on the distribution of naturally occurring resources, such as land. While right-libertarians believe that people may unilaterally appropriate disproportionate amounts of land, left-libertarians deny this, arguing that land ought to be distributed in some egalitarian manner. There is some disagreement among left-libertarians concerning how these resources should be equalized. I argue that there are reasons for libertarians, qua libertarians, to prefer an equal share interpretation of left-libertarianism, both compared to right-libertarianism, and to other versions of left-libertarianism. Essentially, this would justify a system under which rental revenues are redistributed as a universal basic income.