Ownership of Land

http://mises.org/daily/4172

The collective ownership of land has these disadvantages:

1.When all land is owned and managed by the collective (government), no private point of view or interest can be maintained. This results in curtailment or abolition of those innovations and long-term developments, which flourish when land is independently and privately owned and managed.

2.The charge that private ownership of land is a monopoly is certainly not offset by creating a governmental monopoly in place of private (and necessarily competing) transactions in land.

3.It is self-evident that individual men do not labor to produce the land. By the same token, government does not labor to produce the land. The land is a natural resource and the origin of nearly all our natural resources. But one obvious fact emerges. When an individual owns land privately and knows himself to be the proprietor in fact, he will labor with enormous self-commitment to improve the land.

On the contrary, when the individual is merely a tenant, either of a farm or a dwelling or a business site, his interest is in taking out all he can to compensate for the cost of the rent he pays. This is true whether his landlord is a private person or a government. Actually, in those cases where government has become the landlord, the evidence abounds that tenants are even less interested in improving or even maintaining the property they occupy.

If a landlord-tenant relationship occurs privately, then the private owner of the land is in a position to keep up his own property and to influence the tenant against careless behavior or wanton destruction. But when the state is the only landlord, the supervision of the land by the state representative becomes parallel to that of ancient stewards who supervised the behavior of serfs. If the only land available is state land, then the entire human race will become nothing more than tenants, entirely at the mercy of state officials. If private ownership flourishes, the tenant has a remedy. He can always purchase land and thus remove himself from the renting class.

4.The charge that private ownership of land could not exist except for government protection will not stand on the strength of the evidence. Government's role in respect to land has been aggressive rather than protective. Private holdings have been wrested from the hands of individuals or groups the government attacks, either in war or by legal decree.