Martin Adams Quotes

It's important to distinguish the value of raw land from the value of improvements made to land. Land values are socially generated and belong to the communities that have created them. The irony is that while improvements such as buildings don't affect the underlying value of the land upon which they are located, they do have the ability to indirectly affect the properties that surround them.

Due to its inherently limited supply for each location, land obtains its value from the natural, social, and cultural wealth that exists in its surrounding environment.

Fred Harrison explains in The Power in the Land how land values over time become so expensive that too little wealth is left to pay for goods and services. Real estate speculation allows property owners to demand tomorrow's wealth output today, because they have the power to withhold land from use in expectation of future gains. Artificial constrictions in the supply of land make the price increase at a rate the economy can't sustain. Land eventually becomes unaffordable and recession follows leading to a bust before the next boom commences.

One way for communities to create affordable housing is for local communities to adopt land-use rights. Local governments or community land trusts would provide financing to homebuyers, who would then make land contributions on their properties in perpetuity. As a result, communities would get reimbursed for the goods and services they provide to homeowners, while property buyers would primarily become home buyers not land buyers.

We've come to understand that all land not explicitly designated for public use is privately owned, regardless of whether it's put to use or not. The next time you pass by a property that's only minimally used but nonetheless owned, consider how harmless it seems. You might even think that the private ownership may have preserved a little piece of nature from human contact... However, this perspective only arises because of the scarcity we have collectively created; such a situation would not occur if we only used as much land as we actually needed. If our exclusive use of land came with an ongoing responsibility to our local community, nature would no longer be exploited: Most people would tend to use no more land than absolutely necessary,

In theory, capitalism is an economic system that allows people to freely trade goods and services in a competitive free market. But since the outright ownership of land creates an entry monopoly, it restricts the operation of the free market... Consequently, our current implementation of capitalism is deeply responsible for the exploitation of nature and the decline of social well-being.

Economists Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison claim in their work The Corruption of Economics that industrialists toward the end of the 19th century may have intentionally created and promoted a new brand of economics (neoclassical) to divert public attention from the monopolization of nature. Neoclassical economics treats nature as capital - a resource to be exploited.

If we look deeply at life, we realise that the benefits we receive from society are largely attributable to their location. Benefits are local to the areas that we live in: the roads we drive on, the stores we shop at, and the services we use.

Progressive taxes are inherently flawed in that they fund public services which are often location-dependent, thus adding to the value of owned land. Thus, any tax that pays for public services without obtaining revenue from resulting land value increases is fundamentally unjust.

Whenever land is bought and sold, three stakeholders automatically vie for a cut from the revenue that can be had from land: the community, the property owner, and the institutions that finance property ownership. With land-use rights, the revenue from land value increases is primarily recycled back to the community rather than captured by banks and property owners.

The equal and sustainable right of access to the Earth's bounty seems one of the most transcendent truths a human being can contemplate. Yet, this right is missing from the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The fact that this single principle is violated on an ongoing basis is quite possibly the root cause of many, if not most, other human rights violations.

What causes recessions? Many economists talk about the need for a consumer economy, but we can't have a consumer economy if people can't afford to consume, and the only way they can afford to consume over the long run is if they create new wealth to either consume at that time or to defer as investments for later consumption. Simply put, the best way to have a functioning economy is to focus on having a wealth-producing economy. But when wealth can't be created in spite of the need for such, the production of wealth has been artificially limited, and this artificial limitation is the root cause of business recessions.

Given our current system of property ownership, it makes sense that we would see greater wealth inequality in places where there's greater population density because land values command a greater percentage of the financial resources in the denser areas and only flow into the hands of those who own land.

Tax systems are essentially the mechanisms by which societies decide what people have to share with each other versus what they can keep for themselves.

Instead of taxing production and consumption, we can simply capture land value instead. Maxim: Keep what you earn, pay for what you use.

In such a system, employees, consumers, business owners, business investors, homeowners, farmers and even retirees would be better off. Only those who use land inefficiently or seek to profit from it directly would lose - land speculators, banks, mining companies, extractive industries.

We may wonder how the ability to profit from land fosters social dysfunction, but once we realize the extent to which community wealth is privatized for personal gain, we also come to realize just how corrupt most societies actually are. Many social problems exist as a result of how our system misallocates wealth, not as a result of an unalterable human condition.

Markets are free when human beings have equal opportunities to influence the production and trade of desirable goods and services... Some people attain market control and set market prices due to favourable natural, social or political conditions: They attain a monopoly. The problem with monopolies is that they enable those who have attained them to extract money from society without providing goods or services of corresponding value. Apart from abolute monopolies, monopolies can also occur when the market is simply closed to new participants because overall supply can't be increased; these are known as entry monopolies.

Land ownership is an entry monopoly: Land is naturally scarce for each location since its supply can't be increased... When people buy a piece of land, their ownership gives them the right to exclude the rest of society from the benefits afforded to them by their land, even though those benefits only arise from nature and from the presence of goods and services that have been provided by that same society in the first place. Buyers pay for exclusive access rights to land and pay only to the previous landowner instead of to all the people who are now excluded from the location privileges that this one particular piece of land provides.