Land Economics Quotes

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. ~ Martin Adams

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. ~ Martin Adams

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. ~ Martin Adams

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. ~ Martin Adams

We could manage to survive without money changers and stockbrokers. We should find it harder to do without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land ~ Aneurin Bevan

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. ~ Martin Adams

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, ~ Martin Adams

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. ~ Martin Adams

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. ~ Martin Adams

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. ~ Martin Adams

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. ~ Martin Adams

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. ~ Martin Adams

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. ~ Martin Adams

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. ~ Martin Adams

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. ~ Martin Adams

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. ~ Martin Adams

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. ~ Martin Adams

Conservation is ethically sound. It is rooted in our love of the land, our respect for the rights of others, our devotion to the rule of law. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

Those who happen to have the right talents-should be economists and statesmen, and that all economists and statesmen should be Christians, and that their whole efforts in politics and economics should be directed 'Do as you would be done by' into action. If that happened and if we others were really ready to take it, then we should find the Christian solution for our own social problems pretty quickly. ~ C.S. Lewis

On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more. ~ J.M. Barrie

The Land of Israel will be small, but the people of Israel will make it great. Not
in opulence, but in eminence will their destiny be fulfilled, and the elixir of their
pride will be distilled not out of dominion or far-flung borders, but out of the
faithful and skillful building of the good society. ~ Abba Hillel Silver

I had almost three acres of land in Beverly Hills. And I had a big atrium of chickens because I love that feeling of being in the country and living from the soil. ~ Eartha Kitt

The land belongs to the future. ~ Willa Cather

Village cricket spread fast through the land. ~ G. M. Trevelyan

He recalled that when the sun had risen that morning, he was on another continent, still a shepherd with sixty sheep, and looking forward to meeting with a girl. That morning he had known everything that was going to happen to him as he walked through the familiar fields. But now, as the sun began to set, he was in a different country, a stranger in a strange land, where he couldn't even speak the language. He was no longer a shepherd, and he had nothing, not even the money to return and start everything over. ~ Paulo Coelho

There are more active volcanoes beneath the sea than on land by two orders of magnitude. ~ Robert Ballard

When we land against the enemy, don't forget to hit him and hit him hard. When we meet the enemy we will kill him. We will show him no mercy. ~ George S. Patton

I couldn't imagine living in a state that didn't reach the ocean. It was a giant reset button. You could go to the edge of the land and see infinity and feel renewed. ~ Avery Sawyer

...yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it's the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled. ~ Marvinn Land

In the long run men inevitably become the victims of their wealth. They adapt their lives and habits to their money, not their money to their lives. It preoccupies their thoughts, creates artificial needs, and draws a curtain between them and the world. ~ Herbert Croly

Utopia's quite another land;
In her enterprising movements,
She is England
with improvements ~ W.S. Gilbert

This is the Hour of Land, when our mistakes and shortcomings must be placed in the perspective of time. The Hour of Land is where we remember what we have forgotten: We are not the only species who lives and dreams on the planet. There is something enduring that circulates in the heart of nature that deserves our respect and attention. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization, however, has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income. …[T]his was achieved under the rubric of 'accumulation by dispossession'. By this I mean the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as 'primitive' or 'original' during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (compare the cases, described above, of Mexico and of China, where 70 million peasants are thought to have been displaced in recent times); conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession. ~ David Harvey

All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. ~ Michael Chabon

Your soul is a seeker, lover and artist; shape-shifting through archetypal energy, between your darkness and fields of light, your body and spirit, your heaven and hell, until you land in the moment of sweet surrender; when you, as a dancer, disappear into the dance. ~ Gabrielle Roth

There is a pressing need to integrate the study of international economics with the study of international politics to deepen our comprehension of the forces at work in the world. ~ Robert Gilpin

During that time period all of our tribes were suffering extremely from poverty and neglect. And the reason I say neglect is because the U.S. Government was neglecting its true responsibilities they agreed to in exchange for our land and resources. What I and others attempted to do, and in essence we did, was bring attention to our sovereign rights, the rights we had retained when the treaties were made. ~ Leonard Peltier

You cannot make the land go against itself. Not for long; the land will rebel. You must shape the vision to the land, not the land to the vision. ~ Robert Jordan

I'm focusing on cultivating my land. I have vegetables and fruit trees; I want to get some chickens and solar and really get off the grid and focus on just, really, being a mother. ~ Angela Lindvall

Every Hebrew should look upon his Faith as a temple extending over every land to prove the immutability of God and the unity of His purposes. ~ Grace Aguilar

Land monopoly is not only monopoly, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies; it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly. ~ Winston Churchill

Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land? All fear, none aid you, and few understand. ~ Alexander Pope

We're not God. All we can do is our best. But when I look at you ... I get the feeling that the limit of "your best" is up to you. ~ Sakura Tsukuba

I got into economics because I wanted to make things better for the average person. ~ Ben Bernanke

To balance Fortune by a just expense, Join with Economy, Magnificence. ~ Alexander Pope

I am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done. ~ John Brown

A good friend will bail you out when you land in jail, but a very good friend will be sitting beside you in that jail cell. ~ Maya Banks

Ulrich Van Holtz continued to read the latest tome on world economics, pretending to be bored, but in truth absolutely fascinated! ~ Shelly Laurenston