.
| Ground Rent
as a Portion of U.S. National Income |
| [A quotation from:
The Machinery of Freedom, xiv-xv] |
"This leaves open the question of how one attains ownership
of things that are not created or that are not entirely created, such
as land and mineral resources. There is disagreement among
libertarians on this question. Fortunately, the answer has little
effect on the character of a libertarian society, at least in this
country. Only about 3 percent of all income in America is rental
income. Adding the rental value of owner-occupied housing would bring
this figure up to about 8 percent. Property tax -- rental income
collected by government -- is about another 5 percent. So the total
rental value of all property, land and buildings, adds up to 13
percent of all income. Most of that is rent on the value of buildings,
which are created by human effort, and thus poses no problem in the
definition of property rights; the total rent on all land, which does
pose such a problem, is thus only a tiny fraction of total income. The
total raw material value of all minerals consumed, the other major "unproduced"
resource, is about another 3 percent. There again, much of that value
is the result of human effort, of digging the ore out of the ground.
Only the value of the raw resources in fact may reasonably be regarded
as unproduced. So resources whose existence owes nothing to human
action bring to their owners, at the most, perhaps one-twentieth of
the national income. The vast majority of income is the result of
human actions."
|