"The deadliest form of violence is poverty" - Ghandi "As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce." - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations "Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself." - John Locke "Just as man can't exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one's rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property." - Ayn Rand "So long as the great majority of men are not deprived of either property or honor, they are satisfied." - Niccolo Machiavelli "Don't you know that if people could bottle the air they would? Don't you know that there would be an American Air-bottling Association? And don't you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath, if they could not pay for air? I am not blaming anybody. I am just telling how it is." - Robert Ingersoll "Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it." - G.K. Chesterton "Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them." - Henry David Thoreau "The earth is the general and equal possession of all humanity and therefore cannot be the property of individuals." - Leo Tolstoy "Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail." - Abraham Lincoln "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." - Jean Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality "When the 'sacredness of property' is talked of, it should always be remembered, that any such sacredness dos not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the orginal inheritance of the whole species.. It is no hardship to any one to be excluded from what others have produced ... But it is some hardship to be born into the world and to find all nature's gifts previously engrossed, and no place left for the new-comer ... To me it seems almost an axiom that property in land should be interpreted strictly, and that the balance in all cases of doubt should incline against the properitor." - John Stuart Mill "Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right." - Thomas Jefferson "In my opinion, the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land, the Henry George argument." - Milton Friedman "A tax upon ground-rents would not raise the rents of houses. It would fall altogether upon the owner of the ground-rent." - Adam Smith
"If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin." ~Charles Darwin "The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash." ~John Berger "Affluence creates poverty." ~Marshall McLuhan (referring to the wealthy being able to buy up all the land)
Ironically this is also true. While I originally was a strong advocate of land value taxation, I have come to see the potential danger of this type of taxation also. Many people may not be aware of this, but the U.S. Constitution even has a safeguard against direct taxes (taxes which are levied directly upon property rather than a transaction between two parties), requiring them to be apportioned among the states in such a manner that most populous states have to pay the bulk of the tax, which essentially creates an inherent limit on how much the people in the less populated states can be taxed. This all comes back to the age old question: How do we get the government to solve our problems without giving the government too much power?
"Property is the fruit of labor...property is desirable...is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built." ~Abraham Lincoln Only if govt protects the rights & PROPERTY of others are we safe to labor for our own improvement. If a person cannot own the land he works or lives in, he is a tenant of someone else, who calls the shots on what he can do or not do. IOW, he is a slave or sharecropper.. a serf for a nobility class. Government has no other end, but the preservation of property. ~John Locke If govt does not protect the property of the individual, but takes it for redistribution for whatever reason, it has become tyrannical, & NO ONE's property is safe. And if property is not safe, neither is life. Those who want to blur the lines between human rights & property rights move us backward in the quest for human freedom.
