Financing Planet Management Part I

Sovereignty, World Order and the Earth Rights Imperative

Subtitles: The Crack in the Liberty Bell, The Common Heritage Principle and Public Finance, The New Democratic Covenant

We have reached the deplorable circumstance where in large measure a very powerful few are in possession of the earth's resources, the land and all its riches, and all the franchises and other privileges that yield a return. These monopolistic positions are kept by a handful of men who are maintained virtually without taxation . . .we are yielding up sovereignty. - Agnes de Mille (1905-1993)

Heaven has its reasons, Earth has its resources, and Man has his political order, thus forming with the first two a triad. But he would err if he failed to respect the ground rules of this triad and infringed on the other two. - Xun Quang Xunzi, 3rd century.

Defining the parameters of sovereignty is a key component of the world order dialogue as it struggles to reach consensus regarding the boundaries and prerogatives of power.

Sovereignty is the status of a person or group of persons having supreme and independent political authority. In dealing with the concept of sovereignty, we are dealing with the reality of power. It is a power over territory, over land and water, oil and minerals, as well as those life forms that have miraculously emerged out of the mud of the earth.

The kings and queens of Europe, Africa, and Asia were sovereigns. They reigned supreme and were thought to be divine. They descended from those having the strongest might and force to prevail over territory. The larger and richer the territory they could hold under their power and authority, the higher their status. They were both feared and courted by other humans.

These were the dominators who ruled the land and made the rules. Their rules became law. Their territorial law was that of dominium -- the legalization of control over lands originally obtained by conquest and plunder. All real estate was the royal estate. Might made right, as the rules of power became the laws of the land.

Peter Hansen, executive director of the Independent Commission on Global Governance, has stated:

The United Nations cannot by the nature of things, have the formal attributes of sovereignty, which has been defined around a territory, around a (specific) population, because centralized control of a sovereign body with a given territory and population, is not the same thing as a sovereign U.N. To assume that it would be is not a very meaningful way, in my opinion, to define the subject.

But it seems to me that the U.N. has in fact been defined around a given territory, that territory being the planet as a whole, as well as a specific population, which is all the planet's people. The issue here is not that of populations and boundary lines, but of the demarcation of power and control over the earth that is the foremost "formal attribute of sovereignty" to be debated.

To speak of enforceable world law is to speak of world power. A world legislature would have the power to make the laws of the land and to make the rules for the territory of the earth. And this is what concerns me, because we have not yet discussed the rules of territorial control and ownership in sufficient detail.

Before a global authority, be it a reformed United Nations or a federal world government, can be trusted to wield power benignly, the problem of the current undemocratic control of the earth must be addressed. Innumerable battles and wars have been fought, and many are currently in progress, over territorial control. The fair and peaceful resolution of such conflicts requires a deep consideration of ethical principles regarding land tenure.

Dr. I.G. Patel, Independent Commission on Global Governance member, governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and former director of the London School of Economics stated:

We cannot talk (sensibly) about what kind of global government we want until (1) Agreement is reached on how to deal with the causes of international problems and (2) If we are going to have governance or government we will have to do something about poverty.

Dr. Patel is correct in his perception that the world order movement has not dealt sufficiently with these issues. While there is a fair amount of unanimity regarding the basic outline of a democratic global political structure, i.e., the need for a democratically elected legislature, a world judiciary to interpret and apply world laws, and an executive to administer and enforce the laws, there has not yet been sufficient thought applied to the consideration of root causes of poverty and international conflict.

The problem is that democracy has not "grounded" itself. We have not yet extended democratic principles down to the ownership and control of the earth. Democratic government as presently constituted, and democratic world government as currently proposed, ungrounded and unembedded in equal rights to the earth, cannot create the world of peace and justice that we seek.

The Crack in the Liberty Bell

To fully grasp the nature of the severe limitations in the current ideology of the world government movement, it is necessary to follow the thread of the democratic ideal back to its fundamental tenets. Pondering the problem of persistent poverty within a democratic system of government, Richard Noyes, New Hampshire State Representative in his book Now the Synthesis: Capitalism, Socialism, and the New Social Contract, identifies the current land tenure system as "the one great imperfection, the snag on which freedom catches."

Noyes tells us that the "Age of Reason gave us a thesis with flaws." John Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government, the political bible of the founding fathers, held that "The great and chief end of men's uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property." The central understanding was that only through the guarantee of property rights, one's own body included, could the individual really be free.

In further defining property rights, Locke stated that "every man has a `property' in his own `person"', so that anything a man has "removed from the common state," anything with which he has "mixed his own labor," is rightfully his own. The securing of this right was to be the main duty of a democratic government.

Locke also affirmed that "God hath given the world to men in common." But the trouble lies with Locke's Second Proviso regarding property. Locke maintained that it was correct for the individual in a state of nature to mix his labor with land and so call it (produced wealth) his own "since there was still enough (land) and as good left, and more than the yet unprovided could use."

In the Second Proviso the reasoning of the primary mentor of the founding fathers was faulty and limited. Locke failed to perceive the consequences for democracy of a time when so few humans would come to control so much of the earth, to the exclusion of the vast majority. Nor could he have known how the forces of an industrial economy could drive land values to such highs, to the benefit of landowners rather than wage earners.

The property-in-land problem, insufficiently scrutinized by John Locke and the founding fathers, is the crack in the Liberty Bell. It is the root dilemma of democracy. Life and liberty without land rights breeds unhappiness, unemployment, and wage slavery.

Adam Smith was of no more help than John Locke when it came to solving the land problem. Although initially he made clear distinctions among land, labor, and capital, he soon began using the terms capital and land as synonymous factors. Consequently, mainstream economists have treated land as essentially no more than a subset of capital in their own two-factor (capital and labor) macroeconomics. This is why they have failed to understand the grave problem of the maldistribution of wealth that has grown out of the fact that a minuscule percentage of the world's people have come to control and consume the vast majority of the earth's land and natural resources.

The Common Heritage Principle and Public Finance

The resolution of the dilemma of democracy can be found in a three-factor (land, labor, capital) macroeconomic approach. The products resulting from the interaction of land and labor are rightfully held as individual private property, while land (which term includes all natural resources) is recognized as the common heritage.

Once the human right to the earth is firmly established in the minds and policies of a democratic majority, land will no longer be taken by the few from the many either by the force of military might or by the mechanisms of the market. The market's ability to place value, combined with the efficiency of money as an exchange medium, results in a range of prices for land sites and natural resources. Those who simply "own" earth resources, contribute nothing as such to the productive process. Yet under the current private property ethic, they are in an advantageous position of power and can extract the ransom of what economists call "ground rent" from both labor and productive capital.

But if we now apply the common heritage principle to land, then it follows that ground rent, which is a measure of natural resource value, must be treated as "common property." The next step which three-factor economists take is to link this insight with the public finance system. Voila! The policy imperative becomes clear. A way to affirm the equal right of all to the common heritage is to collect the ground rent for the benefit of the community as a whole, a policy frequently referred to as "land value taxation."

Confiscatory taxes on labor and productive capital should gradually be removed, as the value of earth resources becomes the proper source of funding for the community as a whole. The "common wealth" finances the commonwealth.

Three-factor economists thus advocate a practical policy that will solve the problem of Locke's Second Proviso, which falsely assumed no limitation to natural resources. Democracy can now be established on the firm foundation of equal rights to the earth, our common heritage.

While this perspective is newly emerging, it is not new. No less a figure than Tom Paine stated:

Men did not make the earth… It is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property… Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds.

Where does that leave us in our consideration of the world order movement, the concept of "sovereignty," and the need for financing the activities of the U.N. or any other global body?

The New Democratic Covenant

Clearly, the mandate of a benevolent yet powerful sovereign global governmental body must be to protect the property rights of the bodies of individuals as well as the products of their labor (private property), as well as to protect and to fairly share our common body Mother Earth. This is the new territorial imperative, the new democratic covenant, and the higher synthesis resolving what has been the difficult and too-often-destructive dialectic of left versus right.

A properly constituted global authority will seek to further these principles both within and among the current nations. Once the world order movement grasps the importance of the new territorial imperative of equal rights to earth, then it follows that ground rent (land value) should be advocated as the appropriate source of public finance from local to global levels.

(Part II of Financing Planet Management forthcoming on this Aradhana Airwaves substack).