Defending Paine’s agrarian justice and the “Ground-rent”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/eps.5.1.168Keywords:
Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, Resource Taxation, Left-LibertarianismAbstract
Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice deserves more attention than it has received, for in it Paine provides
a foundational case for a broad social welfare program that is absent in his better-known Rights of
Man. In this paper, I explain Paine’s case in Agrarian Justice, and consider the objection that the main
revenue source Paine proposes—the “ground-rent”—is insufficient to fund the social welfare
programs he proposes because in the production of value the contribution attributable to natural
resources is insignificant. I argue that the ground-rent justifies levying a tax not just on the value of
the natural resources used in the production of value, but on a portion of the value of the labor applied
to those resources, and therefore can be a significant revenue source. Similar considerations apply to
resource-based taxation schemes suggested by others, including Henry George, Thomas Pogge, and
some modern “left-libertarians”.
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