Argentina - economic aspects of the country's land use

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Dec, 2000  by Fernando Scornik Gerstein

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II

The Early Twentieth Century

IN THE FIRST decades of the 20th century, a new movement for land reform through changes in the incidence of taxation began in Argentina. It reflected considerable single-tax agitation in Spain, resulting from the publication in Barcelona in 1893 of a Spanish translation of Henry George's Progress and Poverty. (The translation was done by Magin Puig, under the supervision of Carlos Federico Adams y Michelena, a California lawyer who was a personal friend of George.) [7]

Before proceeding, however, it might be well to mention Silvio Gesell (1862-1930), whose unorthodox monetary theories were highly regarded by Lord Keynes, [8] and influenced Social Credit and the Townsend Plan. He was a German merchant who lived part of his life in Argentina, and began his economic writings there in the last decade of the 19th century. His main work, The Natural Economic Order (Vol. I, 1906; Vol. II, 1911) proposed, together with a plan to reduce the money rate of interest, a land reform in some ways similar to that of George, to whose memory (along with that of Moses and Spartacus) the book was dedicated. Although Gesell's monetary views had considerable impact in Argentina, some of them finding actual embodiment in government policy, his views on land were unacceptable to the dominant interests. They were more radical than those of George in that he advocated confiscating and nationalizing land instead of simply taxing its value, but less radical in that they also advocated compensation.

The fate of Gesell's land reform ideas was typical in these decades. In 1912, President Roque Saenz Pena, who in the same year introduced free, secret, and obligatory manhood suffrage to Argentina, sent to Parliament a bill providing for the taxation of "the progressive unearned increment in land values," but, despite its prestigious sponsorship, it was not even considered. However, a number of organizations were formed to promote reform along the lines urged by George, and a few excursions into politics were eventually made with moderate success.

Of these, the most noteworthy was the Partido Liberal Georgista, formed in 1921 by Carlos Villalobos-Dominguez and several other professors from various universities. Its platform demanded first a tax on the annual rental value of land which would, by gradual stages, absorb the full rental value. When this point had been reached, land would have no selling price, and it was proposed that private titles would then be abolished. Land thereafter was to be offered for lease at public auction and lifetime tenures were to be granted to the highest bidders on the basis of annual rent. All tariffs and all national, provincial, and municipal taxes were to be lowered gradually, and eventually wiped out. As can be seen, the principle bears a resemblance to the Rivadavian idea, and it won the enthusiastic support of the tenant farmers (the majority of Argentine farmers being tenants) and their sons. In the municipal elections held in the district of Pringles in the Province of Buenos Aires in 1923, the Partido Liberal G eorgista offered candidates for six then-vacant seats, two of whom were elected. Despite this modest but promising success, however, the party withered away, owing to lack of efficient central leadership after the withdrawal, for personal reasons, of Villalobos-Dominguez. [9]