7 Moffat's "Unorthodox" critique - Part II: nineteenth-century British and continental critics

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Nov, 2003  by George Babilot

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Moffat states that rent is a necessary payment to the landlord to reward him for his functions. But nowhere does he describe these functions in a manner to preclude their adequate compensation via wages, interest, or profits. He claims that rent is a necessary payment to the landlord so as to provide him with adequate capital to make improvements, and as a profit on raw materials. Why should profits and interest be assumed deficient and incapable of accomplishing this? In a similar way he maintains that the landlord must receive a rent to enable him to "use the land for his amusement." But again, why suppose that the wages, interest, and profits accruing to the landlord would be insufficient to support such diversions? Finally, he states that rent is a necessary cost of production determining value, while at the same time recognizing that produce does flow from no-rent (marginal) lands. The price/cost on the market of produce from no-rent lands is by his own definition exclusive of a rent "cost."

Given his views for justifying the private receipt of rent, and the virtues he ascribes to private ownership of land, it is not at all unexpected that Moffat should disavow George's solution to poverty and economic crises, namely, the socialization of rent. Much of Moffat's reaction to George's remedy reflects his contrary view concerning rent, and when this is not the case his statements reduce to forcefully expressed subjective evaluations--assertions wholly lacking in analytical substance. His refusal to regard rent as a surplus, and his unusual views concerning the taxation of rent, in which he apparently assumes that a tax on land can be shifted forward to the tenant or to the consumer and is not, therefore, capitalized, show through in the following sampling of statements on the Remedy:

   If one man works on rich land, another on poor, ought their rewards
   be
   equalized? lf they ought, neither receives "the earnings of his
   labour," and
   if all rewards are equalized, what becomes of competition? If, on the
   other
   hand, the rewards are not equalized, the land is not made common
   property. (47)

   if everything belongs to everybody, the reward of labour cannot
   possibly
   be, as Mr. George asserts, the produce of labour, but can only be
   some
   pittance presumed to be consistent with common ownership.... After
   all
   his elaborate efforts to reconcile it with a free competitive
   organization,
   Mr. George's scheme thus relapses, by the retributive harmony of
   natural
   logic into the impotence of socialistic communism. (45)

   If Mr. George's theory is sound, the man who has produced anything at
   any time stole the material of which it was made. (49)

   whether the rent was fixed or differential they would have power to
   re-levy
   it on the community, and no individual would escape his natural
   share of taxation. The State tenants would simply be proprietors and
   farmers of the revenue, with an insecure title based on popular
   caprice. (50)

   [The occupiers] with only a rent to pay to the state which they would
   re-levy from the consumers. (51)

   in a country where cultivation was protected the landlords would
   re-levy
   the whole taxation from the public. (52)