Open AccessDefending Paine's Agrarian Justice and the "Ground-Rent"
Author(s) -
Michael E Weber
Publication year - 2023
Publication title -
ethics, politics and society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2184-2582
DOI - 10.21814/eps.5.1.168
Subject(s) - agrarian society , economic justice , value (mathematics) , revenue , economics , production (economics) , law , law and economics , sociology , neoclassical economics , political science , history , microeconomics , agriculture , finance , archaeology , mathematics , statistics
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 program 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”.