The ownership of land as property is as unjust, or even more unjust, than slavery, i.e. the ownership of human beings as property.
The one who, having fenced off a piece of land, dared to be the first to say: “This land is mine,” and who had encountered people so simple that they could believe him—that man was the original founder of present day civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, misfortunes and horrors could humanity have avoided if someone had torn out the stakes, leveled the ditch and said: “Beware, do not believe this liar; you are ruined if you forget that no one can own the earth and that its fruits belong to all.”
— Rousseau
Equity does not permit property in land, for if one portion of the earth’s surface may justly become the possession of an individual, held for his sole use and benefit, as a thing to which he has an exclusive right, then other portions of its surface may be so held, and our planet must thus lapse into private hands.
— Herbert Spencer
It goes without saying that a director or a landowner who has purchased some privilege or inherited it from his forefathers has no moral right to it. The question is whether or not his claim is just and reasonable in itself. Because falsehood and evil are more false and more evil the longer they continue.
— Grant Allen
It can never be pretended that the existing titles to such property are legitimate. Should any one think so, let him look in the chronicles. Violence, fraud, the prerogative of force, the claims of superior cunning—these are the sources to which those titles may be traced.
— Herbert Spencer
The people who own land condemn those who appropriate other people’s property both verbally and in courts.
Do they not understand that they, the ones who are constantly taking away from the people their most inalienable property, should burn from shame at the mere mention of the word “theft,” and that they should not condemn and punish others for the things of which they themselves are all constantly guilty?
Consider from the point of view of an observer of nature, a landless man—a being fitted in all his parts and powers for the use of land, compelled by all his needs to the use of land, and yet denied all right to land. Is he not as unnatural as a bird without air, a fish without water?
— Henry George
Private property in land—which never arises from the natural perceptions of men, but springs historically from usurpation and robbery—is something so utterly absurd, so outrageously unjust, so clearly a waste of productive forces and a barrier to the most profitable use of natural opportunities, so thoroughly opposed to all sound maxims of public policy, so glaringly in the way of further progress, that it is only tolerated because the majority of men never think about it or hear it questioned.
— Henry George
Of the two systems of slavery, I think there can be no doubt that upon the same moral level, that which makes property of persons is more humane than that which results from making private property of land. In recognizing land as private property, human beings are overworked, starved, robbed of all the light and sweetness of life, condemned to ignorance and brutishness, and to the infection of physical and moral disease; they are driven to crime and suicide, not by other individuals, but by iron necessities for which it seems that no one in particular is responsible.
— Henry George
The injustice of land ownership, like every injustice, is inevitably tied to a whole series of injustices and evil deeds necessary for its protection.
