Patents vs Land: A Georgist Argument
Can we attempt to frame the problems of private land ownership by comparing it conceptually with patents?
We say that if you invent something first, you can place a patent on it and it becomes your intellectual property. This means you and you alone can produce this item and profit from it. We say this is necessary to incentivize innovation and allow the inventor to offset the sunk cost of developing their invention. Indeed this means the inventor has a monopoly and can charge the highest price a consumer is willing to pay. This certainly can bring up questionable ethics if the invention is a life saving drug, meaning some people will be willing to pay any amount for it. But we generally do ok in the long run with this model because of a simple reason: patents expire. After 20 years the patent expires and others can reproduce or iterate on the invention giving us our consumer benefitting race to the bottom in price.
Now lets consider land: Is land then not akin to a patent that never expires? The first person to arrive on that land takes out a patent on it and owns it to be passed down to their heirs forever. Their heir’s heir can seek the highest rent for this land simply as a result of being born to this line. That particular location of the earth is affectively patented in perpetuity with the only way to access it being to pay the asked rent or buy the patent. What if instead land worked like patents where you could take out a lease for 20 years but then had to re purchase it at competitive price or move on?
Imagine how society would have been held back if the heirs of the original inventor of radio waves still held the patent and could charge royalties to anyone wanting to use radio transmissions of any kind. How about the locomotive, or the airplane or the microprocessor? Clearly indefinite recognition of intellectual property would be stifling so why do we allow indefinite recognition of land as property?
In fact companies are sometimes able to lobby the government to allow them to renew patents far beyond their intended duration. These instances should be scrutinized by society and considered unjust.