The Maccabaean
JULY, 1919
Land Tenure in the Jewish Commonwealth
Assistant Secretary, Department of Labor, U. S. Government
This is the first of a series of three articles by a distinguished economist, leader of the Single Tax movement in America, and a friend of the Jewish national Restoration. The articles are designed to expound the land tenure principles of the Pittsburgh Program. The second article, "Taxation in the Jewish Commonwealth," will appear in the August number.—Ed.
The Zionist Purpose
COMMON ownership and control of their land is the Zionist purpose with reference to the people of Palestine.
As a principle, this purpose is involved in the declaration of the Zionist Congress at Basle in 1897, which announced the object of Zionism to be "the establishment of a publicly recognized and legally secured homeland for the Jewish people." As a policy, the purpose was specifically declared by the Pittsburgh convention of the American organization in 1918, which committed the movement for a Jewish national home in Palestine to "ownership and control of the land and of all natural resources by the whole people."
This specific policy and that general object are inseparable. A homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine cannot continue, no matter how auspicious its beginnings, unless the whole people of Palestine are to own and control the land of Palestine. Merely to say this should be enough to prove it. But confusions of thought spring from misapprehensions of the meaning of "land," and these are too frequent to be passed by with a simple statement of the common-sense truth.
The Pittsburgh declaration undertakes to forestall such misapprehensions by coupling the terms "land" and "natural resources." But the mind that does not think instinctively of those two terms as synonymous is subject to still other misleading confusions. Such a mind would be likely to think not only of land and natural resources as different from each other, but of building sites, for instance, as different from both. Yet all are natural and all are resources. So I shall adopt "natural resources" as the comprehensive term.
Resources
The maintenance and betterment of human life necessitates human industry, and human industry must have resources in order to bring forth consumable products. If we classify those resources we shall find that there are two general kinds, and only two; one kind is artificial, the other is natural. Scrupulously to distinguish these radically different kinds of industrial resources is vital to all sound judgment with reference to their ownership, their utilization and their control.
Artificial Resources
Industrial resources such as cannot exist except as a result of the industrial arts are appropriately distinguished as artificial resources. They include buildings, machinery, fences, ditches, growing crops, mills, factories, vehicles, and so on through an almost endless catalogue. Whatever be the mechanism which serves as a resource for farming, mining, manufacturing, transporting, merchandizing or any other of the myriad variations of industrial activity, such mechanism is for that activity an artificial resource if it be of human construction. This generalization should be obvious.
Not so obvious is it, possibly, that the artificial-resource class includes such alterations of natural conditions as clearings of agricultural areas for farming, pits dug and equipped for extracting mineral deposits, or cellars dug for houses. Yet it is evident upon reflection that they also are in the artificial class. Any natural thing which human effort adapts to human use for the satisfaction of human wants must be an artificial resource to that extent. That it is a resource of some kind is certain; that it could not be the kind of resource it is without human art, is equally certain.