Industrialization and Land Question

Abstract

A letter from Count Leo Tolstoy on October 20, 1908 (addressed to the Federation of Single Tax Leagues in Australia in reply to an address of respect and good wishes presented to him on the occasion of his eightieth birthday) has significant merit regarding the land issues under globalization (Wenzer, 1997). He wrote:

The injustice and evil of property in land has long ago been recognized. More than a hundred years ago the great French thinker, Jean Jacques Rousseau, had written: The one who first fenced in a plot of land, and took upon himself to say, ‘This land is mine,’ and found people so simple-minded as to believe him, that man was the first founder of the social organization which now exists. From how many crimes, wars, murders, calamities, cruelties would mankind have been delivered had some man then uprooted the fences and filled up the ditches. The injustice of the seizure of land has long ago been recognized by thinking people.