Rent

“ But by what right could Government levy upon Rent only if its claims to an income are as a producer of Wealth functioning in the category of Labor, the natural compensation for which is not Rent but Wages? ”

“ In common speech we speak of rent only when owner and user are distinct persons. But in the economic sense there is also rent where the same person is both owner and user. Where owner and user are thus the same person, whatever part of his income he might obtain by letting the land to another is rent, while the return for his labour and capital is that part of his income which they would yield him did he hire the land instead of working it. ”

“ It is the continuous increase of rent, the price that labour is compelled to pay for the use of land, which strips the many of the wealth they justly earn and piles it up in the hands of the few who do nothing to earn it. ”

“ Over and above the capital of the farmer and all its profits, they regularly occasion the reproduction of the rent of the landlord. This rent may be considered as the produce of those powers of nature, the use of which the landlord lends to the farmer. It is greater or smaller according to the supposed extent of those powers, or in other words, according to the supposed natural or improved fertility of the land. It is the work of nature which remains, after deducting or compensating every thing which can be regarded as the work of man. ”

“ The term rent, in its economic sense—that is, when used, as I am using it, to distinguish that part of the produce which accrues to the owners of land or other natural capabilities by virtue of their ownership—differs in meaning from the word rent as commonly used. ”

“ But it does seem to be legitimate to argue from these and similar considerations to the improbability of an abrupt distinction as we pass from rent in the 'strict sense' to rent popularly so called, and to infer from the more apparent difficulty of distinguishing between what is earned and what is unearned in the case of these other differential advantages to a likelihood, at least, of difficulty in the case of land. ”

“ In technical discussion the term rent is usually confined to the compensation secured from appropriation of space, peculiar location, natural fertility, mineral deposits, water privileges, or any natural advantage to be used in production. In this limited meaning rent is confined to the advantage gained by the owner of wealth in any form so affected by the law of supply and demand as to gain a scarcity value. ”

“ Rent values of land.—The general character of rent, as connected with the use of fixed capital and so associated with interest, has already been touched upon. In that sense it depends upon the fact that possession of wealth is universally an advantage in production of future wealth and is subject to all the peculiarities affecting interest. ”

“ The economic bearing of rent is this: it gives effect to the demands of the landlord class for the results of an immense amount of labour applied to the production of varied commodities. As already explained, the produce sold in towns by farmers to pay rent goes, in large measure, to the support of workers who are manufacturing luxuries, objets de luxe, and many meretricious wares that minister to the depraved taste of men and women whose happiness is destroyed by a life of idleness and ennui. ”

“ Now this is actually the case with rent. The ordinary progress of a society which increases in wealth, is at all times tending to augment the incomes of landlords; to give them both a greater amount and a greater proportion of the wealth of the community, independently of any trouble or outlay incurred by themselves. They grow richer, as it were in their sleep, without working, risking, or economizing. ”

“ Some speak as if the abolition of rent were to be an immediate result of the abolition of interest, apparently taking the ground that rent is a product of the selling price of land and the interest of money. ”

“ With what a workman or settler pays monthly for the rent of the land, he makes himself, after a short time, the owner of the land and of the house he lives in, as the monthly rent redeems with a small interest the value of the property. ”

“ Rent is sometimes described as the 'leavings' of profits and wages, but in such cases it may rather be what is left when the necessities of a bare subsistence have been met. The cultivator, having no alternative occupation, may conceivably be forced by competition to offer such a rent as will only permit him to live, and he may offer it with a full knowledge of the conditions of his present position and of the future consequences of his act. ”

“ It is true that all tenant farmers, and many other classes of producers, pay rent. But we have now seen, that whoever cultivates land, paying a rent for it, gets in return for his rent an instrument of superior power to other instruments of the same kind for which no rent is paid. ”

“ The gross rent of a private estate comprehends whatever is paid by the farmer; the neat rent, what remains free to the landlord, after deducting the expense of management, of repairs, and all other necessary charges; or what, without hurting his estate, he can afford to place in his stock reserved for immediate consumption, or to spend upon his table, equipage, the ornaments of his house and furniture, his private enjoyments and amusements. His real wealth is in proportion, not to his gross, but to his neat rent. ”

“ The rent which properly belongs to the landlord, is no more than the neat produce which remains after paying, in the completest manner, all the necessary expenses which must be previously laid out, in order to raise the gross or the whole produce. It is because the labour of the cultivators, over and above paying completely all those necessary expenses, affords a neat produce of this kind, that this class of people are in this system peculiarly distinguished by the honourable appellation of the productive class. ”

“ Some landlords, instead of a rent in money, require a rent in kind, in corn, cattle, poultry, wine, oil, &c.; others, again, require a rent in service. Such rents are always more hurtful to the tenant than beneficial to the landlord. ”

“ A farmer, in making his present contract for rent, does not concern himself with the past history of the causes of the fertility or situation of the land, but with its present advantages, and he makes no attempt to draw the distinction between the earned and the unearned. And, in the future, he and his landlord may allow the nominal rent to remain unaltered in spite of increased prosperity or intensified depression in agriculture, in consideration simply of lessened expenditure or added liberality in the matter of improvements. ”

“ For if, of the produce, all over the amount which labour and capital could secure from land for which no rent is paid must go to land owners as rent, then all that can be claimed by labour and capital as wages and interest is the amount which they could have secured from land yielding no rent. ”

“ Labour is often intimately connected with rent, for in some neighbourhoods there is a vast deal of labour in collecting it.
Quarter-day is the day when rent comes due. But, when due, it does not always come; and a landlord who expects his rent punctually at the quarter is too sanguine by half. ”

“ Relation of rent to wages and interest Stated reversely, the law of rent is necessarily the law of wages and interest taken together, for it is the assertion that, no matter what be the production that results from the application of labour and capital, these two factors will only receive in wages and interest such part of the produce as they could have produced on land free to them without the payment of rent - that is, the least productive land in use. ”

“ Rent clearly expresses the return made to landholders for the use of the land, and wages the return made for exertion of whatever kind; but profits does not express the return made for the use of capital. ”

“ A century ago, as I know very well, house-rent, even in London, took a small part of the workman's scanty earnings; now his earnings are sometimes very little better than they were a century ago, and his rent absorbs from a fourth to a half of what he earns in poorly paid labour. ”

“ A gentleman who farms a part of his own estate, after paying the expense of cultivation, should gain both the rent of the landlord and the profit of the farmer. He is apt to denominate, however, his whole gain, profit, and thus confounds rent with profit, at least in common language. ”

“ In a broad sense, then, rent is a payment for differential advantages, which may thus proceed from different sources. It is only by taking all sources of advantage into account that it can be determined whether one piece of land or another is a more productive instrument of wealth ”

“ The rent of the house itself, as distinguished from the ground, is the equivalent given for the labour and capital expended on the building. The fact of its being received in quarterly or half-yearly payments, makes no difference in the principles by which it is regulated. ”

“ They bought it buried in the ground, and sold it prepared for the market. Now, Fergus, tell me what rent is, before we begin to guess what I shall have to pay the laird, if I settle near you.”
“What farm will you have? Where is it? How large?”
“Answer me first,” said Angus, laughing. “What is rent?”
“The money that a man pays——”
“Nay; rent may be paid in corn, or kelp, or fish, or many things besides money. Better say produce.”
“Rent is the produce that remains to a man——”
“Ella is to pay rent,” interrupted Ronald, laughing. ”

“ And all the world is not only asserting this truth every day, but is also acting on it; for these extra loaves, produced by the qualities peculiar to superior soils, are neither more nor less than Rent. Rent is the amount of produce which a given amount of exertion obtains from rich land, beyond what it obtains from poor land. Such is the account of rent [102] in which all economists agree ”

“ Rent is the extra return made to agricultural capital when employed with peculiar advantages; the exact equivalent of what those advantages enable the producers to economize in the cost of production: the value and price of the produce being regulated by the cost of production to those producers who have no advantages ”

“ The sordid subject came up again for discussion when Phyllis and I went to have a preliminary chat with the house-agent.
"You have spoken with eloquence and conviction about reception-rooms, out-houses, railway stations, golf courses, and h. and c.," said I, "but sooner or later some one must rise and say a few pointed words about Rent."
"That all depends on what you are prepared to give," he replied. "The rough-and-ready rule is to fix one's rent at a tenth of one's income."
"Yes, but which income?" I asked. "For I have two incomes and I can't afford a separate house for each." ”

“ Rent raised again! Every thing seems to raise rent.”
“High prices do, as a matter of course. When the corn sold so well as to afford the settlers a fine profit, other settlers were in a hurry to come and grow corn, and the original cultivators improved their land more and more, and rents rose in proportion. Those who had long leases got up in the world rapidly, and the owners of the land were presently much more than paid for making the road.”
“But, Angus, rent seems to rise and rise for ever!” ”

“ And thus to say that rent will be the excess in productiveness over the yield at the margin or lowest point of cultivation is the same thing as to say that it will be the excess of produce over what the same amount of labour and capital obtains in the least remunerative occupation. ”

“ It was always insisted that a rent could only be charged upon something of which the use could be separated from the ownership, as otherwise it would savour of usury. [2] In the sixteenth century interesting discussions arose about the possibility of creating a personal rent charge, not secured on any specific property, but such discussions did not trouble the writers of the period which we are treating. ”

“ We are not now so much concerned with the practical conclusions which they deduce respecting the real incidence of taxation, as with the fact that the distinction involves a point of fundamental importance in the theory of rent. Rent, broadly defined as a payment for differential advantages, is measured upwards from a minimum level where, it is assumed, no rent is paid. The producers on the 'margin' of production clear their expenses, but have no surplus in hand to transfer to the landlords. ”

“ It requires rent to be low, for without that there cannot be a great surplus produce to divide between the two other classes, after satisfying the landlord. You will always make me say that profits depend on the [Pg 205] low price of corn. I never do say so; I contend that they depend on wages, and, although in my opinion wages will be mainly regulated by the facility of obtaining necessaries, they do not entirely depend on such facility. ”