Why should any human being pay another human being simply to have a place to exist in the world?

In the stone age, small clans moved about hunting and gathering. Where sparsely populated, there was little competition for the area they used. However, as human numbers increased, they might have had to defend their exclusive use against competing clans. With settlement and agriculture, claims to territory were more clearly asserted and defended. Some land was better for producing food. Low-lying and open land would be less defensible than hill tops, where farming was harder.

As civilization developed, warrior elites took control of the best lands, which they leased to farmers in exchange for protection and guaranteed right of use. This rent was paid in food produced and services rendered, including labor or military service. More was charged for use of more productive land. With urbanization, there was similar competition for the best “properties.” (As we still say: “location, location, location!”) Elite families continued to dominate ownership and manage the system whereby land use was stably apportioned through payment of rents. Now, as then, you pay for the uncontested right to occupy a place.

In modern society, it is no longer the king or baron who defends your right of use, but the state. (If you own property, proof of ownership may not even be a paper deed but simply a registry in a government office.) If you rent, your entitlement is guaranteed in a signed agreement. Through taxes, you pay the state to enforce and defend these formal arrangements. Yet, on top of that, you also pay private individuals for the “right” to occupy that property—either through monthly rent or the price of purchase. But, if the state has taken over the role of regulating the system of land use, why does money continue to be paid to private parties for the use of land? The state has superseded the nobility for governance and protection, but not for ownership. It seems we are caught in a hybrid system of double taxation, a compromise descended from feudal society. One way or another you pay twice for a place to put your body—once to the private landholder and once to the state to protect you from usurpers.

In Canada only about 5% of the land mass is privately owned. However, that “alienated” part happens to be the most desirable land. In fact, it is the only part you where are allowed to live. The rest belongs nominally to the “Crown,” which in an arcane sense is the King of England. (The “real” of real estate means royal. It may well turn out to belong instead to native First Nations.) In any case, homesteading was curtailed around 1970 and squatters were suppressed. Individuals cannot apply for Crown land for living space, though corporations can for industrial purposes. There is a housing crisis in part because the whole population is herded into a very restricted area, with artificially inflated land prices.

If someone builds you a house, it’s fair to pay them for their work. But the cost of building is only part of the cost of real estate. The rest is payment for the right to occupy land that is both naturally and artificially scarce. You pay the party from which you purchase or lease. In turn, they had to pay someone else, and that party had to pay… and so on, all the way back to colonists or feudal forebears, who were granted use by the king as favors for support. Absurdly, we are all paying each other for the right exist! Rent is like interest paid for the use of money, which was once frowned upon as “usury.” Some ancient societies cancelled debt every few years. What if we cancelled land ownership?