Stuart McMillen explores these questions in his magnificent 56-page cartoon, “Who Owns the Million Dollar Baseball?” It wasn’t the player Mientkiewicz who somehow made an ordinary baseball worth a million dollars or more. He was just the lucky guy who made the last ‘out’ of a seven-game World Series following a baseball season of 176 games, producing the first World Series victory after 85 luckless seasons.  

McMillen’s strip notes how the entire team won the three other games in the seven-game series, and how the fans had loyally supported the team for generations. The cartoon notes that the City of Boston and State of Massachusetts, played an indirect role by providing streets, electricity, sewer and other infrastructure for the Fenway Park stadium in which the Red Sox play. 

In our blog, Jon Rowe and I wrote:

The value of a business, resource, historic baseball or whatever does not reside solely in the thing. Nor does it arise from the efforts of an entrepreneur alone. Value is, rather, a co-production between an individual, society and nature; and the latter two often play the larger part. Land values, for example, are almost entirely a social product. That’s why two acres near an urban freeway exchange or subway stop can fetch more than does an equal amount of land in the middle of a desert.

The question is less what the owner did, than what others did around him, individually and through government. So, too, with music, inventions – just about everything. These accomplishments draw on what was done before, and depend on the sustaining presence of society as a whole. Even stocks would have little value without stock markets through which to sell them, and without governments to police – to some degree – those markets. These are social creations all.

Once we acknowledge the social component of economic value, then discussion of financial return and social policy take a new turn. Taxation, for example, no longer is a matter of “redistributing” someone else’s income, or wealth, but rather of restoring a portion of it to the rightful owners. The acknowledgment of social co-production also dissolves the myth of the heroic individual businessman or woman as “self-made.” Individuals may do great things, but as Warren Buffett – who knows something about making money – has pointed out, none do it alone.

Stuart McMillen’s strip makes these points wonderfully vivid. In an accompanying blog post, he elaborates on the public factors that contribute to individual success. His "self-made" executive bears a striking and deliberate resemblance to Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the world's richest man.  

McMillen's principal interests are environmentalism, post-growth economics, and human psychology, but he also deals with such diverse topics as Buckminster Fuller, religion, energy, and drugs. He supports himself through a crowdfunding page at which 169 individuals have so far pledged a cumulative US$1,223 per month. He aspires to be the first crowdfunded Australian cartoonist to earn a median income for his country. You can contribute to his work at the crowdfunding site Patreon.

By the way, a shamed first baseman Mientkiewicz eventually agreed to return the ball so it could be put on display. It was an implicit acknowledgment that the Red Sox's success in the World Series stemmed from many sources generously working together.

For me, the report is quite remarkable:  a rigorous, comprehensive set of proposals for how land could be developed, used, and protected as a commons.

There are succinct, powerful sections on making land ownership data more open and available; ways to foster community-led development and ownership of land (such as a “community right to buy”); and codifying a citizen’s “right to roam” on land for civic and cultural purposes. One effective way to curb speculative development and revive farming and forestry is by creating community land trusts and curbing tax privileges and subsidies.

The bald financial realities about land are quite troubling. The report notes that in the UK, “land values have risen 544% since 1995, far outpacing any growth in real incomes.” Housing is simply unaffordable for many people. “Two decades ago, the average working family needed to save for three years to afford a deposit [downpayment] on a home,” the report notes. “Today, it must save for 19 years.”

Much of the blame can go to tax laws and other policies that encourage people to treat homes as financial assets. This fuels fierce speculation in housing that raises prices, greatly benefiting the rich (landowners) and impoverishing renters. Similarly, thanks to speculation and tax subsidies, wealthy landowners consolidate more land while small farmers are forced to give up farming.  Fully one-fifth of English farms have folded over the past ten years. 

Politicians are generally far too wary to propose solutions to these problems. It would only enrage a key chief constituency, the wealthy, and alienate some in the middle class who aspire to flip homes as a path to wealth. But there are in fact many ways to neutralize the speculative frenzy associated with land and mutualize the acquisition and control of land to make something that can benefit everyone.  

Land for the Many recommends a shift in “macroprudential tools” – financial assessments of systemic risk – to prod banks to make fewer loans for real estate and more loans that help productive sectors of the economy. The report also urges restrictions on lending to buyers intending to rent their properties.Other healthy ways to make land more accessible and affordable for all:  a progressive property tax on land; a reduction of tax exemptions for landowners; and a cap on permissible rent increases at no more than the rate of wage inflation or the consumer price index, whichever is lower.

Since profit-driven development can have catastrophic long-term effects on ecosystems, wildlife, and future generations, the report calls for the creation of Public Development Corporations. These entities would have the power to purchase and develop land in the public interest.

I especially like the idea of creating a Common Ground Trust, a nonprofit institution to help prospective homebuyers buy homes. As the request of a buyer, the Trust would buy the land underneath a house and hold it in trust for the commons. Since land on average represents 70% of the cost of a house, the Trust’s acquisition of land under housing would greatly reduce the upfront downpayments that buyers must make. “In return,” write Monbiot et al., “the buyers [would] pay a land rent to the Trust.”  Home buyers could reap any appreciation in value of their house, but land would effectively be taken off the market and its value would be held in the commons.

“By bringing land into common ownership, land rents can be socialized rather than flowing to private landlords and banks,” the report notes. “Debt-fueled and speculative demand can be reined in without the risk of an uncontrolled or destabilizing fall in values.”

Land for the Many is major achievement. It consolidates the progressive case for land reform and explains in straight-forward language how law and policy must change. Of course, the politics of securing this agenda would be a formidable challenge. But given the grotesque inequalities, ecological harms, declines in farming, and unaffordable housing associated with the current regime of land ownership, this conversation is long-overdue.