Eating Our Children

December 07, 2025

Eating Our Children

The Inheritance of Loss: How a Stolen Birthright is Bankrupting Our Future

We live in an age of searing contradiction. Our powers of production are unimaginable, our capacity to generate wealth unprecedented. Yet this golden age of progress is stalked by a deepening shadow: entrenched poverty, a yawning wealth gap, and the gnawing anxiety of economic instability. Here lies the great enigma of our time: how can destitution not only persist but fester in the very centres of immense wealth?
Mainstream economics, blinded by orthodoxy, has no good answer. This essay contends the paradox is no accident, but the direct result of a foundational injustice: the private theft of economic rent. This system treats our common inheritance—the earth—as a private monopoly, severing the link between work and reward. It institutionalises a parasitic ‘free riding’, allowing a privileged few to reap where they have not sown. In doing so, it preys upon the prosperity, security, and very futures of our children and grandchildren.
To understand this, we must first define the invisible engine of inequality, trace its history of capture, and expose how it corrupts our economy and devours the young. Finally, we will see the state’s complicity in this generational crime, and the simple, profound remedy that justice and logic demand.

1. The Invisible Engine: What Really is Economic Rent?

Forget your monthly payment to a landlord. In economic terms, Economic Rent is something far more fundamental: it is the surplus value of land and natural resources. This value is not created by any owner’s labour or clever investment. It is a social product, generated by the community itself—by our collective demand for a location, by public investment in infrastructure, by the simple fact of our presence and activity.
The philosopher Henry George gave us the core principle of justice here: you own what you create, but the value of the earth belongs equally to all. Rent is unearned income. As Adam Smith noted, it comes to landlords “as it were, of its own accord.” Historically, this surplus was the basis of civilisation—the fund that built culture, public works, and the state. Its privatisation created a dual society: a parasitic ‘Predator’ class living off the wealth generated by the ‘Producer’ class.
This was no natural evolution. It was an act of violent theft, legalised over centuries.

2. The Original Sin: How Our Land Was Stolen

Our system of property rights isn’t natural law; it’s a historical construct built on conquest. The framework that lets individuals pocket the earth’s value was forged in acts of dispossession that have left us a profoundly traumatised society.
The English Enclosures: Starting with Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, a centuries-long process saw common lands—the lifeblood of ordinary people—systematically seized by Act of Parliament and handed to a wealthy elite. This created the landless working class.
Colonialism & Conquest: The global land grab was enforced by brutal violence. In Africa, taxes like the ‘Hut Tax’ (payable only in cash) forced self-sufficient farmers off their land and into colonial labour camps. The concentration camp, used by Italians in Libya and the British in South Africa, was invented to break resistance to this theft.
Systemic Violence: This was ‘supplanting’ on an epic scale. The process dehumanised the landless, created a ruling class with an insatiable appetite for consumption without labour, and embedded violence into our economic DNA. The poison injected then still circulates in our ‘impersonal’ markets today.

3. The Predator Economy: How Rent Wrecks Capitalism

That original sin evolved into the corrupting engine of modern capitalism: land speculation. This isn’t a market flaw, but a direct result of treating socially-created value as a private casino chip. It drives a predictable, 18-year boom-and-bust cycle:
The Boom: Growth increases demand for land, lifting its value.
The Frenzy: Speculators leap in, bidding prices beyond all reason. Banks lend against this ‘value’, and vehicles like REITs pour in fuel, inflating a bubble.
The Collapse: When rent claims such a huge share of wealth that wages and profits collapse, production stalls. The result? Depression, unemployment, and crisis. The system must crash to reset land prices to a level the real economy can bear.
This is cannibalistic capitalism—where finance divorces from production and money is made from causing poverty. It enriches ‘free riders’ who contribute nothing. And while the crash hurts everyone, its most devastating prey are the young.

4. The Devouring of the Young: A War on the Future

This system is, at heart, a war on the next generation. It forces the young to pay tribute for the privileges of the present.
Unaffordable Shelter: Speculation has turned a basic need into a vehicle for extraction. The price of a plot now dwarfs the cost of the house on it, condemning the young to lifelong debt or crippling rents.
The Debt Trap: So-called ‘housing wealth’ is largely debt. It binds the future, making children pay for the windfalls of their predecessors—what the Duke of Argyll called the “preposterous assumption that one generation may bind another.”
Stolen Opportunity: When rent absorbs all progress, wages don’t rise. As Henry George warned, the worker then has “no more interest in the general advance of productive power than the Cuban slave has in the price of sugar.” Progress becomes a curse.
The Physical Toll: This economic violence kills. It drives ‘deaths of despair’ and carves shocking life expectancy gaps—16.9 years within one London borough. One estimate pins 50,000 avoidable premature deaths annually in England and Wales on a tax system that burdens work instead of capturing rent.
Theft of Nature: We treat nature’s capital—fossil fuels, biodiversity, a stable climate—as income to be consumed. We are, as E.F. Schumacher warned, “stripping the world of its once-for-all endowment,” leaving a wasteland as our legacy.
This devastation is not an accident. It is actively enabled by the modern state.

5. The Complicit State & The Simple Remedy

The state is not a neutral referee. Through a corrupted tax system, it subsidises the private capture of public wealth.
Our current taxes are both mad and bad:
They punish production (income, wages, VAT), shrinking the economy and creating an estimated £1 trillion in deadweight loss in the UK.
They fail to capture public value. The principle of ATCOR (All Taxes Come Out of Rent) shows that taxes on business ultimately reduce what can be paid as ground rent—a clumsy, indirect way of collecting what should be public revenue.
They subsidise monopoly. When taxpayers fund a new tube line, the value uplift isn’t recouped for public good; it’s pocketed by nearby landowners as a windfall.
The Remedy is simple, just, and devastatingly efficient: Abolish all taxes save that upon land values.
A Land Value Tax (LVT) is an annual charge on the rental value of land alone, ignoring buildings. Its effects would be transformative:
Efficient: It has no deadweight loss. It doesn’t punish work or enterprise; it encourages the best use of our finite land.
Just & Progressive: It captures for the community the value the community creates. The wealthiest owners of the most valuable sites pay the most.
Destroys Speculation: By taking the annual rent for public use, it makes land-banking pointless. Land prices would fall, making housing affordable and unleashing productive enterprise.
This isn’t a radical new idea. It is the restoration of a common birthright.

Conclusion: Reclaiming Our Birthright

The evidence is inescapable. The poverty, inequality, and burdens crushing the young are not due to a lack of resources or ingenuity. They are the bitter harvest of a foundational wrong: treating the earth as private property.
The private capture of economic rent is the “great primary wrong.” It is the engine that ensures progress enriches the monopolist, the speculator fever that destabilises our world, and the extractive machine that devours our children’s future.
To build a society where progress blesses all, we must correct this error. The choice is stark: continue on the path of social decay, or reclaim our common inheritance. Restoring the equal right to the value of the earth is the essential, indispensable step towards a future of genuine prosperity, justice, and freedom. Our children’s future depends on it.

Comments

The thoughts behind the Renegade Ecologist

From my 30 years as a nature conservationist I have learned the utter futility of trying to protect nature under our current economic system. But by making some small changes to our taxation system we could make a world fit for our children to inherit full of wildlife & prosperity for all.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root....
Henry David Thoreau

"In many ways, nature conservation has become just another method of rent extraction by landowners who are trying to hide the fact that modern farmers’ fields are essentially deserts, devoid of wildlife, and the taxpayer must pay ‘rent’ if we want wild animals to occupy ‘their land’."

Peter Smith

Land Value Tax, which is in my opinion the Holy Grail of legislative changes to protect wildlife, is the simplest expression of the Economic theories of Henry George. This theory goes that if we abolish all harmful taxes on our hard work and trade and instead charge a rent for the use of natural resources such as Land we will not waste them or allow private interests to exploit the rest of humanities access to them.

Such a tax would not only stimulate jobs and enterprise but put a value on all of our natural resources and force us to look after them. If it was implemented for agricultural land, where the lower value of perpetually designated wilderness or natural grazing land is reflected in its land value taxation, it would be the surest way to save the wildlife of the UK and for the least cost to the taxpayer”

This would mean hard to farm areas, steep banks, riverbanks, rocky outcrops and areas landowners want to designate a nature reserves, which must be legally binding, could be set aside for wildlife and as such attract no taxation. The result of this would be that unproductive and marginal land would become wildlife havens and receive long term protection for future generation to enjoy. But it would also take away land and monopolies from our plutocrats who own wealth with no obligation to the rest of society, these plutocrats fund both the red and blue (and Yellow) faction of the vested interest or ‘line my friends pocket’ parties that control the legislature in Britain.

This blog is dedicated to teaching those who love nature that there is a simple ‘magic bullet’ that can save the rare wildlife of this country at no cost to the taxpayer. This magic bullet will actually grow our economy and create jobs and help create a better society based on rewarding those who work hard while penalising idol people who make monopolies such as bankers and landowners.

The solution if adopted worldwide would alleviate poverty and starvation and make a significant contribution to preventing war and terrorism.

Follow me on twitter: @peetasmith

Views are my own and don’t reflect the views of Wildwood Trust