We assert that the ‘rents’ of nature and society are public value. The desire to divert to one’s own pocket a part of the stream of value provided free from nature, or from the investments of society, is a natural human tendency called rent-seeking. Wherever rent-seeking is prevented, growing prosperity is shared. Where it is privatised there is poverty, inequality and social dislocation. UK costs of state were once funded from Ground Rents but citizens were powerless at that time to prevent erosion of this benign revenue system at the hands of aristocrats in Westminster. Our mission today is to recover public wealth and jealously guard it from the rent-seeker lurking inside each of us.
