An essay on the American Mind web site calls attention to a phenomenon that is worth attending to, although the fact that our country’s 100 largest land owners hold 2.1 percent of the land area of the continental United States (up from 1.4 percent in 2007) may not portend the destruction of the American middle class, much less of democracy. That is a subject for another day. My pedantic side wishes simply to focus on one sentence: “In much of the American West, billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Ted Turner have created vast estates that systematically make the local population land-poor.”
No. People who own no land are not “land-poor”. The land-poor are those who own land but can’t afford maintenance, mortgage payments, taxes and other encumbrances. George Washington, for example, owned a vast estate, but, when he was elected President –
Despite his reputation as a man of great wealth, Washington was “land-poor” at a most inopportune time. To complete his journey to New York for the inauguration, he needed to borrow 600 pounds at a rate of 6 percent interest from Alexandria merchant Richard Conway.
The accumulation of residential and farm property by well-heeled investors may, indeed, owe much to the “land poverty” of those whom they buy out.
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