Ricardo on rent

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1. Did Tom Hanks narrate this?
2. Another aspect of the classical approach to the distribution of wealth is the morality of any claims to wealth. Labor certainly has a moral claim to what labor produces. Does the owner of land have a moral claim to rent? Ownership of land is a static activity. Ownership merely establishes a legal mechanism for claiming what others produce. This is the basis for "rent-seeking" activity. Adam Smith, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot and others hinted that justice requires that rent be collected by society, to pay for public goods and services and, possibly (as Thomas Paine urged) distributed in equal shares as a form of citizens dividend to each member of society.
3. As far as I know, the law of rent applies regardless of number of goods, types of land, or uses of land. That doesn't mean that all laborers will earn the same amount (based on wages at the "margin of production"); what it means is that the wages for different types of labor are anchored based on what that sort of person could make working at the margin. The very lowest wage earners will be left with basically nothing after rent, which we can see all over, everywhere in the world since the last pioneering frontiers were closed.
   
   There is no difference between the modern theory of value and the late-classical theory of labor value (LTV). Classical economists (Henry George certainly), never actually thought that the value of an object was determined by its input values. 
   
   The labor theory of value isn't really a theory of value; it is more like a normative theory of ideal prices, how things should be priced if there were a fair market (e.g., the ability to manufacture land). So LTV was actually a tool for identifying economic rent. Land has no marginal cost to produce; no labor goes into it, so whatever value land has is economic rent, not a free market price.
   
   LTV was misused by Marx, who seemed to take the idea literally, a mistake that conservative neoclassical economists are all too anxious to foist onto classical economists.
   
   In Henry George's own words: "It is never the amount of labor that has been exerted in bringing a thing into being that determines its value, but always the amount of labor that will be rendered in exchange for it."
   
   You can see George's classical theory of value is identical to the neoclassical version but retains a framing conducive for noticing economic rent, the central activity necessary for any just economic analysis.