Valuation and the national economy.

One of the principal problems in the democratic countries today is to determine the rights of the individual owner, and of the nation, in the utilization of land. The emplexities of modern life have affected previously held concepts regarding land use; and the idea that ownership permits the use or misuse of land, without regard to the effects of that usage upon the economics of the nation and the well-being of the community has been modified by public opinion and curbed by legislation... As far as can be ascertained there are no previous writings which deal with the importance of valuation to the national economy, and it would have been possible to have limited this work to an examination of valuation since 1939 by drawing on first-hand knowledge: to have done so would have meant a loss of perspective. This thesis falls into four sections, the first of which is a brief history of valuation, and an appreciation of its place, from the earliest times, in the national econony. A wide range of authorities was consulted and research was not easy, because most of their references to valuation are only incidental, and often obscure. It will be shown that valuation was one of the main functions of administration in Ancient Greece and Rome and that that the course of English history was profoundly influenced by valuation policy. The Domesday Survey was the first inquiry in England into the national wealth; the Saladin Tithe and later the exactions by John led to Magna Carta, whilst the system of valuation from 1290 to 1334 was one of the roots of the representative system...