EFFECTS OF THE REMEDY

The advantages which would be gained by substituting for the numerous taxes by which the public revenues are now raised, a single tax levied upon the value of land, will appear more and more important the more they are considered . . . . With all the burdens removed which now oppress industry and hamper exchange, the production of wealth would go on with a rapidity now undreamed of.

Consider the effect upon the production of wealth.

To abolish the taxation which, acting and reacting, now hampers every wheel of exchange and presses upon every form of industry, would be like removing an immense weight from a powerful spring . . . . The present method of taxation . . . operates upon energy, and industry, and skill, and thrift, like a fine upon those qualities . . . .  If a man build a ship we make him pay for his temerity, as though he had done an injury to the state; if a railroad be opened, down comes the tax collector upon it, as though it were a public nuisance; if a manufactory be erected we levy upon it an annual sum which would go far toward making a handsome profit.  We say we want capital, but if any one accumulate it, or bring it among us, we charge him for it as though we were giving him a privilege.  We punish with a tax the man who covers barren fields with ripening grain, we fine him who puts up machinery, and him who drains a swamp . . . .

To abolish these taxes would be to lift the whole enormous weight of taxation from productive industry.

And to shift the burden of taxation from production and exchange to the value or rent of land would not merely be to give new stimulus to the production of wealth; it would be to open new opportunities.  For under this system no one would care to hold land unless to use it, and land now withheld from use would everywhere be thrown open to improvement.

The selling price of land would fall; land speculation would receive its death blow; land monopolization would no longer pay . . . .

And it must be remembered that this would apply, not merely to agricultural land, but to all land . . . . Everywhere that land had attained a value, taxation, instead of operating, as now, as a fine upon improvement, would operate to force improvement.  Whoever planted an orchard, or sowed a field, or built a house, or built a manufactory, no matter how costly, would have no more to pay in taxes than if he kept so much land idle.  The monopolist of agricultural land would be taxed as much as though his land were covered with houses and barns, with crops and with stock.  The owner of a vacant city lot would have to pay as much for the privilege of keeping other people off of it until he wanted to use it, as his neighbor who has a fine house upon his lot.  It would cost as much to keep a row of tumble-down shanties upon valuable land as though it were covered with a grand hotel or a pile of great warehouses filled with costly goods.

Consider the effect of such a change upon the labor market.  Competition would no longer be one-sided, as now.  Instead of laborers competing with each other for employment, and in their competition cutting down wages to the point of bare subsistence, employers would everywhere be competing for laborers, and wages would rise to the fair earnings of labor. . . . The employers of labor would not have merely to bid against other employers, all feeling the stimulus of greater trade and increased profits, but against the ability of laborers to become their own employers upon the natural opportunities freely opened to them by the tax which prevented monopolization.

It is manifest, of course, that the change I propose will greatly benefit all those who live by wages, whether of hand or of head and it is likewise manifest that it will increase the incomes of those whose incomes are drawn from the earnings of capital, or from investments other than in lands.

And so with the farmer.  I speak not now of the farmers who never touch the handles of a plow . . . but of the working farmers who constitute such a large class in the United States . . . . Paradoxical as it may appear to these men until they understand the full bearings of the proposition, of all classes above that of the mere laborer they have most to gain by placing all taxes upon the value of land . . . . The fact is that taxation, as now levied, falls on them with peculiar severity.  They are taxed on all their improvements houses, barns, fences, crops, stock.  The personal property which they have cannot be as readily concealed or undervalued as can the more valuable kinds which are concentrated in the cities.  They are not only taxed on personal property and improvements, which the owners of unused land escape, but their land is generally taxed at a higher rate, than 'land held on speculation, simply because it is improved.  But further than this, all taxes imposed on commodities fall on the farmer without mitigation . . . . The farmer would be a gainer by the substitution of a single tax upon the value of land for all these taxes, for the taxation of land values would fall with greatest weight, not upon the agricultural districts, where land values are comparatively small, but upon the towns and cities where land values are high; whereas taxes upon personal property and improvements fall as heavily in the country as in the city . . . . The result would be that speculative values would be kept down, and that cultivated and improved farms would have no taxes to pay until the country around them had been well settled.  In fact, paradoxical as it may at first seem to them, the effect of putting all taxation upon the value of land would be to relieve the harder working farmers of all taxation.

Wealth would not only be enormously increased; it would be equally distributed.  I do not mean that each individual would get the same amount of wealth.  That would not be equal distribution, so long as different individuals have different powers and different desires.  But I mean that wealth would be distributed in accordance with the degree in which the industry, skill, knowledge, or prudence of each contributed to the common stock. . . . The nonproducer would no longer roll in luxury while the producer got but the barest necessities of animal existence.

All fear of great fortunes might be dismissed, for when every one gets what he fairly earns, no one can get more than he fairly earns.  How many men are there who fairly earn a million dollars?