The Remedy

The equal right of all men and women to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air. It is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men and women have a right to be in this world and others do not.

Any one human being who appropriates to himself or herself the individual right to the land of any community or country, could legally expel therefrom all the rest of its inhabitants. If you extend this right to the whole surface of the globe, where would non-landowning human beings have the right to live?

This supposition is occurring on a growing scale, realized in actual fact. The comparative handful of proprietors who own large surfaces of the U.S. are doing only what federal, state, and local laws give them full power to do (and what many of them have done already), excluding millions of American people from their natural birthright, the land. And such exclusions are as repugnant to natural right as the spectacle of the vast body of the American people being compelled to pay such enormous sums to the few landowners of their number for the privilege of being permitted to live upon and use the land which they, the landowners, so fondly call their own; which is endeared to them by memories so tender and so glorious, and for which they are held in duty bound, if need be, to spill their blood and lay down their lives.

Place one hundred men and women on an island from which there is no escape, and whether you make one the absolute owner of the other ninety-nine, or the absolute owner of the soil of the island, will make no difference either to the chosen one or to the other ninety-nine.

It was not nobility that gave land, but the possession of land that gave nobility.

What is being proposed here is a simple yet sovereign remedy, which will raise wages, increase earnings of capital and give remunerative employment to whomever wishes it. The proposal is to appropriate land rent for public revenue, rather than rob producers of their rightful earnings by punitive taxation.

Now, as the taking of rent, or land value, must be increased as we abolish other "taxes," we may put the proposition in practical form by proposing to abolish all taxation and derive all public revenue from a legitimate charge upon land location values.

"Taxation," which lessens the reward of the producer, necessarily lessens the incentive to production. Thus, taxation which diminishes the earnings of the laborer or the returns to the capitalist tends to make the one less industrious and intelligent, the other less disposed to save and invest. "Taxation" which falls upon the processes of production interposes an artificial obstacle to the creation of wealth.

If manufactures are taxed the effect is to lessen improvements; tax commerce and the effect is to prevent exchange; tax capital, and the effect is to drive it away. But the whole rental value of land may be taken as public revenue, and the only effect will be to stimulate industry, to open new opportunities to capital and to increase the production of wealth.

The charge on land location values may be assessed and collected with a definiteness that partakes of the immovable and inconcealable character of the location itself. Were all charges for public revenue placed upon location values, irrespective of improvements, generating public revenue would be so simple and clear, and public attention would be so directed to it, that valuation of the charge on any location could and would be made with the same certainty that a real estate agent can deterimine the price a seller can get for a lot.

The charge upon location values falls only upon those who receive from society a valuable benefit and falls on them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. When all location rent is taken via legitimate charges for value received for the needs of the community, no citizen will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what he or she fairly earns. Then, and not until then, will labor get its full reward, and capital its natural return.

Effects of the Remedy:

The advantage which will be gained by substituting for the many taxes by which the public revenues are now raised, a single just charge levied upon the value of locations, will appear more and more important the more it is considered. With the removal of all the burdens which now oppress industry and hamper exchange, production of wealth would increase with a rapidity now undreamed of.

Consider the effect upon the production of wealth. Abolishing all taxation which 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 to penalize energy and industry and skill and thrift like a fine upon those qualities. If a person builds a ship we make the person pay for such temerity, as though an injury had been done to the state; if a railroad is opened, down comes the tax collector upon it, as though it were a public nuisance; if a manufactory is erected we levy upon it an annual sum which would go far toward making handsome profit. We say we want capital, but if any one accumulates it or brings it among us, we penalize him or her for it as though we were giving the person a privilege. We punish with a tax those who cover barren fields with ripening grain; we fine those who put up machinery and clean up a dump.

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

To change the taxation from production to a charge on the value or rent of locations would give new stimulus to the production of wealth; it would also open new opportunities. For under this system no one would care to hold a location unless to use it, and locations now withheld from use would everywhere be thrown open to improvement. Millions of acres that today are being used inefficiently would return to their natural, pristine state.

The selling price of locations would fall; speculation in locations would receive its death blow; the monopolization of valuable locations would no longer pay.

And it must be remembered that this would apply not merely to agricultural land, but to all locations ... everywhere. Everywhere that locations had attained value, the generating of public revenue from those values, instead of operating, as now, as a fine upon improvement, would operate to motivate 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 location value charges than if such locations were kept vacant. The monopolist of agricultural locations would be charged as much as though those locations were covered with houses and barns, with crops and with stock. The owner of a vacant city lot would have to pay as high a charge for the privilege of keeping other people off of it until the owner wanted to use it as the neighbor who has a fine house upon his lot.

It would cost as much to keep a row of tumble-down shanties upon valuable locations as if those locations were covered with grand hotels or a pile of great warehouses filled with costly goods.

Consider the effect of such 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 einployers, 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 location value charge which prevents the monopolization of locations.

It is manifest, of course that the change proposed here will greatly benefit all those who live by wages, whether of brain or of brawn. 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 locations.

Farmers, not those who never touch farm equipment, but the working farmers who are such a large class in the U.S., will benefit by the proposed change. Paradoxical as it may appear to these farmers until they understand the full bearings of the proposition, of all classes above that of the laborer such farmers have the most to gain by deriving all public revenue from just charges on location values. The fact is that taxation, as now levied, falls on them with peculiar punitive severity. They are taxed on all their improvements, houses, barns, fences, crops, and stock. Farmers pay personal income taxes and sales taxes. 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 owner of unused locations escapes, 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 charge upon the value of his or her location instead of all these taxes. The charge on location values would fall with greatest weight, not upon the agricultural districts, where location values are comparatively small, but upon the towns and cities where location values are high; whereas sales taxes and taxes upon personal income, personal property and improvements fall as heavily in the country as in the city. The result of a charge on location values would be that speculative values of locations would be kept down, and that cultivated and improved farms would have not payments to make to support government directly until the country around them had been well settled. In fact, paradoxical as it may at first seeln to them, the effect of putting all charges for public revenue upon the value of locations would be to relieve the harder working farmers of all taxation.

Wealth would not only be enormously increased, it would be equitably distributed. Not to mean that each individual would get the same amount of wealth. That would not be equitable distribution, so long as different individuals have different powers and different desires. But wealth would be distributed by the degree in which the industry, skill, knowledge or prudence of each contributed to the common stock. The non producer 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 person gets what each fairly earns, no one can get more than he or she fairly earns. How many men and women are there who can fairly earn a million dollars a year?

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