Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/61

 It cannot retain all the cake—as the socialists demand openly and the single-taxers unwittingly contrive—and still hold out part of the same cake as an inducement.

Fourth.&emsp;If, as shown in discussing individual motives, the control of land with immunity from molestation is the only logical key to individual security, and therefore the most effective inducement of effort, the community is fully justified, first, in permitting the private ownership of land and, second, in making this ownership the guaranty of all intermediate inducements.

It may seem a little arbitrary to assert that land-ownership is the only adequate guaranty of inducement; but this conclusion can hardly be escaped. The essential factors of value, as will be shown more fully later, are land-area, population and time; and with two of these, time and population, not subject to control, the third factor, that of area or foothold, then becomes the definite key to freedom, or value, whichever we care to call it. Henry George partially perceived this; but it is important to realize what both Henry George and his followers overlook,—If land-ownership is the ultimate key to value, it is also the only valid key to our individual accumulations of value through extra-effort and utilized time. Conceding freely the justification of his emphasis upon the power conferred by land ownership, this is the very reason in the end why we will not part with this key to popularly elected wardens. If there is a proper charge for our storehouse, let it be on the basis of capacity, not of contents; exactly as in the case of any other safe-deposit. If the community is going to encourage individual deposits, it must hand over the key to the depositor.

Recognizing that individual interests and community interests are quite logically divergent, the former being concerned with effort and the latter with order, it should be apparent that a proper co-ordination of these interests will give, as a