Page:Oscar Ameringer - Socialism for the Farmer (1912).djvu/25

 "Ah," you say, "but these people own too much land." Yes, but there is no law on our statute books to prevent one man from hogging the whole blamed country and tell the rest of us to get off the earth. If it is right for one man to deny another man access to the soil, then it is right that he deny ten, hundreds, thousands or millions of people. Besides, you and your dad whooped it up for the politicians who made our land laws, and if you don't like them you have no one to blame but yourselves.

From the foregoing it must not be understood that the farm land is gobbled up by the wise men who run our trusts, railroads, ourselves included. While it is true that some of the great trusts own considerable land, these institutions are satisfied in getting the farm product without owning the farm itself. It is rather the small capitalists in the county seat towns who are getting the farms.

Many farmers have landlord heads on farm hand bodies. Instead of seeing themselves in the true light as pure and simple workers, they entertain a hazy notion that the ownership of more or less mortgaged implements, chattels and lands stamps them as capitalists. They do not look upon the soil as a means of production, but as a means of speculation and exploitation. Deep down in the heart of every farmer there is a hope that some day the rise of land values may make a second Rockefeller of him. Some day he hopes to move to town, while a hungry tenant on the old home place supplies him with the necessities and luxuries of life. In other words, he expects to escape the blessings of farm life by becoming an exploiter of his own kind.

Now, some farmers have made money by buying land cheap and selling it high, Many have retired to county seats to spend their declining years in comfort and idleness. Consequently he looks upon rising land values as a great blessing. But while rising land values may be a good thing for land speculators, they are a curse to the actual tillers of the soil.

Let us put it in this way: The same Kansas farm

So you see, while the value of this farm rose from $100.00 to $10,000.00, the volume and the value of the crop remained the same; which is not quite true, because land which produced 2000 bushels of corn in 1880 will not produce 2000