Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/533

Rh would fall on land, instead of, as now, on various forms of property, and this would be all. Doubtless, this would confer some benefit, but how is it to secure a juster distribution of profits, how is it to cause poverty to change its coat, and plenty come where want has hitherto existed? It is impossible to see how these results are to ensue, and the land theorists do not tell us.

The good that is pictured is a dream, whereas the evil would be immeasurable; and when we had all finally settled down to the new conditions, we should contemplate some such picture as the following: All the farm-lands in the country in a condition of shameful neglect, and their productiveness seriously decreased; state tenants going from farm to farm, cultivating the fields solely for their immediate yield, neither planting orchards, nor fertilizing, nor keeping in repair fences or drains. The ambition to improve would be paralyzed, and the desire to keep up the productiveness of the acres to a standard would no longer exist. As soon as one piece of land would be exhausted, the tenant would move to another. Every motive for careful cultivation and preservation would be replaced by motives for immediate profit. These conditions would follow any form of national ownership; but if George's tax of rental value were strictly enforced, there would be no inducement, as I have shown elsewhere in this article, to work the land at all. In towns and cities, or wherever land is used for commercial purposes, we should see rent paid just as it is now, but to the state instead of to individuals. The only difference would be, that all taxes would fall on land. Houses, bonds, mortgages, stocks, personal effects would be untaxed; that is to say, the greater part of most rich men's possessions would be unburdened, but rent would remain just as it is now, and enter into the price of commodities just as it does now. As the scheme is to tax up to the rental value, this rental value would be what competition and demand made it. Favorable situations would be bid for and go to the highest bidder, and consequently the poor would be pressed to the wall as much then as now.

Nor is this all. Under such an enormous enlargement of the powers of Government, jobbery and corruption would have a field for its operation such as the most sanguine Tweed never dreamed of. Our politicians would have all the corner lots, all the choice situations. And then, if the rents should prove to be in magnitude what Mr.George supposes, think of the funds that would lie in the state treasuries as tempting reserves for the schemes and devices of speculators and law-makers!

I have been able in the brief space allowed me to no more than roughly hint at all the possibilities involved in the startling scheme of the Georgeian economics. If it were possible to collect unearned increment, or to determine what it is and so adjust taxation that it should take just the increment and no more (which would be about as difficult as for Shylock to cut his pound of flesh and shed no blood), the gain