Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/503

Rh by any device or dispensation which should enable government to be carried on without taxes. I protest against the assumption that this would abolish poverty, unless those who hold that it would shall offer us something more conclusive than their private opinions.

The ethical reason why land should be singled out exclusively for purposes of taxation is based upon what are called “natural rights.” I quote Mr. Clarke's words:

“The second answer, in substance, is: Because land is not rightfully the subject of absolute property, and because the injustice of allowing it to be so acquired and held will be remedied by the exaction and application to common uses of economic rent.

“The standard of right, to which this answer appeals, is that conception of inherent or underlying rights which is usually described, perhaps not altogether happily, by the phrase natural rights.”

General Francis A. Walker, in his “Land and its Rent,” disposes of the dogma of natural rights as applied by Mr. George with a few words of sarcasm, which really do embrace the true philosophy of the subject. He says that as he has never lived in the state of nature himself, but has passed his whole life in communities more or less civilized, he does not feel moved to discuss the subject on any other than economic grounds. According to my observation, more people of fair intelligence are taken in the single-tax net by this dogma than by all others together; and even when they are shaken from every other, they still cling to this as a sheet-anchor. It is worth while, therefore, and indeed necessary, to give some particular attention to it, in an elementary way.

Having cautioned us against the use of the phrase “natural rights” as not altogether happy, Mr. Clarke proceeds to use it twenty-one times in the next twenty pages, as though it were as happy as possible, assuming in all cases that every person born into the world has a natural right to land and a natural right to the best land—conditioned, however, upon every other person's equal right to the same land. The only way to make these conflicting natural rights effective is to confiscate economic rent through the taxing power.

What are “natural rights”? Let us test them for a moment by the Socratic dialogue, the interlocutors being A and B:

A. When you speak of natural rights, you mean rights according to nature, I suppose? B. Undoubtedly. A. And that the origin of such rights is traceable to the state of nature? B. Certainly.