Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/513

Rh body of land would become substantially free, and all the people of this country would stand, so far as abundance of natural opportunities are concerned, where their predecessors stood sixty or eighty years ago.... Furthermore, the annihilation of the speculative element of value is likely to have a particular beneficial effect in and near large cities, where now the density of population presents a great and terrible and threatening problem, before which, hitherto, all the wisest and most humane of men have stood gasping and helpless." Capitalists, it is contended, would hasten to erect comfortable houses for rent on vacant city and suburban lots "if, from the value of such lots, the speculative element were excluded. Houses would compete for men, instead of men cutting each other's throats, as now, in the competition for houses."

The first result of the application of the single-tax principle would be to discharge from taxation all unoccupied land in both city and country. The value, or rent-yielding quality, having been seized by the state, nobody would be so foolish as to pay taxes on property which neither now nor hereafter could bring him any return. All such holdings would be abandoned to the state, and this is exactly what is intended. Of course, the state would not tax its own property.

Then the state would say to capitalists, "You can build on this land on condition of paying ground-rent, and you will receive such interest on your capital invested in bricks and mortar as the law of competition will allow." But that is what capitalists can do now. By paying ground-rent they can build as much as they please. How is building to be expedited by changing the landlord? In fact, it would be retarded. At present the land-owner is spurred on to improvement by the hope of gaining a ground-rent and by the imposition of a yearly tax on his property, which he must pay whether it yields any return or not. Both these incentives would be wanting if the land were owned by the state.

How would it be with agricultural land held for speculative purposes? The state would say to the would-be farmer, "You can cultivate this land by paying the rent which neighboring land pays." But can not the farmer get the same land now on the same terms? Show me the owner of unfilled agricultural land who refuses to allow his acres to be cultivated at a fair rental. I can show plenty of such land within one hundred miles of New York, and all over New England, which any cultivator can have the use of, without paying any rent at all, on condition of cultivating it. Surely the state would not offer land on more favorable terms. It would not let the land, rent free, and furnish the capital to cultivate it also. In short, no new opportunities for the cultivation of land would exist unless the state should offer better