Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/156

136 of another kind. Mr. Sidney Webb maintains in his evidence before the Town Holdings Committee, that the economic theory of the incidence on the occupier or consumer of that part of local taxation, which is proportioned to the value of the house as distinct from the ground on which it is built, 'assumes that there is no other shoulder on whom the builder can shift it, that he must get his normal interest, that he is between the fixed point of the ground landlord, and the shifting price of the consumer, and that one of them must give way.' But, he argues, 'the ground landlord is not a fixed point, and, in the passage of agricultural land into building land, 'there is' always a large jump in value. 'The freeholder getting, in any case, a much larger than the agricultural value' has 'no fixed point of resistance,' and 'the better economic opinion would now be that, in the same sense that the rate on land falls upon the owner, the rate upon buildings falls equally so.' Professor Munro urges before the same committee that the 'circumstances are so different that you cannot apply' the 'theory of agricultural rent to the rent of building land' 'without great qualifications.' 'The landowner of agricultural land requires to let his land in order to obtain a return,' and has to be 'content with the surplus that remains over' the 'remuneration,' which the 'farmer has received for himself' and his 'outgoings.' But 'in the case of agricultural land that may be turned into building land there is no necessity for the owner to let it for building purposes. As agricultural land he is obtaining a fair ordinary return for it, and anything that he obtains over and above the agricultural rent is a pure and absolute gain in itself.' 'He can control the market' 'to a very much greater degree than a landowner can control the market for agricultural land.' And again, at the time when 'the builder purchases the land from the landowner, the only rates that the land is liable to are rates for agricultural purposes, and the future increased rates that may fall upon that land in case it is built upon, and in case a house is erected and occupied,' do not at all enter into consideration.

In these different ways both Mr. Webb and Professor Munro lay stress on the distinction between agricultural and urban land. We are not now so much concerned with the practical conclusions which they deduce respecting the real incidence of taxation, as with the fact that the distinction involves a point of fundamental importance in the theory of rent. Rent, broadly defined as a payment for differential advantages, is measured upwards from a minimum level where, it is assumed, no rent is paid. The