If the truth were fairly told, I am afraid that the farmer who owns the land gets less for his labor in raising his potatoes than I, who own no land, get for my labor in obtaining the means whereby I am enabled to purchase the potatoes.[1]
In truth, we each of us obtain by the present social co-operative system a vast deal more of the bounties of Nature than we possibly could if in possession of land with nothing but our individual efforts to rely upon; and if we look the world over, we shall find that those communities enjoy the greatest abundance in which there is a great diversity of industry, an unrestricted accumulation of wealth, and where private ownership has been guaranteed by the authority of the state and supported by the consent of the people.
But private ownership of land is a monopoly, say Mr.George and his followers. Land belongs to the whole community; the state, therefore, should be the common landlord; and the first great step in a general act of readjustment is to appropriate the rental value of land by taxation. Improvements, it is magnanimously conceded, are not to be taxed; but land only to the full extent of its rental value. But what is the rental value of agricultural land apart from its improvements? According to Ricardo, all that land produces above the lowest point of production that will support the laborer goes, by virtue of the competition that always exists, to the landlord as rent. In this country freeholds are so general that we have little practical exemplification of the operation of the laws of rent; but, should the state become the common landlord, these laws would be sure to manifest themselves. According to this theory, if land yielding ten bushels to the acre is suflScient to subsist the worker thereon, then all land that yields more than ten bushels to the acre has a rental value equal to this excess. That is to say, the Georgeian plan of taxation, in so far as it affected agricultural lands, would, on all the farms of the country, absolutely confiscate the entire results of labor above the mere point of subsistence.
Ricardo's theory of rent may not be mathematically true, but it is unquestionably approximately true, because in the briskness of competition, in the struggle for subsistence, land must, if sought for at all, command a rental value proportionate to its yield above a certain minimum point. Mr, George will say that this is not what he means.
- ↑ The following statement, in a recent article by Edward Atkinson, illustrates how completely the product of the land falls to the benefit of the whole community: "One man working the equivalent of three hundred days in the year, or three men working one hundred days in the harvest-season on the far plains of Dakota in the production of wheat, aided by one man working three hundred days in milling and barreling the flour, and supplemented by two men working three hundred days in moving wheat and flour from Dakota to New York, and in keeping all the mechanism of the farm, the mill, and the railroad in good repair—four men's work for one year places one thousand barrels of flour at the mouth of the baker's oven in the city of New York—a yearly ration of bread for one thousand men and women."
