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When you look at it in the right light you will find that land values are a liability instead of an asset to the farmer who farms the farm. Rising land values may increase your taxes, but they don't increase the product of the land.
Tenant Farming.
The landlord robs the tenant and the tenant robs the soil. The result is an impoverished rural population and an impoverished soil. Landlordism is a curse, whether we find it in India, Ireland or Wisconsin. It produces miserable farm homes, overworked women, and underschooled children. Schools, churches and homes go down in the country and a non-producing, non-progressing parasite class composed of tired and retired farmers hang around the county seat towns like flies around the bungholes of molasses barrels.
Landlordism is a survival of Lordism or Feudalism. The iandlord is a parasite without an extenuating circumstance. In the scheme of life he fulfills no useful function. He is to agriculture what the mistletoe is to the tree. The rent money that flows from the farm to the towns is a fearful drain on the actual tillers of the soil. He finds himself short of the capital required for the purchase of the best farm animals and implements. Every improvement made in soil culture or by more scientific management is absorbed by the landlord in ever rising rent.
The division of the farming class into landlords and landtillers, exploiter and exploited, produces the same effect noticed in the separation of ownership and labor in modern industrial life. The tenant as his brother the wage worker will retain from the product of his toil only sufficient to keep himself in working condition. The surplus above the existence wage is confiscated by the landlord even as the capitalist confiscates the surplus value produced by the wage worker.
Tenantry did not increase at the fearful rate as mortgaged indebtedness did in Wisconsin. But it does increase faster than the new farms cut out of the jungle have increased.
On the whole it may be said that the higher the land values, the denser the population and the older the settlement the greater is the number of tenants. The greatest percentage of tenants is found in the southern counties of the state. Tenantry gradually disappears as we move north toward the sparsely settled jungle. From this it may be deducted that if tenantry rises with age and land values, the northern part of Wisconsin will produce a lusty crop of renters as soon as the land has reached a state of cultivation where it will support two men—landlord and renter. Up to the present time
