"LAND AND TAXATION"

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 83, 4 October 1930, Page 8

"LAND AND TAXATION"

(To the Editor.)

gi r> _My brief commentary on the proposed Pareinata bridge has borne unexpected fruit in the form of a didactic pronouncement from the Hon. A. D. M'Leod in your issue of Monday, in which he surveys the situation from "China to Peru." Long ago the illustrious Adam Smith wrote that provision for the separate rating of land and improvements should be "a perpetual regulation of fundamental law of the commonwealth," and he added that nothing was more just than a tax upon the ground rent of houses, meaning a tax upon the unimproved value of land. In more recent times the Right Hon. G. J. Goschen, Chancellor of the Exchequer*; in the first Salisbury Ministry, descrbedj •lical rates as "a vent charge in'favour ok the community." According to Mr. M'Leod," however, all this •is mere Tory obscurantism, and • accordingly is not seriously to be considered.

It is useless for me to argue with Mr. M'Leod since I start with propositions (1) Jhat the land is by natural right the common property of all the people; (2) that in the matter of natural rights one man is as good as another; and (3) that land-value taxltion is the one certain and equitable method of asserting and securing the right of every man to his share in the land of his country. ' Mr. M'Leod not only denounces this as heresy, but says that rates and taxes are necessarily evils in themselves, and that instead of making landowners pay for public improvements, they should be relieved of all rates! If I have stated Mr. M'Leod's position unfairly doubtless he will correct me, but in the meantime further comment is re-served.-xl am, etc., '■'■■-. . • P. J. O'REGANV--Ist October.