Book VIII.-APPLICATION OF THE REMEDY.

Auckland Star, Volume XX, Issue 147, 22 June 1889, Page 4 (Supplement)

Book VIII.-APPLICATION OF THE REMEDY.

Chapter I.—What is necessary for the use of land is not its private ownership, but the security of improvements. If we give improvers that security, we may safely abolish private ownership of land. Treating land as private property stands in the way of its proper use. Wore it treated as public property it would be used and improved as soon as there was need for its use or improvement ; but being treated as private property the individual owner is permitted to prevent others from using or improving what he cannot or will not use or improve himself. If the best use of land be the test, then private property in land is condemned as it v is condemned by every other consideration.

Chapter lI.—A question of method remains. Justice would be satisfied and all economic requirements met by abolishing private titles, declaring all land public property, and letting it out to the highest bidder under such conditions as would sacredly guard the privato right to improvements. But this would involve a needless shock, and a needless extension of governmental machinery. We may best assert the common right to land by taking rent for public uses. We already take some, rent in taxation; we have only to make a few simple changes in our modes of taxation to take it all. What I therefore propose is to appropriate rent by taxation, and as the taxation of rent or land values must necessarily be increased just as we abolish other taxes, we may put the proposition into practical form by proposing to abolish all taxation save that upon land values.

Chapter 111. —The best tax must —(1) bear as lightly as possible upon production, so as least to check the increase of the general fund from which taxes must be paid and the community maintained; (2) be easily and cheaply collected, and fall as directly as may be upon the ultimate payers, so as to take from the people as little as possible in addition to what it yields the government; (3) be certain, so as to give the least opportunity for tyranny or corruption on the part of officials and the least temptation to law-breaking and evasion on the parti of the taxpayers ; and (4) bear equally, so as to give no citizen an advantage or put any at a disadvantage as compared with others. To these conditions the tax upon land values conforms, and it is the only important mode of taxation that does.

Chapter IV.—The grounds for concluding that the tax on land values is the best tax have been admitted expressly or tacitly by all economists of standing since the determination of the nature and law of rent, including Ricardo, McCullough, John Stuart Mill and Fawcett; and the French economists of the last century, headed by Quesnay and Turgot, proposed it.