Evening Post. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1908. AN INGENIOUS AND DRASTIC REMEDY.

Evening Post, Volume LXXV, Issue 46, 24 February 1908, Page 6

Evening Post. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1908. AN INGENIOUS AND DRASTIC REMEDY.

r A member of the Scottish Bar "and University graduate who has devoted twenty-seven years of his life to the woik of education in India, and is now on the look-out for a suitable place for settling v.ith his wife and family, obviously brings to New Zealand some exceptional qualifications for giving us a fresh and unbiased opinion on certain fundamental points in our social conditions. Mr. C. A. Patcr&on, M.A., LL.B., possesses these qualifications, and the impressions of his visit to New Zealand with which he favoured a representative of this paper on Friday last do not disappoint the hope that it was natural to entertain. So far as climate goes, Mr. Paterson cpnsidered the southern half of tho North Island and the northern parts of the South Island to present higher attractions to the retired Anglo-Indian than any other country he had seen. A man who has spent tho prime of his life under tho scorching sun of India wants something milder for his declining years, and for the development of his children, but he may nofc be prepared to return to j the other extreme under the cold grey skies of England or Scotland. To such a man the climate of Napier or Nelson may well appear ideal, and during tho last two summers at any rate 'there have nofc been many of the intervening places for which almost as much might not be said. But climate is not everything, ' even for tho retired Indian civilian. "Tho Anglo-Indian," says My. Paterson, "would require some little land about his house, and such a place would coi,t him much more than it would in ,tho Old Country." He has therefore to 'weigh the advantages of our magnificent climate against the added cost of living, and it unfortunately appears that in the case of so promising an intending settler as Mr. Paterson the former has kicked the beam. It is indeed an extraordinary phenomenon and a most disquieting one that within a few miles of Wellington land should command a higher price than within the same distance of London, and that tho relative productiveness of- the two has a3 a rule nothing to do with the difference. The cause is not to bo found in nature, but in artificial conditions, and our visitor seems to us to have put his finger on one of the most important. "Everywhere throughout the Dominion," says Mr. Paterson, "tho land-shark and tho landsharking syndicate, an abomination to which there' is nothing corresponding in the feudalism of the Old Countiy, are exploiting the people by means of tho "unearned increment.' " The immunity j which the Mother Country enjoys from this "abomination" is, of course, not to be ascribed to her superior virtue, but eimply 'to the fact that a stagnant or slowly falling market does not offer the same encouragement to speculation as a rapidly rising one. There- has not been much unearned increment to attract the speculator to rural land* in England during the last fifty or sixty years; it i 3 the problem of the unearned decrement that ' has ' constituted the landowners' ch>f difficulty In ihh, as in so many other inspects, we are at the antipodes of the Old Country. In all newly-settled countries land inevitably rises in value with tho advance of settlement, and the almost unbroken prosperity which we have enjoyed for nearly twenty years has made the rise so rapid and at the same time so steady that land speculation has become quite a. profession, and even tho veriest tyro has been ablo tj maku handsome proiits in a manner that costs him nothing more than the original outlay of his to:i per cent, deposit, and 'not only roildere as a rule- no services whatever to the State, but does it a veiy serious injury. How is a stop to be put to a practice which diverts money and enorgy from productive industry* to what is often little better than gambling,- and at the same time raises, perhaps to a prohibitive figure, tho price of land to the man who is prepared to add to the countiv's wealth by working it? If tho State still' held the fee simple of all the land, the' evil would be too small to bother about, and it should therefore at the very ! leasfc hold on to what still remains. This, > however, is but* a sorry remnant, ancl : our main concern is with the land that has already passed into private hands. For this Mr. Paterson proposes an ingenious and dipfitic remedy. He would tax incomes derived from land as well as tho land itself, making- the tax on unearned incomes double that on oarned incomes. From tho former fax no land would bo e:;empt, and thus tho speculator would bo heavily penalised ao long as he kept it unproductive. As a further inducement against locking it up, Mr. Paterson would allow the State to tako over the land at twenty-five years' purchaso of tho unearned income. Thus if tho speculator declared this income at a high figure, ho would pay heavily in taxation ; if he gavo a low estimate, he would be allowing the Blate to buy him out cheap. The speculator would thus be "in v, cleft stick." The State would get a welcome addition to its revenue from a source hitherto untapped, or else" would secure an equally welcome addition to its dwindling supply of land at a cheap rato. In either case a very severe check would bo imposed on the* rampant evils of land gambling. The reformer will do well to ponder Mr. Paterson's suggestion very carefully, and to determine how far it could be adapted to our conditions.