WAGE TAX OR LAND ?

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 110, 11 May 1932, Page 6

WAGE TAX OR LAND ?

(To the Editor.)

Sir, —The imposition of the increased wages tax from 3d to Is in the £ marks the final stage of the complete. ruin of this once fair country. 'Repeatedly in the past it has been pointed' out that the private ownership of land, resulting in land monopoly and land speculation, is the only, universal agent great enough to account for the universal breakdown of society. Other causes of course, as.Cue-1 toms tauffs and the squandering of public funds, have assisted. > Land being a natural monopoly, its quantity being fixed by necessity, it inevitably becomes the register and recipient of all human progress. The benefit of every advance in thought and application is capitalised in the selling value of land. In normal times great industries are built up that add considerably to the value of land. A psychology is.thus created that leads- people to believe that the buying and selling of land is more profitable than industry. Speculation jn land becomes a mania, and the piice of land soars far above real values. The checking of land settlement by these inflated prices, and the diminished' purchasing power of the people, generally, through excessive rents, causes a falling off in effective demand for goods, thus ushering in unemployment and the commencement of depression. From thence onward the effects are cumulative and progressive, like the growth~of the snowball.

A wise and unenlightened selfishness in control of affairs could early have countered this retrogression by the simple measure of taxing land values 2d or 3d in the £,_for the different-reasons'of providing a just -fund for the re-employment of those deprived of a livelihood, for the prevention of further speculation, and to compel speculators already in possession to rebate their 'terms. There being no enlightenment in our high places, this was not done. Instead aggravating measures were adopted, as relief from rates and land tax_ and the provision of fertilisers, etc., which took burdens, rightly resting on land ÜBers, and transferred them to other sections of the community. The cost of caring for the unemployed was also almost entirely collected from the wageearners. The inevitable' result has been more and more unemployment and more and more taxes upon wages and industry until the social structure threatens to collapse altogether. Has the exemption from taxation benefited land ■■values? On the contrary, paradoxically and justly, it has destroyed them. Land values are built on profitable industry. Profitably industry has been killed both by crushing taxation and by excessive rents due to land speculation. The extinction of profitable industry is also the extinction of land yahies, both due to the failure to provide a just system of land value taxation at the outset. —I am, etc.,

E. A. GOSSE.