RATING ON UNIMPROVED VALUES.

Gisborne Times, Volume VI, Issue 182, 9 August 1901, Page 4

RATING ON UNIMPROVED VALUES.

To ilie Editor of the Times. Sir,— By the Times report of the meeting of Haiti ratepayers X notice that Mr A. F. Bridges referred to the coming into force of rating on unimproved values. Be seems to hail it with delight, though it was knocked out in Auckland by such a large majority. However, the opinion shows the views of the amalgp.mationists. Will you kindly reprint the enclosed extract from the Auckland Herald of Tuesday for the benetit of Mr Bridges and others who think with him. The question at the tinish, “Does. Auckland understand it ?" was answered in the affirmative by an enormous majority.—l am etc., SeTTLEE.

[Extract.] But while to many the matter begins and i ends with the question of whether our pre- j sent municipal revenues should be raised by tile system in vogue or by one which exempts improvements, this point of view is a strangely short-sighted one. The gentlemen who have thrown for years such energy into the agitation make no such mistake. They are not concerned with the etfect upon individual ratepayers or with the loss or gain which may arise in any occasional quarter. For this is avowedly the thin end of a theoretic wedge with which they hope to rend asunder our whole system of property-holding and to depreciate and finally to confiscate all land-values, that is to say all private property in land. Many who favour unimproved value rating have no sympathy with the ultimate object of the agitation, but have been led by specious arguments and superficial statements to misunderstand the actual results which the change will induce. But every individual who is prominent in the popularising of the question upon which the ratepayers of Auckland poll to-day openly and publicly advocates what is termed the single tax, and declares it to be a process by which private property in land is to be abolished. It may mean little to those whose sense of justice has been hypnotised by a pretended panacea for all human ailments to think lightly of the tearing-up without compensation* of title-deeds issued by the national Government and bought and sold in good faith by law-abiding and law-observing citizens. But tlie workman whose savings are largely sunk in his allotment, the farmer whose ambition it is to win freehold for himself and his sons, the trader whose residence and his business are equally his own, have a common stake in this with every man and woman interested in any commercial concern—from co-operative building society to life insurance company. The sole and only inspiration of tills “ unimproved value rating” is the Single Tax and tne declared effect of this tax would be to sweep into oblivion or into the coffers of the Stale every penny of value now held by every citizen in land, leaving untouched by the most remote taxation every other form of “ wealth.” The question to be decided in Auckland to-day cannot be fully considered apart irorn this climax which the leaders of the agitation so openly announce and desire. Even if it were a mere matter of personal gain, how many are directly and indirectly bound to lose cy such a revolution as this new rating system is declared by its leading advocates to initiate and who can be sure of escaping from the industrial cataclysm which such a revolution must assuredly precipitate? But more than the question of personal profit and loss, so persistently misrepresented in the attempt to persuade the ratepayers to adopt a new and untried system, is the question of national maintenance of national obligations. The v Single Taxers would treat the national signature as a mere nourish of the pen to be rubbed-out whenever the humour seizes us, the very commandments as ta be revised from generation to generation. This doctrine of spoliation has been growing by dangerous degrees of late. But does Auckland understand it and does Auckland agree with it ?