THE SINGLE TAX.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume I, Issue 105, 18 April 1911, Page 1

THE SINGLE TAX.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —In your sub-leader in Tuesday’s paper is calculated to assist the Single Tax rather than hinder its progrest. You say that the Single Tax means confiscation. The actual fact is that the Single Tax would stop confiscation. AU taxes on labour and the products of labour are confiscatory, as they take from the individual individual earnings for public purposes. Why, according to your own statements all taxes are confiscation. But a tax on land values is not confiscation, because land values are due to the presence and industry of the whole community. The larger the community, the more active their industry, the higher are land values. A tax on the products of labour makes commodities dearer and stops their production to a greater or less degree. A tax on land values makes land cheaper. If the tax took the full annual value, the capital value would be gone. You say in effect that the condition of the workers of thia country is not desperate. Well, just try making a living by casual labouring, and keeping a small family. With high rents and high prices through the vicious Customs taxes, you will find that the position is a desperate one. The wonder is that our gaols are not fuller. With the ever.-increasing price of land, it will get further and further from the reach of the masses unless I we adopt this all-important reform, ! Lan<j Value Taxation. 1 belong to j that school of lunatics you refer to, because I am convinced that if I we stop one set of men from har- ! nessing and shackling their fellows; i if we are to avoid the great gap between the landless workers and I the landowning idlers which exists in older countries, we can do it, not by arbitration between employee and his immediate employer, and not by multiplying laws upon laws i and restrictions as we have unforj tunately been doing, but by giving all men equal opportunities to the i use of the earth. This can be done l by making all occupiers pay the | annual value of the bare land into ' the public till. —I am, etc., \ E. STEVENSON.