THE LAND QUESTION

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21949, 5 November 1934, Page 12

THE LAND QUESTION

Sir, —I note Mr. A. A. Wright's correction, but it makes no difference to the fact that, as any authoritative writer of the early period makes clear, it was the enclosure of .the common lands, the workers being hunted off by the police and the armed forces of the Crown, and of the great landlords, that caused the poverty. These people, robbed of their source of livelihood, roamed the forests, the highways and the byways, in their thousands, and when the factory system developed, as one writer; puts it, "the sturdy beggars came to town." The whole was a dreadful chapter in British history. Some county councils in Britain are now restoring to the people Rome of these common lands, by taking back strips for roads; the old and the new boundaries, with tho original milestones away back now in "private" land, are still to be seen, because there was a superstition against moving a milestone. Although he is not candid enough to say so, the "criticism" Mr. Wright gives from an "English sourco" comes from Major Douglas, and I have already torn it, the full criticism, to shreds elsewhere. It is wrong in every conceivable respect. Land restoration means that the community gets the rentals on the bare land; there is no tax whatever, single or multiple. Res.r toration does not merely propose to deal with a rise in prices of land, but a fall or a static position also; thus, when our land here boomed owing to war prices, the rentals would have risen proportionately, and have fallen again as prices receded, and there would have been no land speculation such as we are row suffering the effects of, and no load of public and private indebtedness; the boom rentals would have paid our war costs. The land user would simply pay the State rentals as a super-landlord, and be relieved of taxation, instead of paying rentals, generally in the form of interest on mortgages, and taxation as well. Eating bread by the sweat of our brow simply means that each will earn his living; if some do not work, then they must live by the sweat of another's brow, which is not ethical. Under land restoration there will necessarily be ample real wealth in distribution, no unemployment, and more voluntary leisure than is possible under the present system. As for this "credit" that te so much talked of now, an individual's credijt is based on his actual and prospective earnings. So it should bo with the community as a whole, and as the ground rentals are the community's rightful source of revenue, and no other, except royalties on natural products such as coal and minerals in the earth, or virgin timber on the surface, that is the natural, elastic, easily adjustable monetary basis. The persistence of the present depression is due to the fact that we cannot now recover by colonising new lands, and thus get clear of the stranglehold of the land system in the older parts; but the same system has been brought to tho new lands, and is now in "full fruit," and we are trying every method but the bedrock one for rectification. Matamata. T. E. McMillan.