LAND AND POVERTY

Waikato Times, Volume 116, Issue 19352, 4 September 1934, Page 7

LAND AND POVERTY

(To the Editor.) Sir, —4 hope that those who have been following the letters on the subject of land restoration will have duly noted that the Administrator' of Samoa, in his report to Parliament, states that jn Samoa “poverty cannot exist, all families being well endowed with land.” This is all of a piece with what history as far back as we can trace shows. Archaeologists tell us that the Valley of the Nile is the cradle of civilisation, where the Egyptians had such centuries of lore behind them that they could laugh at Greek culture as being the mere babbling of children. Leave out wars, natural disasters such as floods and droughts and pestilence, and nowhere can you find able-bodied, involuntary poverty in the absence of land speculation or land monopoly. You can ■start with the Egyptian, follow Moses into the wilderness to Mount Pisgah, come on through Greek and Roman periods, on through mediaeval times to our present day, and, everywhere and always, involuntary poverty is the result (with the exceptions abovenamed) of enslavement of the people through the land system.. There was no poverty in England until the lords enclosed the common lands, thus taking from the labourers their sdurce of livelihood and driving them from the villages into the towns, where they were, in their destitute situation, made the most of by rapacious factory owners. Had the labourers been able to retain their lands, the factory owners would have been compelled to give them good wages and good conditions—better than they had before—to Induce them to leave their villages and work In the factories. Land robbery was responr sible for the sweated industrial conditions.

Exactly the same thing is going on now. An Ohaupo reader of the Waikato Times sends me a copy of the July issue of “Land and Liberty,” an English journal, by which I note that the whites in Kenya Colony (Africa), and in other places, have been making strenuous efforts to persuade tho governmental authorities to restrict further the amount of land each native is permitted to hold, the object being to take away the natives’ source of livelihood, after which, iike the English agricultural labourer of the seventeenth century, they would become slaves to the white man’s industrial requirements, which is the object the whites have in view. There will be poverty in Samoa right enough if ever our abominable land tenure system is adopted. * Money is emphatically not purchasing power; goods and services ar< purchasing power, but in order to ex change these goods and services in a civilised community w r e must have money, which is a draft on purchasing power. There is no shortage of either money, goods or services, for all exist in abundance; but there is a frightful throttling down and maldistribution of all three, and reforms, In both the land and the monetary systems—and radical reform at that—are long overdue. Internally Ihc letting of the cat out of the bag over the reserve police force indicates what is expected in New Zealand as a result of our deplorable economic maladjustment;’ internationally, the fierce and fervent race of armament' shows what Is expected generally in the world at large. Indeed, the only peoples who are not suffering from the pangs•of poverty are the “poor benighted heathen” whom we send missionaries to "save." It is a good Job for the missionaries that the "heathen” cannot see us going short amidst superabundance 1 The situation reminds me of the witticism of the Maori who said that the missionaries told them to look up in the clouds, and while they were looking up other pakehas came along and stole their land from them.

Let us see what happens: As I write I have before me a clipping of an obituary notice of Mr George Henry Bosch, described e S a great benefactor, who used his money to benefit his feliow-men. He said that although he was rich he could not eat any more than before, and could not wear more than one suit of clothes, so he spent his surplus money on benefactions for the people. But what does your land speculator do when successful? lie can cat no more than before, nor wear more than one suit of clothes, so lie reinvests his surplus in more land, or slocks and shares, thus drawing more and more tribute from industry and production. By (his process producers are gradually but surely made the toiling slaves of a few battening parasites, until sooner or later so much commercial lifeblood is sucked out of the producers by the parasites that there is n collapse. You will note that it. is the farmer who gets into difficulties first, and that the economic system gets worse and worse until the primary producer is rehabilitated: lienee nioratoria legis-lation-on farm mortgages only, be it noted in llie first place—and ilie proposed National Mortgage Corporation. All these tilings are merely palliatives to bolster up a thoroughly rotten system.

Every kind' of user, of land should pay to the public revenues an annual rental on the community-created values, called the “economic rent of land,” and to be relieved of all rates and taxes of every kind. These rentals would rise and fall with the growth or decline of population and progress, and be an automatically sufficient source of revenue for all public purposes. Think what It would mean to industry to be relieved of the grievous burden of taxation 1 Industry would leap forward at a bound, and unemployment would vanish. There would be more jobs than men, and every man would get his full economic reward, with no deductions whatever in taxation. Taxation is an invention of the landlords. “For more than 150 years after the Norman Conquest the whole cost of both national and local government in Britain was borne by the .landholders. This was the condition upon which they held, and the performance by Ihem of their specliied services (such, for instance, as provision for armies, upkeep of roads, bridges, sea walls, etc., maintenance of such poor, aged and intlrm who were unable to provide for themselves) was the equivalent of an annual rental paid to the community for permission to hold the common property. Gradually, however, the landlords passed off from themselves these obligations, first by means of the poor law and loan taxation, and next by the invention of excise duties and national taxation." (From “The Great Bobbery,” by J. W. Graham Peace, for 30 years secre-

tary of the Commonwealth Land Party of Great Britain. See page 124, chapter “Origin of Taxation.”) So now, when you pay taxation, you will know why, and whom to blame, and how to remedy the fault. To take for the community the economio rent of land is the answer to the Minister of Finance when he says he cannot abolish duties because it would play havoc with the is tiie answer to the farmer who wants derating; it is also the answer to the farmer who wants reduction of interest; for under Land Restoration there would be no land mortgages, nos need for them. It is the answer to the worker clamouring lor more wages, and the pensioner asking for i restoration of pension cuts, for with taxation abolished goods would bo ex- I tremely cheap, and the purchasing j power of the worker’s services, as i expressed through the medium of money, would be doubled. Machinery cheapens goods by mass-production, and their prices, apart from the taxation on them, go down, whereas land values go up with progress. An acre next, to the. Bank of England is now worth £6.500,000, and the annual rental on the land alone £325,500. Such is the effect of progress on land values, while labour becomes a drug on the market. Follow those social values lo where ihey "rest," in the land values. Take them for social purposes, abolish taxation, bring In real free trade, enjoy flic world's best- at the lowest cost, and poverty and the mountain of vice It engenders will fade away.

ushering in a new Golden Age.—l am, etc., T. E. MoMILLAN. Matamata, September 1, 1934. P.S.—Among the Danish smallholders there is now a strong movement agitating for the socialisation of the social values of land and the abolition of taxation. New Zealand farmers please note!—T. E. McM.