The Essential Reform:
Land Value Taxation
In Theory and Practice
C. H. Chomley and R. L. Outhwaite
[Part 5 of 15]
Though it might be too much to say that starvation is the product of
civilisation, it can at least be said that it is only in civilised
communities that the use of starvation is obscure. If the members of a
Kaffir tribe starve, it is due to the fact that some natural calamity
has prevented the land producing the accustomed harvest, for
starvation in a time of over-production" is certainly a
phenomenon of civilisation. Nature seldom withholds her bounties, and
persistent starvation is unknown to the Kaffir for the reason that
every man has a right to the use of the tribal lands. As these lands
are held in common, the Kaffir has available for his own use all he
produces, the consequence being that the struggle for existence does
not exist for him. Astute South African monopolists with gold mines to
exploit, desiring to teach the Kaffir the "dignity of labour,"
at a low wage, have urged that private ownership of the land should be
established, the reserves broken up, and the blessings of civilisation
thus showered upon the native. The Report of the South African Native
Affairs Commission, 1903-5, appointed to provide a solution for the "labour
problem," is permeated with these views. It is stated: --
"The natives have had access to the land on terms
which have enabled them to regard work for wages as a mere
supplement to their means."
Having paid a tribute to the native's industry, the Report says : --
"Given such a population, possessing easy access to
the land, it would have been extraordinary if the present situation
had not followed on a very rapid growth of industrial requirements."
The Commission points out the desirability of bringing about "a
condition of things which at least will not perpetuate or aggravate
the existing labour difficulty." The Minority Report shows how
this should be done.
"The minority of the Commission believes that to do
away with free land to natives would be to strike at the root of
much that is unsatisfactory in native life -- tribalism, communal
occupation of land, polygamy, inertness, the comparative
unprogressiveness of the mass, the absence of the desire for or the
incentive to industrial paid labour -- and that coupled with the
right of purchase and sale of land among themselves, leading in time
to larger holdings, the change would in a relatively short time
reduce the number of natives tied to the locations and reserves,
release a large number for work more valuable to themselves and to
the country, and would immensely raise the manner living and the
habits of the natives remaining the reserves."
Having shown how the natives could be driven to the labour market by
the establishment of private ownership of the soil, the Commissioners
proceed to find Divine sanction for the project.
"The Commissioners forming the minority claim at
the suggested change would bring the natives under the pressure of
the law, 'If a man does not work neither shall he eat,' and by doing
so would set in motion certain potent forces which would start the
native races of this country on the upward road more than any
legislation which could be devised."
After such testimony from such a source there is any rate
justification for claiming that the fact that the natives have access
to the soil places them beyond fear of starvation and makes them
masters of the situation in the labour market, since they are in a
position not to work for a less wage than at least the equivalent of
what an equal amount of labour would produce if applied to free land.
So, as a wage-earner, the native has a minimum rate of wage
established by the maintenance of equal rights to the use the soil.
This enabled them to defeat the mine-owners in their attempt to reduce
wages after the war, in consequence of which the latter turned to
China for serfs.
While it is clear that the maintenance of the equal right of all to
the use of the soil is the basis of the well-being of the South
African natives, it is scarcely less clear that the denial of that
equal right is the root cause of social distress in communities which
have undergone the civilising process suggested in the Report. We are
driven to this conclusion when we proceed to investigate the cause of
the social disease, the symptoms of which are starvation, low wages,
unemployment, poverty.
For if men starve, it is obviously because they have no wealth with
which to supply their needs. All wealth is the product of labour
applied to land. Men do not starve because they cannot labour,
therefore if they starve it must be that the source from which alone
they can produce wealth by their labour -- that is to say, the land --
is closed against them. So at once we are confronted with the fact
that land monopoly, the denial of the equal rights of all to the use
of the earth, provides a reason for starvation. If one man owned all
the land of a country in which a million men, eager to labour, lived,
he could any day condemn them all to starvation by withholding from
them his land. The few men who own the bulk of the land of the United
Kingdom could do the same by mutual agreement. They do not so decree,
but allow access to some of the land on terms which enable a section
of the community to pay rent and live. Some land they withhold and
compel another section of the community to starve -- those, in the
first place, who wish to work upon this land, and consequently those
who would be engaged in the production of secondary forms of wealth if
the former were permitted to employ themselves. Turn now to the
symptom of disease somewhat less acute than starvation, namely,
poverty. If poverty exists, it must either be that those who produce
wealth are incapable of producing sufficient, or else that, having
produced wealth, they are not permitted to consume all they produce.
Now as the producers of wealth have to buy the right to live, week by
week, month by month or year by year, which is what they do when they
pay rent to individuals for a foothold on the earth, their poverty is
at least engendered by the amount they pay since they get no
equivalent of wealth in return. So immediately we begin to diagnose
the symptoms of the social disease, we find in land monopoly the
roots-cause. There should be nothing surprising in the fact that land
bears the same relationship to communal welfare in the civilised as in
the uncivilised State, for the Englishman is just as much a land
animal as the Kaffir, though the complexities of his existence
disguise the fact.
And as we proceed further in investigation, all the circumstances
before us substantiate the conclusion that land monopoly is the enemy.
If there is poverty because insufficient wealth is produced for the
needs of all, it cannot be due to natural causes that this
insufficiency maintains, for there exist a multitude of men eager to
produce wealth and millions of idle acres from which it could be
produced were access to them not denied. Not until every idle fertile
acre and every idle man are contributing their maximum to production,
and every idle operative is at work satisfying the needs of these, and
his own, will the possibilities of the creation of wealth have been
exhausted. It is claimed, however, that not the under-production but
the over-production of wealth is the cause of social distress. If men
who have created wealth starve because they have produced so much that
for awhile their labour is not required, it is owing to the fact that
they are not permitted to consume what they produce. This is due in
part to their potential consumption being limited by the amount which
they have to pay for permission to live, and infinitely more so by the
fact that, as an indirect result of land monopoly, wages do not
represent the full equivalent of the value of the wealth produced.
Moreover, labour being denied access to the soil, there is an
under-production of wealth from this primary source which makes for
under-consumption at secondary sources by limiting potential demand.
If labour received all that labour created, and labour were permitted
to create all it could, over-production would only result when the
needs of all had been supplied. These considerations enable us to
understand why it is that industrial depression, with increased
unemployment and falling wages, follows a period of industrial
prosperity - that is to say, of enhanced production. During the latter
period the share going in rent to the monopolist or as profit to the
capitalist is rapidly increased, while the share going to the worker
in the shape of wages remains stationary; or is not proportionately
increased. Those directly responsible for the increased production of
wealth are not permitted to consume it, those to whom it goes cannot,
and so a glut results termed over-produc tion, which is in reality
under-consumption; and industrial depression ensues. This process is
accentuated by the fact that during a trade boom there is always a
tendency to treat land as a counter in a speculative gamble on a
rising market and to withdraw it from use.
During Preceding years there had been an acceleration of the
production of cotton goods in the United Kingdom, and when in 1908 the
lock-out of the operatives took place, the mill-owners stated that
they stood to gain, since over-production had precipitated a crisis,
and the laying up of the mills would enable stocks to be reduced. And
at the same time in the United Kingdom there were millions of human
beings requiring cotton goods and unable to purchase them, and tens of
millions in India, clearly showing that production had not overtaken
potential consumption. Therefore the problem that confronts us in
relation to betterment of social conditions resolves itself into
finding a means to increase the production of wealth and to ensure its
equitable distribution and consequent consumption when produced. The
first is essentially a matter of giving labour full access to natural
opportunities; the second object is to be achieved by the freeing of
the land-user from monopoly exactions and by raising the wage of the
worker till it represents the full value of what he produces. Were
these aims achieved, production would be at its maximum, and all the
latent possibilities in the soil, the mines, the rivers, would be
called forth by applying to them all the potentialities in the hand
and brain of every citizen. Consumption too would be at its maximum,
and there would be no such bitter anomalies as an overproduction of
boots, and tens of thousands of bare-footed children; of clothing, and
a multitude in rags; too many houses, and millions herded in slums;
labourers sowing, reaping and garnering the harvest, and starving
themselves.
How the taxation of land values will operate to increase production
by giving labour access to the land may now be considered.
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