What is the Single Tax?

P. H. Cornick

[Reprinted from the Single Tax Review, 1915]

The so-called Single Tax on land values is a means to an end -- a simple and practicable political expedient whereby land may be made common property without resort to judicial expropriation or force of arms; and whereby alone the common heritage of the human race may thereafter be equably administered.

In an incomplete form, it was first advocated as a fiscal measure by a group of political economists in France, just prior to the outbreak of the French revolution. It was similarly advocated by certain American statesmen in the early part of the nineteenth century, and sprang up sporadically in various parts of the world, sometimes as a result of the works of its earlier French proponents, sometimes independently.

In 1879, however, Henry George, an American political economist, published a work entitled "Progress and Poverty," in which he clearly demonstrated the direct connection between the law of rent and the law of wages, and proved conclusively that involuntary poverty and economic maladjustments have their roots, not in natural law or Divine will, but in that denial of natural rights on which the institution of private property in land is based.

As the means by which land might be made common property without "needless shock to present customs and habits of thought," he proposed -- and proved the justice of and the economic necessity for -- the abolition of all taxes on the products of man's labor, and the diversion from private pockets into the public fund of economic rent. "We would simply," he said, "take for the community what belongs to the community, the value that attaches to land by the growth of the community; leave sacredly to the individual all that belongs to the individual."

This expedient whereby economic equality and social justice may be brought about was unfortunately christened by some of his followers the Single Tax -- unfortunately, because the appropriation by the community of the value it creates can in no sense be considered a tax. The name, furthermore, has become a shibboleth, the sound of which serves to divert men's attention from the fundamental economic reform at which the movement aims.

Today, the Single Tax has come to be regarded by a world staggering under injustice and hungering for social redemption, merely as the rallying cry of fiscal reformers; but in the eternal truth behind it. He the hope of the down-trodden, and the foundation of the brotherhood of man.