The Single Tax -- No Compromise

Stephen Martin

[Reprinted from the International Union Newsletter, February, 1970]

The longer I live the more I am convinced that compromise is a sign of weakness; indeed, experience has taught me that any practical advantages gained therefrom are a snare and a delusion. My greatest successes over the years have always been when my rigid adherence to the principles involved have aroused the mental vigor of my opponents. For this reason I say that in advocating land value taxation we should never fail to emphasise that we mean a single tax.

Early in my life, I was convinced of the soundness of LVT, but my conversion was not complete until I realized that all other forms of taxation were immoral and inimical to the well-being of society, and a negation of personal liberty.

Subsequently the single tax and its economic thesis provided me with an answer to my doubts on many social problems. I now no longer believe in State education and health services or State participation in and ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Neither do I accept rational planning and zoning of the use of land. This brings me to another point in the potency of the use of the term single tax. I have on occasion had discussions with members of the Socialist and Labor Party who have avowed their convinced support for LVT only to find that where we parted company was their inability to accept the consequences of its full implementation, namely the diminution and abolition of political direction and power over the way people live and their right as individuals to decide their own destiny.

Concerning local government taxation we often use the phrase "take rates off buildings and levy them solely on land values." Why not "take taxes off wages and incomes and tax land values"? To emphasize our objective as a single tax levied solely on the rent of land may raise searching questions but they can all be answered satisfactorily. To the man in the street it would surely create a new vision.

It is true that State paternalism has made the answers more difficult to get over than in the age when Henry George wrote his great classic, but we cannot and must not compromise. Private monopoly in labor and capital, and State monopoly have established themselves more firmly than ever before in the history of mankind. Our task is that much greater. Some time we must win through, if not in our time then in some future generation.