In Defense of Free Trade

J. Rupert Mason

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, January-February 1940]

The most immediate opportunity facing us, it seems to me, is to fairly scream to every one within hearing to urge his Senators and Congressmen to support the reciprocal trade treaty efforts of this Administration. The opponents are sure to be ferocious!

Now that the President has appealed for authority to provide greater freedom of trade between nations, let us not fail to give the suggestion support in every way at the disposal of any of us.

No one realized more completely than Henry George that taxation of land values, alone, would not eliminate unjust privileges, and that the abolition of trade barriers between nations constituted just as integral and essential a step before justice can prevail.

Many Georgeists appear to have all but forgotten this, for they have all but limited their thinking to the importance of government collecting all of the publicly created rental value of land, instead of only part of it, as at present.

Henry George, who launched the Georgeist movement, was of a much broader turn of mind than are his followers. No one can deny that he saw the necessity of collecting all the rent of land. But he also saw the question of Freedom in its larger aspects. In an editorial in The Standard, signed by him (reprinted by C. Le Baron Goeller), we find the following:

"As for those of our friends who think we ought to leave protection undisturbed until we have succeeded in taking land values for public benefit, and those who express the same underlying thought by asking why free land will not lead to free trade much more naturally than free trade will lead to free land, it seems to me that they can hardly fully realize the great object which is to be attained by the Single Tax, nor yet the practical means by which the adoption of this Single Tax is to be secured. Like those who oppose us, or fail to go with us from sheer inability to see how the taxation of land values can abolish poverty, their mental gaze seems to be concentrated on what we propose to do, ignoring what we propose to do away with. The great benefit of the appropriation of land values (i.e., economic rent) to public use would not be in the revenue that it would give, so much as in the abolition of restrictions upon the free play of productive forces it would involve or permit. It is not by the mere levying of a tax that we propose to abolish poverty; it is by 'securing the blessings of liberty.'

"The abolition of all taxes that restrain production or hamper exchange, the doing away with all monopolies and special privileges that enable one citizen to levy toll upon the industries of other citizens, is an integral part of our program. To merely take land values in taxation for public purposes would not of itself suffice. If the proceeds were spent in maintaining useless parasites or standing armies, labor might still be oppressed and harried by taxes and special privileges. We might still have poverty, and people might still beg for alms or die of starvation. What we are really aiming at is ... 'the freedom of the individual to use his labor and capital in any way that may seem proper to him and will not interfere with the equal fights of others' and 'to leave to the producer the full fruits of his exertion.' To do this it is necessary to abolish land monopoly. And it is also necessary to abolish tariffs."

By enlisting aggressively with this Administration with regard to its present attempts to lessen trade barriers, the Administration leaders might discover that there is much about which we both think alike.

We know that any lowering of tariff barriers must increase the difficulty of private interests continuing to pocket for themselves as much of the publicly created rental value of land as at present. Very few land speculators have caught this, so they may not be as vicious in their opposition to Secretary Hull's aims, as they are to any taxation of land values.

This seems to me to be the most concrete opportunity facing us in many years I hope it may be soberly considered by every lover of liberty.