Is "Our" House Built Upon The Sand?

Oliver McKnight

[Reprinted from the Single Tax Review, March-April 1916]

The Bible story of the foolish man who built his house upon the sand, may have been told solely to direct the individual toward the building up of individual character, but I can not help but think that it has a larger meaning and was given for our guidance in collective character-building.

Upon what kind of foundation have we built our house of government? We have, in so far as our constitution is concerned, done well in this matter. Free speech, free press, political equality, and religious liberty are some of the beautiful columns that support our structure, but on what do these columns rest?

If these columns rest on insecure foundation, if they do not rest on the solid foundation of just economic conditions, they cannot endure. A time will come when the winds of involuntary poverty and the storms of anarchy will beat upon our house, and it will fall, because it was built upon the sand of special privilege and unearned wealth. We have an immense area of land, rich in mineral wealth and in agricultural possibilities, that only require the mind of enterprise, the hand of labor, and the opportunity to free exchange of products, to create wealth beyond the imagination of the most enthusiastic patriot.

Do our present economic conditions show a desire on our part to encourage wealth-production, by holding out the certainty of just reward to the forces, and the only forces, which can change the raw materials of Nature into the finished product of desirable and exchangeable wealth? We do not encourage enterprise by giving over to monopoly the great public utilities (which are made valuable through collective demand) with the power to use for selfish advantage, rather than for the public interests.

We place a detainer on the hand of industry by a system which taxes, in some form, all that industry produces, thus tending to decrease the demand for wealth production by increasing cost to the consumer.

If this were all, it might be possible, in a great and rich country like this, to build our structure and maintain it with some hope for its endurance, but it is not all. With a wholesale disregard of "equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," with no just conception of collective morality or moral conception of collective justice, we have established a system which hands over to the forestallers and the idlers the earned profits of the enterprising and industrious. In other words, we have made land private property. Land is the element on which capital and labor must produce wealth. Is it right, just or moral to permit non-capitalists and non-laborers to charge a price before they will permit capital and labor to do the things we want them to do?

This is the kind of foundation on which our structure rests. Can it bear up under the pressure of increased population? Will its trend, which has already, with our 100,000,000 of population made it profitable to hold land out of use, be towards more liberty or more slavery for the masses - when our population reaches 300,000,000?

The great Teacher has told us, by way of contrast, of the wise man who built a house on which the winds blew and the storms beat, but it did not fall - because it was founded on a rock. Let us therefore build our government house on the rock of Justice. Justice requires that each child of man born into the world, shall have an equal right with every other child, in the opportunities of earth; if for any reason, he is deprived of these rights, our structure will remain insecure for the want of a secure foundation. If this be not so, then morality, religion, brotherhood and the high ideals of mankind, are only the result of vain imagination or the work of scheming fakirs - and are impossible of realization.

We must make land common property. We must collectively recognize, and collectively incorporate into law, the right of all men to the use of the earth. Nothing short of this will suffice to stop the greed and selfishness of some of our number - who will take advantage of the future increase of population. In order to make land common property it is not desirable or necessary to disturb the possession of the present holders, provided they are willing to pay the entire rental value of their holdings into the public treasuries.

"Great was the fall of it." Will this be our epitaph when this nation has taken its place in the cemetery of Republics, or will it be - "And it fell not because it was founded on the Rock of Justice."