Defense of Henry George's Single Tax

John Emery McLean

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, May-June 1927]

THE Rev. S. Parkes Cadman, writing in today's Register in reply to a New York inquirer, damns with faint praise the economic philosophy of the late Henry George and illustrates the wisdom of the shoemaker who decides to stick to his last. He admits that "the Single Tax theory has its merits," but asserts that its "want of practicality" is a "barrier which economists declare insurmountable. Why penalize land," he asks, "as one species of property, and allow all others to escape?" I beg leave to comment as follows:

1. The practicality of the Single Tax is its chief merit. Its adoption could be brought about with the ease and simplicity of a mere stroke of the pen a rescinding of all taxes on the products of labor and the processes of industry and commerce.

2. It does not "penalize" or tax either land or land owners. It taxes land values as the sole source of public revenue, because these are created by the community and not by the owner of the land. It does not take from any body anything that he earns, produces or manufactures.

3. Land is not morally to be regarded as a "species of property" because it comes from the same creative Hand as the air, sunlight and water, which are not so regarded even legally, and it should be accessible on equal terms to all living beings, as the other three elements of Nature have always been.

4. Statisticians have repeatedly proven that the land values of the United States capitalized at four per cent, and taxed accordingly, would produce ample funds to meet all the expenses of government federal, state and municipal. To allow all other forms of wealth to "escape" taxation, therefore, is to permit and encourage their free circulation in the channels of industry as a means of producing more wealth and promoting prosperity along more equitable lines.

5. Great accumulations of wealth in private hands resulting from the exercise of special privileges cannot be reached through taxation because the tax is passed along by the monopolist (in the price charged for his product) to be paid by the ultimate consumer. The redistribution of such wealth can only be effected by abolishing the monopolies that render the accumulations possible, and this can be done automatically by abolishing the fundamental monopoly of the land, in which all other monopolistic enterprises have their roots, directly or indirectly.

6. The only "barrier" to a wider application of the Single Tax system is ignorance and misrepresentation among politicians, leaders of popular thought, and brethren of the clergy who are too engrossed in their pastoral duties to read George's inspired work, Progress and Poverty, and are thus tempted to offer advice that is quite uninformed. But it is encouraging to note that Prof. John Dewey, of Columbia University, one of America's greatest scholars, has said:

"I regard the land value tax as both theoretically and practically sound, and an indispensable basis of much needed tax reform,"

and that Justice Louis D. Brandeis, of the United States supreme court, has recently declared:

" I believe in the taxation of land values only."