The Case Against Revolution

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from Single Tax Review, Vol.XIX, No.1, January-February 1919]

Single Taxers owe it to their cause to decline participation in the maudlin sympathy which is enlisted by every insane or violent attempt to destroy rather than to rebuild existing institutions.

It should be remembered that ours is a movement which urges an economic society based on the natural order. It is to be brought about by an appeal to reason; it depends for its success on the orderly processes of society, and is to be attained through the ballot. It is doubtful if revolution under the most promising auspices would give it to us; the forces that revolution brings uppermost are not those on which dependence is to be placed, or to whom we can look for the kind of reorganization that seeks a permanent basis in the natural law of society.

For this reason, sympathy for the I. W. W., physical force anarchism, sabotage, violent trades unionism, bolshevism, and all their evil brood, are utterly foreign to us. They make as little for the goal we have in view as the oppression and privilege out of which they are born. Their origin is the same -- their appeal is to the same evil parent. For the oppression they would substitute is the oppression of their class -- and is quite as hateful.

The British elections which have resulted in a victory for Lloyd George and the coalition, have some compensating advantages. All those tinged with pacifism have gone down to defeat; among them Henderson and Snowden. The new government will face an electorate which will not be satisfied with Tory measures of reconstruction, and it is difficult to see how the elements can be held together for long. Unless Lloyd George has determined to abandon altogether his early professions he must soon challenge his Tory associates to a duel to the death on principles, the application of which their class must resist or themselves pass away. But whether they will swallow or be swallowed, is a matter of conjecture in which one man's guess seems as good as another's.

That there is little to be hoped for from the Labor men of Great Britain who are lined up with Henderson and his impossible programme, seems clear. George Barnes, the Labor member of the War Cabinet, is out with a proposal that out-Herods Herod, or in this case out-Hendersons Henderson. His suggestion for an international wage minimum as a matter for consideration by the peace Conference is made in all seriousness. He is quoted as saying:

"In a word, we desire to adopt the principle laid down by Gompers, that labor shall no longer be treated as a commodity, but shall be the first charge on production before rent, interest on capital or profits."

Maybe it will be profitable to take Mr. Barnes seriously. He perceives the fundamental truth that human labor is the one absolutely essential factor to the production of wealth -- that is, in the transforming of the raw materials of the world into particular things needed for the satisfaction of human wants. But economically it is not possible to put labor before rent. Rent is the value which comes to certain sites because labor can be more profitable employed thereon than on other sites. It comes because in the present order of things all labor cannot be profitably employed on equally advantageous sites. Therefore, the Single Tax proposes to equalize these advantages by taking for public uses whatever advantage inheres in one site over another. Thus, while it is impracticable to have all returns to labor "come ahead" of "rent", it is quite possible to have labor share in the rent fund.

Henry George in his epoch-making Progress and Poverty says:

"At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that labor-saving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of labor; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past."

And again he says:

"It is true that disappointment has followed disappointment, and that discovery after discovery and invention after invention, have neither lessened the toil of those who most need respite, nor brought plenty to the poor."

Newton D. Baker, in Everybody's Magazine of recent date, says:

"Has all the mechanical development of recent years really advanced us? Has this great civilization of ours built up on machinery, really meant our refinement? Have all these great inventions of manufacture, conquest of the air and sea, of distance, and even of time itself, been of real benefit to us?"

Mr. Baker is trying to say the same thing that Henry George said, and succeeds in saying it, though not nearly so well. The Secretary of War is supposed to be a Single Taxer, was a convert of Tom L. Johnson, but if we gather correctly from an interview with him printed in Collier's Weekly he is a believer in the Single Tax but not in favor of its adoption, like the traditional Maine prohibitionist who was in favor of the law but "agin" its enforcement. Yet Mr. Baker has suggested the inquiry, and it is hardly fair to his readers not to furnish the answer. Mr. George wrote a book to explain why all this wonderful mechanical progress had not been of real or adequate benefit to society. Mr. Baker has read the book. He elects to write an essay for a magazine which embodies the inquiry; will he follow it up with a second article embodying the answer? We might suggest that there is good material in Progress and Poverty for quite a number of magazine articles from the Secretary; they will not be as good as the original, and a reference to the source might not be out of place, though such an acknowledgement might be a somewhat inconvenient confession for a democratic office-holder. Still, a brave man might risk it.