Is the Single Tax Movement
Advancing or Retreating?

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, January-February 1928]

The few among us who would confine the Single Tax movement to the discussion of the mere transference of taxes from labor products to land values, and who would hold Land and Freedom strictly to the narrow advocacy of that policy, have now something to consider.

Perhaps the very reason why many people feel a lack of sympathy with the Single Tax movement is due to the too formal character of our agitation, to the purely cut and dried formulas, to the narrow range of our inquiry that fails to take into account the varied phenomena of social movements, and the many manifestations continually arising because of the lack of social justice which it is the aim of the Single Tax to establish. At a time when we were successfully appealing to many of the disinherited, to minds only vaguely conscious of great social wrongs, our words were out of a vocabulary more universal, and therefore more distinctly welcome to hearts that hungered for a message of emancipation. We were by reason of this better understood.

And indeed if the proposal of Henry George is not for a new and different state of society, and if we will not accord our teaching to this very real vision, then indeed has this movement of ours lost its magic. Our sympathies must be with those who for any reason are raising the standard of revolt against the intolerable conditions of a false civilization. Their way may not be our way; their justice not our justice. But their right to revolt, and their right to express their convictions, is our right. We must defend their rights as peculiarly our concern. The state of society we are helping to build as disciples of Henry George, is a society of freedom, for it is that, and not a new tax system, that we would bring about.

Our enemies are not merely those who attack the Single Tax. In a sense they are our friends. Our real enemies are those who, desiring to perpetuate things as they are, would bring under ban those who are doing anything to destroy what they regard as existing injustice. For the time being these are our friends.

This comment is for the purpose of leading up to what we want to say about a certain group of irresponsible, reactionary busybodies calling themselves "Key Men of America." Their names, though not important in themselves, deserve mention for qualities that are typical of certain so-called 100 per cent Americans. Their names are Fred B. Marvin, Edward A. Hunter, of the Industrial Defence Association, and Harry A. Jung, of the Military Intelligence Association. Just now they are preparing a blacklist of men and women among whom we find some of the finest characters of our time.

PHE object of this blacklist is to prevent certain persons from obtaining engagements to speak at public functions, town halls, and universities. In other words, their aim is to create a reign of terror that will suppress all freedom of speech. The New York World has been commendably active in disclosing the evil machinations of this dangerous group which may well arouse us to exercise that vigilance which has been declared to be the price of liberty. They have already prevented many distinguished men and women from addressing audiences by threat and intimidation and misrepresentation. They sought the removal from the high school faculty of a teacher whose sole offence had been that he won a five dollar prize for a definition of socialism. The man who sought this dismissal should be mentioned so that he shall receive the proper share of obloquy. He is Major General Amos A. Fries, Chief of the Chemical Warfare Service. Happily he was unsuccessful.

Other activities successfully achieved are said by the New York World to be the dismissal of two teachers from the West Chester, Pa. Normal College, their offence being the support of the right by the Student Liberal Club to criticise the American policy in Nicaragua, the cancelling of addresses by Lucia Ames Mead on the charge that she failed to salute the flag (though she has denied this), the preventing of Dr. Frank Bohn, journalist and lecturer, from addressing the Community Forum at Cranford, N. J. Other achievements are recorded to their discredit. And it is to be noted that members of the American Legion who fought in a war to make the world safe for democracy are active in this new movement to make democracy impossible.

These "Key Men," with the apparent object of making themselves as ridiculous as possible, have issued a blacklist of names of men and women supposed to be dangerous to the welfare and security of the country. Look at just a few names on this list: Jane Addams, John Dewey, Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, Zona Gale, Oswald Garrison Villard, Rabbi Wise, George Foster Peabody. We see by this that Single Taxers are not wholly ignored.

WE say now to these preposterous "Key Men of America" that Single Taxers are more dangerous than any of those named dangerous to the spirit of war which they are fomenting, dangerous to the policies of injustice and oppression and militarism, and the government policies in Hayti and Nicaragua. What the Single Tax proposes is the destruction of most everything that these superheated patriots stand for. It spells complete obliteration of the spirit of persecution that this dangerous group would launch upon the country. It has nothing but supreme contempt for them, mingled with concern for their power of harm, which is in proportion to the hate they can engender among the ignorant and prejudiced.

The last outstanding Liberal leader in British politics passed away in the person of Asquith a few weeks ago. With his death British Liberalism ceased practically to exist. There is no longer a Liberal Party in Great Britain animated by the old Liberal traditions and able to appeal to great names like Cobden, Bright and Gladstone. To celebrate the demise of British political liberalism the party has issued its valedictory in a document of 500 pages which they call "Britain's Industrial Future" the report of the Industrial Inquiry Committee of the Liberal Party.

The authors of this precious document do not call it a valedictory, of course. It is supposed to be a new political programme with recommendations to guide the party in its deliberations as to future policies. In putting forth this death warrant they ignore the fact that there is already a Socialist Party in Great Britain known as the Labor Party. As there is no room in British politics for two Socialist parties, members of the Labor Party must exult in this formal renunciation of nearly all the Liberal principles held by the party of Gladstone and Asquith.

We have not seen this voluminous Report. Our knowledge of its contents is gained from the New Republic and a few papers we have seen from England. It is said to have taken eighteen months of intensive study devoted to the task by such men as John Maynard Keynes, W. T. Layton, editor of the Economist, H. D. Henderson, editor of the Nation, and B. S. Rountree. Party leaders like Lloyd George, Sir Herbert Samuel and Sir John Simon assume responsibility for the Report, and so we are left in no doubt as to the eminence of the pallbearers officiating at the Liberal obsequies.

In his reply to James G. Elaine in the North American Review on the subject of Protection away back in 1890, Mr. Gladstone said: " The argument of the free trader is that the legislator ought never to interfere, or only to interfere so far as imperative fiscal necessity may require it, with the natural law of distribution." Evidently in the mind of Mr. Gladstone this truth did not solely apply to the question of Protection, but was of far more general application. But the Manchester Guardian, which is supposedly a Liberal organ and is a journal of high standing, refers to the Report approvingly as an attempt " to infuse into the mainly haphazard economic growth measures of control and co-ordination." It therefore proposes to interfere with the natural law of distribution, or to proceed as if it had been tested and failed.

WE are told by the New Republic, which can always be depended upon to do its best to add to the cloudiness and complexities of economic thinking, that "the influential Liberal leaders have turned their backs on laissez faire." "They are in harmony," says the New Republic, " with the thought in this country which is stretching out toward social control of economic institutions." We had sensed this and deplore it as much as the New Republic exults in it. We are told by this organ of confused economic thinking that " the main task (of these new and strangely constituted Liberals) is the better organization of business." This, we are told, may require, in some instances, " the taking over by public authority of important enterprises that are not well adapted to private ownership through lack of profit or through the danger of monopoly."

We hope we are not unduly facetious in pointing out that there thus appear two reasons for taking over private enterprises one that they are not making profits, and another that they are, for surely a monopoly must be profitable. If government is to take over unprofitable enterprises presumably not without compensation it will have accumulated quite a large collection before many years quite enough, we should say, to bankrupt most governments. But the reader will observe that no principle is urged that should govern the acquisition by government of private industries, or any distinction beyond the broad one indicated, which, of course, is no rule of reason by any law of economics. Single Taxers agree that the distinction is between industries subject to the law of competition and others not so subject,, and requiring the use of land for their operation. The distinction may not be an exact one, but it is at least a roughly convenient approximation.

The degree to which the new liberalism would go in increasing the functions of government is appalling. We are told: "Thorough publicity of accounts of all businesses is the basis of the remedies proposed." But the owners of privilege are reassured by the following from the New Republic's study of the Report: "All this looks in the direction not of preventing or breaking up monopoly but of substituting sound public regulation for the vanishing checks of competition." So land monopolists and monopolists of every other kind, most of which owe their existence to land monopoly, have nothing to fear.

THE Report also proposes that the government interfere with the free flow of capital into the most profitable channels, if we understand correctly. These new Liberals believe that the national savings, estimated at 500,000,000, should be used less for investment abroad and more for industries at home. Whether this is merely advisory, or whether forcible steps are to be taken to keep these savings in the country, does not appear, but the latter procedure is an easy step in translating this glaring economic fallacy into action. Surely there must be many of the old-school Liberals still alive in Great Britain who will read this Report with stupefied amazement, not unmixed with a real sorrow in seeing a great political party forsake its most glorious traditions in a hodge-podge of ill-considered Socialistic recommendations. The only thing we miss is the Capital Levy, and we are grieved at the absence of an old friend.

Income and inheritance taxes are said in this Report * to be the most scientific (sic) forms of taxation and should be made to bear a large portion of governmental burdens. We are still depending on second-hand information as to this Report, but have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the New Republic's statement of its contents. And again we cry, Shade of Gladstone! For Gladstone condemned the income tax as " overwhelmingly energetic in minutiae." Others of the great Liberal leaders would have relegated the income tax to periods of emergency. None would have advocated extensions of or substantial additions to it.

A proposal of this extraordinary Report which the New Republic calls "striking" is for the establishment of an " Economic General Staff working in close touch with the Prime Minister and Cabinet." No wonder this is called " striking." The mischief such a General Staff could do passes all imagination. The business of regulation and " snoop," after " the general statistics of all businesses " were in their hands, would give work to an uncounted clerical force, a great army of functionaries, and a department more extensive than anything in the Soviet government of Russia, and indeed in the history of any nation since time began. From mining operating companies and great department stores to peanut stands, the Economic General Staff would be kept pretty busy.

One thing this Report clearly shows. The economic thought of British politics has gone to seed; Liberalism is dead; the Liberal Party has no leaders. Everything advocated in this Report, which is the voice of the party's more influential spokesmen, the Labor Party will do better and more fully, and for those who like that sort of thing the Liberal Party cannot hope to compete. And another thing the Report shows: the confusion of thought is the child of the confusion that reigns in the economic, ordering of the country. Where the influence of land monopoly penetrates every nook and corner of the land, the disposition to evade this question of first importance leads to policies of makeshift of which this Report is the astounding culmination.

Owen D. Young, of the Dawes Reparations Commission, and widely recognized as a financial authority, has recently declared: "Here in America we have the standard of political equality. Shall we be able to add to that full equality of economic opportunity? No man is wholly free until he is both politically and economically free."

We sometimes have to rub our eyes when reading statements from our leaders and politicians. Often they speak the dialect of Single Tax economics as if they had learned the language. How is it they manage to ignore the meaning? What is equality of economic opportunity for instance? What is economic opportunity itself? Is it not land, and is not every piece of land where people "most do congregate" an economic opportunity?

But let us give credit to Mr. Young for understanding just what he says. If so, he accepts what Henry George taught. If so, he is one of us. If so, he will feel impelled to do something for the truth he believes in. And there can be no more fitting conclusion to round off a useful life and the highly honorable career which has been his, than the doing of something fitting the action to the words we have quoted.

Today, and indeed in no time in recorded history, has there been such a thing as "economic equality." And for this reason what Mr. Young calls the "standard" of political equality, which he says we have, is a standard to which we find it impossible to conform. Your economic slave makes a poor political freeman. The individual who is pinched by poverty, or who lives in fear of want, or to whom his possessions are insecure, is the slave of his ward boss, or other boss, or of unseen influences to whose dictation he must bow. It is impossible to think of him as acting on his independent judgment in the exercise of the suffrage. Though even in cases where he may not be individually concerned he still has connections whose material interests render them economically subservient, and whose welfare, for various reasons, influences his political conduct in their behalf.

When he is not economically free, government possesses a power over the individual to influence his political conduct, and sometimes to crush him utterly in his material affairs. When the masses are poor they vote according to their economic herd instincts, and even when they are well-to-do must struggle for the possession or retention of economic privileges where opportunity is unequal. In such a state of society political opinions are colored to their economic needs; independence of judgment insensibly yields to the call for material advancement in a society of economic inequality. The standards of political and economic equality, however unflattering it may be to our prepossessions as " independent " American citizens, tend to exact uniformity in character, one declining as the other declines, rising as the other rises.

In his Washington correspondence to the New York
Herald-Tribune Mark Sullivan makes it clear that President Coolidge holds certain definite views with regard to the sharing of the cost of flood control and river projects that must be undertaken by government. His mind, according to Mr. Sullivan, is determinedly fixed in the opinion that "benefited property should pay." While undoubtedly the financial aspects of cost and benefit present some intricate problems, Mr. Sullivan says:

As one of many variations of the effect of flood control, there is some land and property that undoubtedly will be worth more after the improvements are made than it was ever worth before.

It thus seems clear to the President that the benefited land should pay.

We congratulate our friends everywhere on the evidence this affords of the progress of the idea for which Land and Freedom stands. Once it has got clearly into the heads of our slow-thinking politicians that this is the principle that should govern us in the collection of revenue for public improvements, our cause is almost won. We congratulate also the President and his advisors. The principle once applied and generally accepted will send the Single Tax movement ahead with tremendous strides.