Review of the Book

Rural Problems in the United States
by James E. Boyle

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from the Single Tax Review, September-0ctober 1921]

The Editor's preface to this little work says: "It is vastly important to have an efficient, happy and contented agricultural population." Approving heartily of this sentiment we turn to the pages where rural problems are treated.

The author says land values showed a gain of over 100 per cent. in the decade from 1900 to 1910. "This has meant over-capitalized land in many sections. It has meant an increase in land speculation, the worst form of speculation. In some counties (in the corn belt) farm tenancy has already reached 90 per cent. of the farms. If the present movement keeps up for two or three decades, we shall soon be as much a country of absentee landlords as Ireland was before the Land Acts were passed. And thus far we have evolved no land policy."

He says of the Federal Farm Loan Act: "The Federal Farm Loan Act was designed to help tenants become landowners. In practice it is working like this: The prosperous and shrewd farmer, seeing the advantage of cheap money on long term payments, borrows under this Act and buys out his less prosperous neighbor. Then he repeats this step, putting tenants on his holdings. Thus the Act tends to make the prosperous more prosperous."

One of the problems, distinctively rural of course, is to keep young men on the farms. The author points out that in one of the newest farming States, Oklahoma - a State where according to the author's statement "abundant free land existed as late as 1901"-"rural counties showed losses of from 3 to 23 per cent., while the cities of the State increased over 200 per cent. in population."

After all this it is discouraging to find that when the author comes to consider what he terms "idealistic reforms" he makes no mention of the Single Tax. He has apparently never heard of it as among the proposed solutions for the evils of land speculation and increase of farm tenancy.

A curious example of the author's economics is presented under the heading "Cheap Food Fallacy." "Cheap food would mean if the idea were pushed to its ultimate conclusion that a degraded peasant class would have to occupy the country. In other words we would have in the country the condition of France in the seventeenth century as described in La Bruyere and quoted by Taine in his 'Ancient Regime,' a sort of 'Man with the Hoe' type of farmer." He says elsewhere, " Cheap food of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States was undoubtedly a blessing to all interests."

What has happened since to make dear food a blessing he does not tell us. He speaks of real and nominal wages, so cannot be wholly blind to the distinction. The important consideration is what the farmer's products will buy, and whether such exchange is on an equitable basis. The farmer's real interest is not in dear food, but in what economists call effective demand on the part of the buyers of farm products. The farmer's interest is therefore in abundance, not in scarcity or dear food. If he sometimes or often loses sight of this consideration it is because of faulty habits of thinking.

Lengthy discussions of the country church, the country newspaper, etc., - all valuable in its way, no doubt - comprise the greater number of pages in this little work. The more pressing rural problems are scarcely even indicated.