Review of the Book

The Burning Question, Making Your Living
in a Monopolized World
by Louis Wallis

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, January-February 1938]

Joseph Dana Miller was during this period Editor of Land and Freedom. Many of the editorials published were unsigned. This review is signed by Mr. Miler.

The Burning Question, Making Your Living in a Monopolized World, is another welcome contribution to our literature from Louis Wallis and fitly supplements his previous work, Safeguard Productive Capital, which has had a wide circulation.

The author in his preface introduces his subject as follows:

"This book deals with the problem raised more than half a century ago by Henry George, without some of his presuppositions, and from a dif- ferent point of approach."

He begins his discussion with the housing problem, which he declares to be "but a single phase of the larger economic problem which now challenges civilization."

The author indicates the weakness indeed the absolute futility of federal housing schemes, While the double pressure of heavy taxation on improvements and the inflated, speculative cost of land continue. He sees the slum problem as created by the force of public authority, "which penalizes improvements by overtaxing them and undertaxing both improved and vacant land to such a degree that speculators have been able to withhold a large part of the ground area in America from all use, and selling and leasing land at prices far above productive worth."

He commends the federal information agencies for making thorough research into the appalling facts which in themselves doom its housing problems. All this is enforced with admirable simplicity which we do not recall to have seen surpassed anywhere. Productive enterprise is crushed between two forces, the power of taxation and the exactions of private monopoly.

There are many passages which we would like to quote, such as:

"It will be news to most persons that bona-fide human industry is under organized obstruction by the law, while speculative, unearned incomes are specially favored and protected by the law."

The chapter in which Mr. Wallis states his differences with Henry George seems to us rather attenuated. We would point out that withheld wages cannot for long reinforce the stream of productive capital; since the return to capital is determined by the same law that determines wages the margin of production.

We would differ with Mr. Wallis when he quotes approvingly from Dewey and Tufts, that "no individual knows how much he creates; it is a social product." This lends strength to the socialistic viewpoint. But with rent no longer privately appropriated the amount going to wages automatically determines the value of the individual's contribution to society, which we think Mr. Wallis, on reflection, will not deny.

We have not the space to review this somewhat metaphysical point more in detail. The work is so excellent that these points of difference need not be emphasized.

Advertisements of this valuable little work appear in newspapers and periodical mediums, covering a million and a half readers in this locality. What more can we ask of the services of one man to the cause of greater economic freedom?