Review of the Book

Safeguard Productive Capital:
Tax Ground Values and Untax Industry
by Louis Wallis

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, September-October, 1935]

Here is a work typical of much that is being written in these days, and useful within limits.

Prof. Wallis has his fling at Henry George. It has become the habit of those who derive all they know from the master to present what they want to think is an original approach to the problem, so much more reasonable than Henry George himself, but which turns out to be the same thing under another name and a new setting, or some very much diluted form of it. For example, one of the subtitles of this work is "A New Approach to the Business Problem." It would be new if Henry George had not indicated the same avenue of approach fifty-five years ago. We wonder if it is just crass egotism that leads these writers to wrest piecemeal rocks from the great mountain and exhibit them as original discoveries. There is not a single statement in this book of Prof. Wallis that is not derived from Progress and Poverty.

Perhaps the reader will ask for justification for these comments of the reviewer. We have it on page 58 and 59 of the work as follows:

"Mr. George, as we have shown, was not the first writer who pointed to land as a peculiar tax base; but he attracted worldwide attention for a time by linking economics, in oracular style, with Utopian emphasis on Single Tax as a panacea for social ills. I concur in much that Mr. George says, but cannot count myself a disciple, and have experienced considerable difficulty in working with those who regard him as their master.

On the whole, then, the influence of Progress and Poverty at the present time is an obstacle in the way of sane economic readjustment; and with regard to this point, the views of many scholars are expressed by Prof. Edward A. Ross, of Wisconsin University, who writes me as follows: "I agree with you that by rearing a Utopia on the exclusive taxation of land, Henry George interrupted the rational evolution which was getting on toward recognizing land as peculiarly able to bear taxation."

This is pretty astonishing. Mr. George did much more than point to land as a peculiar tax base. Nor did he set himself to build a Utopia. If he dwelt upon the subject "in oracular style" (by the way, this sounds like a sneer) he did so because he saw the kind of a civilization that would result from the solution he offered. He had linked the law of wages with the law of rent. This was his great contribution to economic science. There had been many land reformers before him, but none had built the bridge over which in a much feebler way inferior thinkers had stumbled, or walked uncertainly. It is not surprising that Prof. Wallis found "considerable difficulty in working with those who regarded Henry George as their master." It is clear that he has only imperfectly sensed the teachings of Henry George in all their implications.

We are sad to learn that Progress and Poverty is "an obstacle in the way of sane economic readjustment." The remark is amusing, for it is doubtful indeed if Mr. Wallis' present volume would have emerged at all if Henry George had not inspired it.

But let us be grateful for small things. This book will be read by many who have not the intellectual capacity, nor perhaps the leisure, to examine what Henry George really taught. Much that precedes what we have quoted is well worth while. In this we include his examination of Marx, his explanation of the nature of capital, his relation of land to production, and the evils wrought by land speculation. These are all well done, and other comments of Prof. Wallis call for commendation.

Prof. Wallis suggests as a substitute for the name Single Tax, "Capretax," which strikes us as a name of equal futility.

It may be said, too, that the rejection of rights, or "Natural rights," on which George laid peculiar emphasis, forces Prof. Wallis to an acceptance of Bentham's principle of "The greatest good to the greatest number," the fallacy of which was pointed out by the clear-eyed Alexander H. Stephens many years ago.

All the points raised quite admirably by Prof. Wallis will find further augmentation in a better knowledge of Henry George, to whom all these arguments may be traced. And for the benefit of the student let us say that Henry George did not teach that land was "peculiarly able to bear taxation." It is not the taxation of land that he taught, and we wonder if it would not have been just as well to insist upon this throughout in the interest of truth and a better understanding. Indeed this has been done in what precedes the passage we have quoted and which is a negation of what has gone before.

All in all, it will still have to be said that this little work will do good among those who prefer to get their knowledge in derivative form.