The Road To Freedom,
And What Lies Beyond
CHAPTER 7
Josiah and Ethel Wedgwood
[Published in London by C.W. Daniel, Ltd., 1913]
VARIOUS THEORIES ABOUT LAND REFORM
… Land reformers differ in aims
as well as in methods.
… LAND REFORM -- a foolish name,
since it is not the land but the dwellers on it who need reforming --
covers a menagerie of aims and programmes.
… The idea that the misuse of land
is in some way connected with social troubles is too obvious not to
spread directly it is expressed. Artists and poets, desiring to renew
Arcadian scenery; rural proprietors, anxious to revive agriculture;
moralists, planning the restoration of virtue by means of wholesome
labour; philanthropists, scheming to turn slumdwellers into model --
villagers; Fabian socialists, needing scope for their sociological
ingenuity; eugenists, in search of a good laboratory for the
concoction of the human race ; all these, in their cry for "land
reform," unite with the financier, who sees in the locked-up
riches of the soil fresh fields for exploitation, with the statesman,
who perceives a new source of revenue, and with the anarchist and
single-taxer, for whom the land is a key to social revolution.
… Alas! the apparent unity is not
likely to endure. Though parties now are ostensibly divided chiefly by
differences of method, there is a deep underlying divergence of
principle which is already beginning to cleave land reformers into two
sections; and if as yet the lion sometimes lies down with the lamb, it
is because neither recognises the other. For some of these land
reformers wish utterly to destroy land monopoly; but the larger number
wish to adapt it to their own notions of social fitness, and
therefore are naturally excluded in discussing methods of attacking
it. These latter desire to control land, as a workman controls his
tool to whatever end he has in view; and amongst them may be reckoned
the majority of philanthropists and politicians, in short, all those
social reformers whose design is to better the world by various forms
of benevolent despotism, and who aim not at freeing the people by
freeing the land, but at using the land to govern the people.
… Social reforms benefit land
monopolists in the favoured areas.
… Not only have these reformers not
endangered land monopoly, their schemes have been actually such as to
intensify its evils and fortify the monopolists. Such measures as the
purchase by county councils of agricultural land for small holdings,
must obviously increase the monopoly price of all country property in
the coveted area, and saddle the small-holder with a disastrous rent.
In point of fact, the Small Holdings Act of 1907 promptly raised the
price of land in certain districts by 15 per cent., according to the
statement of the then Under-Secretary for the Board of Agriculture ;
while the tenants are groaning under the high rents needed to recoup
the ratepayers.
… A similar effect would of course
follow in towns on the State purchase of slum property, and the
erection at the ratepayers' expense of model dwellings. The
disappearance of the slum renders the surrounding neighbourhood more
attractive, and neighbouring rents rise in consequence. Anyone who has
watched the transformation of Seven Dials into Shaftesbury Avenue will
recognise a practical illustration of this truth.
… The erection of dwellings at "charity"
rents would have the simple effect of perpetuating that sort of "charity."
Some philanthropist in Parliament recently proposed, that the State
should provide houses for working men who get less than fifteen
shillings a week. Were his scheme realised, he need not fear that his
houses would ever lack inhabitants. While industrial slavery
continues, the depression of town rents to a country level will not
succeed in giving rural charms to the streets of Shoreditch; it will
only depress the wages of other places besides Shoreditch to the wages
of Bedfordshire. The only certain gainers in this arrangement are, not
the workmen, who lose at one end what they gain at the other; not the
small capitalist employers, whose profits, under the present system,
are limited, like the workmen's, by competition; but those whose
spoils are indefinitely capable of expansion -- the landlord and the
landlord-capitalist.
… Such measures as these make the
land neither cheaper nor more accessible for free men; the only sure
and permanent beneficiaries in each case are all or certain
landowners.
… Every kind of suggestion has been
made to remedy unemployment, besides the only reasonable one of freely
opening the gates to the source of all employment. Since misery is
greatest amongst the unskilled labourers, it has been imagined that a
solution would be found by rendering them skilled, by transferring the
competition in the labour market from a lower to a higher grade of
worker. With this end in view Trades' Schools and apprenticeship
schemes are fostered, whose clever young scholars drive the elderly
and less up-to-date artisan into the street, that the production of
wealth may increase and the site value of industrial towns rise.
… It must be the same with all
other attempts to benefit the working class without going to the root
of the social trouble. A minimum wage may, incidentally, kill a few
small capitalists and employers; but it must result either in higher
rents or higher prices, and so does but entrench landlordism and
capitalism still more strongly. Of little use, either, is it to tax
profits or incomes. Such taxes are added to the cost of production and
transferred to the consumer in higher prices. Such measures will not
unlock to labour the closed gates of employment, nor set free one serf
whom the capitalist controls.
… Anarchists[1] and
Single-Taxers.
… Of the named sorts of
politicians, there remain but the anarchists and single-taxers who
desire the genuine destruction of land monopoly -- besides those many
persons who, while holding very incoherent opinions, are yet, by
instinct, individualists.
… Of these, the anarchists, like
the socialists, consider land as only one of several equally important
factors in the industrial problem. They do not recognise its basic
character; and therefore they concentrate their fire on capitalists
and the money system, and, in treating of land, content themselves
with various empirical and arbitrary settlements, which do not seem to
have any reasoned connection with the distinctive peculiarities of
land as an agent of production and necessity of life. Indeed many
writers, of all schools, seem to regard land as a sort of material
used in agriculture, rather than as the source of all organic life and
mother of all industry ; and they ignore altogether its essential
characteristics of space and site.
… About the year 1851 the French
anarchist Proudhon wrote (Idee Gen. de la Rev., v. 5):
"It was with the land that the exploitation of
mankind began; its solid foundations were laid upon the land. The
land is still the stronghold of the modern capitalist, as once it
was the citadel of feudalism and of the ancient aristocracy."
Yet Proudhon, in the preceding pages, proposes cheap houses and
abolition of interest as the panacea for urban troubles, and in the
subsequent ones, a sort of peasant proprietorship with a communal levy
of half the produce, as a solution of agricultural difficulties!
… A similar inconsequence of ideas
is found in many honest and zealous revolutionaries of to-day, and
seems to be due to a mental confusion of land, the source of life and
labour, with the wealth produced from it by labour.
… Confusion between Land and
the Products of Labour.
… (1) Both considered as private
property.
… This failure to distinguish the
difference between land and labour-created commodities, and to discern
all that is involved in that difference, is continually vitiating all
plans for reform.
… If land is placed in the same
category with labour- created wealth, then of course the same ideas
about ownership and property will be applied indifferently to both.
According to this view, if a book or a knife can be privately owned,
so can land. If, on the other hand, land is to be communal, then also
commodities created by labour must be communal.
… Now, if land is regarded as a
private possession -- like a book or a knife -- individual economic
freedom must produce the rule of an oligarchy - as at present; for
whatever persons get control of the land will rule their
fellow-creatures, and without free access to land, social liberty is
only a name. Hence it comes (as was pointed out in Chapter V.) that
the Manchester School of individualists, who regard land as private
property, have failed to secure social justice, or even to amend the
relations between capital and labour.
… Bakunin wrote, about 1867, that
liberty alone was but the liberty to die of hunger, and therefore only
a farce. Without free access to land this is true, for liberty
involves liberty to make a living, which involves use of land. But
with free access to land the saying would be meaningless ; for land
and labour together are the sole creators of food and shelter, and it
is only when they are separated that starvation becomes the
alternative of slavery.
… A Digression on Free Access
to Land.
… "Free access to land":
that means, that there shall be for every man free opportunities for
individual use of a portion of that land which has no special
advantages of nature or site; and that no land shall be any longer
appropriated for use, nor withheld from use under the false claim of
private property, except a full equivalent be paid to the rest of the
community. Free access to land means a potential share for each
individual in all that land for which there is no competitive demand,
which is, at the time, "on the margin of cultivation."
… For it is to the use of a portion
of such land only that any individual has an absolute unqualified
right. To the use of any portion of land, which has a competitive
value because it gives a special privilege, no individual can lay
absolute claim ; but he must make a return for its special value to
those other claimants from whom it is appropriated. In other words, he
must pay a rent to the community. And so long as an individual pays
this rent to the community for the special value of special land, it
cannot rightly be in any person's power to dictate to him any other
terms, nor any special method for its use. Nor can it be within the
just power of any central or local Government to grant permits for the
use of land to those whom it may favour, and under regulations which
it may choose to impose. Whilst paying to the community the special
value of his land, the occupier is by right freed from any further
economic obligations towards society; any other compulsory levy taxes
not his privilege but the fruits of his labour -- not what he has
taken from the world but what he has added to it.
… But without such free access to
land, social liberty must be abandoned, and all that can be aimed at
will be a rough material equality, maintained, either by continual
primings of the very wealthy to subsidise the very poor, or by a
compulsory pooling of all the wealth produced by labour. The injustice
of such methods is disguised by talking of "labour" where "labourers"
is meant; as if labour were an organism, possessing but two arms and
two legs. To "secure to labour what labour creates" has a
high and plausible ring, but it merely means sharing the fruits of A,
B and C's toil among all the letters of the alphabet. However
cunningly concealed, this is what all schemes for the distribution of
wealth amount to, whether they be in the crude form of collective
ownership, or in the familiar and accepted shape of rates and taxes on
houses and machinery and incomes; or of the familiar juggle of 9d. for
4d.; or of tariffs (whether buyer or seller pays the duty); or any
other way of compulsorily levying wealth from one person, to spend
either on the benefit of other individuals or on so-called common
services. Yet between such schemes we must needs choose while land
continues to be erroneously treated as private property; and we have
the anomaly that while it is so treated, genuine private property is
continually tampered with.
… Confusion between Land and
the Products of Labour.
… (2) Both considered as communal
property.
… To return to our theme : When
land and commodities made by labour are placed in the same category,
then, if both are treated as private property, the present condition
of industrial slavery must ensue. If, on the other hand, both created
wealth and land are alike regarded as common property, then either the
kingdom of heaven must come to effect the arrangement amicably, or
open despotism must prevail. For just as no man can rightly monopolise
the common soil, because no man made it, so no man can rightly be
forced to share with the community anything that his own brain and
limbs have made. Community of goods could only be enforced by a
tyranny as great as that which now drives the tramp and the gipsy from
their campfire on the common into the stone-breaking yard of the
workhouse.
… As land is true public property,
so the produce of labour is true private property.
… Such interference is only
supposed necessary by reformers because they fail to see that the
unjust accumulation of wealth, and its dangers, spring from land
monopoly alone; that, far from being an inevitable result of unbridled
liberty, they are due to the legalised confusion of land with private
property. For social liberty is possible ; and it rests on the
recognition of a double right : the right of everyone alike to a use
of the soil, and the right of everyone to own what his own labour has
made.
… Communal anarchists, not
recognising this difference, find themselves in a dilemma ; for in
asserting common rights, not only to the soil but also to the produce
of labour, they are obliged (in order to avoid Government coercion) to
presuppose an Utopia in which no man will contribute less, nor take
more, than his fair share from the common pool. This is assuming much.
The voluntary renunciation of individual property is perhaps a flower
of the perfect life, but social justice can make no claim for it. Such
self-abnegation belongs to a world where the common human terms of
justice and injustice have lost their meaning and yielded to a more
divine conception.
… The Single Tax.
… The clearest recognition of the
fundamental difference between land and commodities made by labour is
to be found in the teaching of Henry George; and the economic and
social principles that result from that difference are embodied in the
doctrine of the Single Tax.
… As a philosophic idea, this
doctrine has profoundly influenced many thinkers. In particular, it
notably affected the later writings of Leo Tolstoy, providing an
immediately practicable scheme of society in accordance with his
religious principles.
… As a political programme, and
under the name of "the Taxation of Land Values," it has in a
limited form introduced itself recently into the politics of many
countries, and, as a measure of industrial utility, found supporters
to whom the philosophic ideas at its root would seem fantastic and
highflown.
… The Single Tax as an Ethical
Statement.
… The single-tax proposition must
be analysed into two parts. The first is a statement as to the
relationship which ought to exist between men in the use of land. It
is as follows: That every individual has an equal right to the use of
land; and that since some land, by reason of its superior nature or
situation, gives to its owner a special advantage, the owner of such
land should pay to the community an equivalent to its special value.
This compensation, paid to the community by the owner of superior
land, would be in the form of a tax which should take from him all the
superior profit which that land yielded above the least profitable
land in use. This superior profit is called " the site value,"
and in paying the site value, the owner is losing the special
advantage conferred by the superior land, and restoring it for
redistribution among the whole community.
… This tax, or rent, paid to the
community for the site value of the land he monopolises, is --
according to the single-tax doctrine -- the only contribution which
can justly be levied from the individual by any government.
… This proposition is sometimes
stated somewhat as follows: That a tax on land values should replace
all other forms of taxation for the purposes of communal revenue; or,
That all rent should be communalised by means of a full tax on land
values.
… The proposition cannot, of
course, be accepted by persons who are able to retain a belief in the
absolute private ownership of land, and who would prefer that the
public should purchase from present landowners -- at a price --
whatever land is needed for communal purposes. Neither does it find
favour with State socialists, who believe in State ownership and
control, not only of land but also of labour and of the produce of
labour; and who therefore desire to "nationalise" land, even
at the cost of pensioning every existing landowner. It is a
stumbling-block to those rule-of-thumb reformers, who fancy that
taxation should be "according to ability to pay." But to
individualists of all kinds it must appeal as a solution of problems
heretofore un- solved. Even among absolutely anarchical and
decentralised communities it would appear that some such solution of
the difficulties arising from special advantages in site or minerals
must be agreed upon, if there is to be real equality of conditions.
… The Single Tax as a Method.
… The second part of the single-tax
proposition is a practical programme. By putting this system in force,
or even by only beginning to apply it, as a legislative measure and
under existing conditions, land monopoly would be broken down and
access to land restored to the whole community. Its advocates propose
to do away with all other taxes on property, and to levy taxation on
each landowner according to the land value he owns, so that rent may
replace all other revenue for communal purposes. They contend that
such a land value tax, even in its beginnings and gradually
introduced, (1) will bring all land into its most productive use,
lower the price of goods and improve material conditions; (2) will
make such a change in the worker's bargaining power as shall turn him
into a free man, and secure to him the full fruits of his work; and
(3) will prevent the possibility of wealth being unjustly accumulated
by industrial methods.
… Of these three results, the
second, the freeing of individuals from industrial slavery, is by far
the most important. That, and the third, the prevention of capitalist
exploitation, are the only two which come strictly within the scope of
these chapters; although the first, the increase and cheapening of
production and amelioration of physical conditions, figures
prominently whenever the taxation of land values is discussed on
political platforms.
… That the increase of production
is perpetually put forward by politicians as the main result of the
taxation of land values is, we think, the cause why the measure is
regarded with such suspicion by many sincere reformers, who are led to
suspect in it some further trick for further enriching the capitalist
employer by new opportunities for exploitation. It cannot be too
clearly emphasised, that the argument for the single tax, as a
practical method, is not the greater creation of wealth (although that
wealth should be then fairly distributed), nor the increase of revenue
for public services, nor the better housing and improved material
conditions of the people. These are all but incidents in its course.
Its great final result, that which inspires men, who are more than
professional politicians, to hope in and work for it, must be the
emancipation of the whole population.
… In Chapter IX. are discussed in
detail the immediate effects to be expected from a practical
application of the single-tax principle.
… On the side of theory there seem
but two objections that can be raised to it by the most fervent lovers
of liberty. First, that as a tax, it involves the existing Government
machinery. To this may be replied, that the single tax involves less
State interference than any other political programme; and that, as a
social truth, it will survive the practice and theory of autocratic,
democratic, or any other sort of government. Also that it is the only
method of genuine revolution which does not of necessity involve
earthquake and catastrophe. The second possible individualist
objection, is the question of how far the community, who rightly own
the site value, can be represented by any government, when it comes to
applying the revenue drawn from it. A careful consideration of the
ideas that are discussed in the following pages may lead to the
conclusion that the difficulty would in practice solve itself, and
that site values will tend to disappear as the population emancipates
itself from present conditions. Until then, local devolution might
offer a convenient temporary solution.
… But however imperfect the single
tax might be, as worked by political machinery during the time of
transition from this state of society to a new and better one, however
partial its application in the hands of any conceivable legislature,
yet it must at least be far more just than the methods of taxation now
in vogue. At the present time, our governments not only leave scarcely
touched that source of revenue to which the public can fairly lay
claim -- the rents drawn by individuals through the monopoly in land
-- but they substitute a tax on individual earnings, and apply the
proceeds, in the name of public services, to all manner of objects
from which that individual gains possibly little or no benefit, or of
which he may absolutely disapprove. Every year a larger number of
citizens grow discontented and suspicious, not only of the methods and
education of the schools, but of compulsory schooling in itself.
Increasing numbers condemn war and military service. Distrust of
police and judicial methods, and scepticism as to the treatment of
criminals, are rapidly growing. And the condemnation and the
scepticism come, not from the ignorant, who might be converted, but
from the thoughtful and educated. Yet private property -- the creation
of personal labour -- is compulsorily taken in ever-increasing
taxation to carry on these systems, and to introduce fresh schemes,
such as experts delight in, in defiance of individual opinion and
individual rights.
NOTES
- By "anarchist" we do
not mean a person who attempts to redress injustice by throwing
bombs. It is obvious that no genuine anarchist could approve of
explosives and terrorism any more than he approves of police and
prisons. Such things are only an attempt to supplant one reign of
force by another.
CONTENTS
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