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The Single Tax and Socialism

H. Chomley and Joseph Fels / 17 December 1908, p.162.

Is there any good and sufficient reason why single taxers and Socialists should not work shoulder to shoulder in close alliance for that amelioration of social conditions -for that radical change in the basis of society which both feel is essential if this world is to become a fit place for the vast majority of its people to live in? Differ as they may concerning some of the means by which this bettering of conditions is to be accomplished, they agree as to others, and their ultimate aim is practically identical: namely, to make the mass of the people full participants in the vast wealth and the immense store of material advantages which the industrial forces of the world, rightly used, might produce.

It is true that the Socialist -- or so we understand the mailer -- regards the nationalisation of all means of production, distribution and exchange, as the only way towards the adequate socialisation of wealth, while the single taxer believes that such socialisation can be brought about by nationalising, through taxation, the land, and those things which arc in (heir nature monopolies. But this difference ought to count for little in the face of the wrongs and abuses which Socialists and single taxers agree should be attacked here and now. Two men who are travelling the same road, whereon enemies must be fought before progress can be made, would be foolish in refusing to join forces because one of them, after miles of the journey had been accomplished, intended to take a turning which the other believed would not lead to the objective which both had ultimately in view. Such travellers are the single taxer and the Socialist, and surely they should combine to fight their way along the first stages of their perilous economic journey.

In proof of our contention that their ultimate aim is practically indistinguishable, let us quote a portion of the passage from Progress and Poverty, in which Henry George points to the changes he desires to accomplish, and believes would result from the single tax :

"There would be a great and increasing surplus revenue from the taxation of land values, for material progress, which would go on with greatly accelerated rapidity, would tend constantly to increase rent. This revenue arising from the common property could be applied to the common benefit, as were the revenues of Sparta. We might not establish public tables - they would be unnecessary; but we could establish public baths, museums, libraries, gardens, lecture rooms, music and dancing halls, theatres, universities, technical schools, shooting galleries, playgrounds, gymnasiums, etc. Heat, light, and motive power, as well as water might be conducted through our streets at public expense; our roads be lined with fruit trees; discoverers and inventors rewarded, scientific investigations supported; and in a thousand ways the public revenues made to foster efforts for the public benefit. We should reach the ideal of the Socialist, but not through government repression. Government would change its character, and would become the administration of I great co-operative society. It would become merely the agency by which the common property was administered for the common benefit."

No Socialist, we take it, hopes, at least for a long time, to accomplish more than this. The question remains, is there anything in the present practical proposals of the single taxer which is either foreign to, or not directly tending towards, the Socialist's ideal?

The single taxer wishes to lax land values. This would take for the community a portion of the value which the community created. It would, in our view, do muck more, but looked at from (he point of view of the Socialist, it should be of the first importance, for it both reduces the value of the land, which he wishes ultimately to nationalise, and provides a fund for purchase, or redeeming bonds paid for the land, if he has purchase in view.

Again, the single taxer desires to nationalise, or municipalise, railways, tramways, gasworks, waterworks, canals, telegraphs, telephones, electric supply - all those undertakings, in fact, which can be exploited by the individual only when some special privilege is conferred upon him by the State. These are in their nature monopolies, and to monopolies of almost every kind in the hands of the individual the single taxer is a sworn foe. Such limited exceptions as copyright and patents are of small importance.

Admitting that the Socialist considers this programme insufficient, it surely, nevertheless, affords a basis for a working agreement which would occupy reforming energies for the present and years to come. The single taxer wishes to begin with an attack on land monopoly. Cannot the Socialist go with him there? No one has pointed out more forcibly than Karl Marx how potent an agent is land ownership in the enslavement of labour. Let us destroy such ownership, and take the next great step that may prove needful, when the ground is clear.

Private property in land cannot be abolished in a day, or in many years, without unwearied effort, but the lime is propitious for striking a telling blow. Government is in need of another 20,000,000 pounds to meet next year's demands on the revenue. A tax of 1d. on the capital value of land in the United Kingdom, which cannot be less than six thousand million pounds to-day, would supply the sum and about 5,000,000 pounds to spare.

Let wasteful expenditure be cut down, as it might and ought to be by many millions, and still social reformers would find plenty of use for the balance.

If space permitted, we could show how, besides raising revenue, this tax would do much greater things in forcing land into use, in town and country, which means employing men now unemployed, who in their turn would spend their wages in employing others. We could show how it would raise wages, by reducing the competition of men driven out of the country with workers in the towns; how it would reduce rents, by forcing owners of unoccupied land and houses to build and to secure tenants.

These things, however, Socialists know. What we would urge upon them is to put a tax upon land values in the forefront of their programme, to make it their political battle cry for the coming months, and to ask help of the hundreds and thousands of single taxers and land value taxers, who are scattered throughout the country. They would be surprised at the response. And if, when the first battle of the land is won, question arises whether Radical and Socialist forces can still advance together, at least they will understand one another's, objectives better, after being comrades in arms.

MR. FELS AND THE SINGLE TAX

Nelson Field / 23 May 1912 (p.93)

Sir, - It is about time that Mr. Fels was informed that the measure of his mind has been taken by Socialists; and they are no longer inclined to be taken in by him. Day in, day out, we hear of Mr. Fels popping a letter into this paper and inspiring an article in that, subsidising a land-taxing lecturer here and a land-taxing party there, and all with a single object, which he must be very insincere if he conceals from himself. That object is to free his own class - the class of industrial capitalists - from the incubus of rent. Oh, yes, we understand our Mr. Fels better perhaps than he understands himself. At present, industrial capitalists not only pay rent for their own premises, but they must pay (in wages) the rents of their employees. And to make bad worse, the rent thus extracted from them if spent by a class that despises them. But suppose the State should appropriate rent - a great deal of relief would come to Mr. Fels' caste in several ways. First, rent would probably be reduced, if not for employers for workmen - with the consequence that wanes might be reduced. Secondly, the Government would spend its revenue from rent in the form of large undertakings designed to provide still greater scope for capitalists. Thirdly, a Single-tax is obviously designed to save the necessity of other taxes. In other words, Mr. Fels would get a great relief! Go on, Mr. Fels, we know your little game ; but it won't wash.


Fairplay / 6 June 1912 (p.93)

As I am not a Single Taxer, I am not influenced by political motives in protesting against Mr. Field's unjustifiable attack. Nor does Mr. Fels stand in need of any defence from me. 1 am animated merely by a feeling of indignation at the injustice and unfairness oi this wanton attack^ 1 enclose card.

MR. FELS AND THE SINGLE TAX

Nelson Field / 6 June 1912 (p.143)

Sir, - For all I know to the contrary, Mr. Fels may be, as your correspondent, "Fairplay," affirms, the mildest- mannered man that ever proposed to enrich himself at somebody's else's expense; but King Charles I probably ran him very close, and even Mr. Fels' enemies - the opponents of his Single-tax proposals - are probably not without personal charm. But personal charm has nothing to do with economics, and Mr. Fels ought to know very well that the release of himself and his employees from the obligation of rack-rent and the diversion of economic rent to the State will actually enable him to increase his profits. Not only will his men's living minimum be reduced, consequent on the reduction of their rent, but all the philanthropic State undertakings, now in part paid for out of profits and wages, will be paid by the State out of rent. Should private capitalism therefore continue after the Single-tax is in operation - and Mr. Fels has never suggested that it should not - the whole benefits will fall to his class. The class of Rent will be abolished only to make even more room for Interest and Profit. That Mr. Fels does not expect personally to benefit during his lifetime by this reform I can easily believe. If members of the capitalist class were not individually prepared to be occasionally altruistic in the interests of their class, the class itself would soon cease to exist; there must be honour even among thieves.


Fair Play / 20 June 1912 (p.189)

Sir, - Mr. Nelson Field's opinion that the single tax will benefit the capitalistic class by reducing rent and augmenting interest and profits is a perfectly legitimate one. I have myself pointed out again and again the absurdity of endeavoring to solve the industrial problem by the simple application of Mr. Henry George's panacea, and have exposed his contradictory assertions that "rent is robbery" whilst "interest is natural and just." But when Mr. Field goes on to impute dishonourable motives to those who accept George's economic theories he is overstepping the bounds of decency. Your correspondent has deliberately slandered a man he does not even know, and after being told so by one who happens to know, he simply reiterates the slander without any excuse. It is not necessary to characterize such conduct as this. Mr. Fels is justified in treating such "canaille" with contempt.


Nelson Field / 27 June 1912 (p.213)

Sir, - The would-be chivalrous personal defence your correspondent "Fair Play" put up (or Mr. Fels led me to conclude at first that he was no other that Mr. Fels; but his statement last week that in his opinion the single tax would augment profits and interest makes my assumption impossible. The dilemma "Fair Play" is now in is clear; his friend Mr. Fels is spending money in propagating a proposal that will be to his own advantage, or, at least, to the advantage of his own profiteering business. Now, in what way, I should like to ask, does Mr. Fels differ in this from the American trust magnates who go into politics for the good of their business and even endow colleges to spread economic fallacies? In America such men, however affable their manners or apparently benevolent their actions, are described as "out for boodle." Yet "Fair Play" objects to my stating this of Mr. Fels, though he acknowledges that boodle in the long run will result to Mr. Fels' class. What has an economist to do with Mr. Fels' personal charm. The personal charm is not incompatible with the economic instinct to squeeze out of society more interest and profit and to name the process social reform. As a social reformer Mr. Fels is either intellectually stupid not to see what "Fair Play" and I see so clearly, or he is a shrewd, long-sighted business-man. If this is slander, every economist daily slanders his thousands.


Nelson Field / 4 July 1912 (p.239)

Sir, - That amiable and charming gentleman, Mr. Fels, whom your correspondent, "Fair Play," has known to his delight for twenty years, shows no sign of profiting by "Fair Play's" instructions in economics any more than by my "slanders " In the "Daily Herald" of Tuesday last Mr. Fels returns to his dead muttons like any vulture that has been momentarily scared off ; and, after the usual manner of modern disputants, repeats his original fallacies as if they had never been demonstrated to be such. Under the title of "What Can the Rich Man do?" Mr. Fels perfunctorily goes through a. list of obviously impossible charities which a sensible rich man, like himself, cannot patronise. Omitting, then, any charities or works of education or endowment that a rich man with brains and good intentions might support, Mr. Fels hastens to his appointed end of advocating the Single Tax. The real grievance of labour to-day, he maintains, is that there are not jobs enough to go round; and the reason of this is that land is held up from productive exploitation. Tax landlords, therefore, on the market value of their land, whether used or unused, and the latter variety will soon be brought into the market. Doubtless it may be by this means; but what is there to prevent the capitalist class, of which Mr. Fels is such an amiable member, from intensifying their monopoly of Capital and Raw Material? Obviously nothing. The class of Rent, in fact, is abolished only to swell the classes of Interest and Profits, And since the charming Mr. Fels belongs to one or both of these classes, his interest in the Single Tax is personal. What can the rich man do, therefore? He can employ his money in the propagation of reforms which will add to his own wealth. When Jews do this, Mr. Belloc cries aloud that England is being sold to the Israelites. But when an American does it, and does it so amiably and so charmingly - being an amiable and charming man and not one of those Jews - why, then "Fair Play," and doubtless others, join in excusing him and in accusing critics like myself of ''slander." Mr. Fels knows. better, however, than to complain of " slander" himself. Neither the Rothschilds nor he condescend to reply to criticisms to which there is no honourable answer.


The Editors / 18 June 1912 (p.267)

From an interview with Mr. Finney in the "Labour Leader," and from his election literature that we have seen, we conclude that Mr. Finney is a. moderate Liberal whereas Mr. Outhwaite is an advanced Radical. In the "Labour Leader" Mr. Finney informs us that he is in favour of a universal Minimum Wage Bill. So is Mr. Outhwaite. He favours likewise an Eight Hours Day. So does Mr. Outhwaite. He would nationalise the mines, etc. So would Mr. Outhwaite. Finally, he summed up his programme in a poster issued during the election to this effect: "Vote for Finney and better wages and regular work." But Mr. Outhwaite is not only in favour of the same things, he has a notion, though a bad one, of how to get them. He does not say: Vote for me, and then when you have returned four hundred more like me, we shall possibly be able to do something. No, he can say: Vote for me and strengthen the hands of Mr. Lloyd George, who is about to do these very things. In regard, therefore, not only to promises, but to the ability to carry them out, the Liberal candidate had the advantage over the Labour candidate. The latter, indeed, was in the anomalous situation of having, on behalf of Labour, to oppose the main constructive plank in Mr. Outhwaite's programme: the Single Tax. But if the Single Tax was to be opposed - and we all agree that it should be - all the rest of the social reform programme should be equally opposed. To our mind the Single Tax differs in no essential respect from the Minimum Wage, the Eight Hours Day, the Right to Work, and all his other mites of the cheese. It is even conceivably a means of financing these schemes at the expense of the landowner instead of at the expense of the capitalist. But as both alike live on Labour the difference in their effect on wages is the difference between two-and-six and half-a-crown. Like the barbarians, however, who cannot count, Mr. Finney put two-and-six on his programme, but he was shocked at the suggestion of half-a-crown. Thus he and his supporters have been made fools of by a party that, in the matter of social reform at any rate, can beat them even hollower than they are.

Views and Reviews

A.E.R. / 27 February 1913 (p.409)

I DO not intend to deal with the "lies beyond"; there are enough by the way. We know by past experience that, when the "manufacturers' party" deals with the land, it tempers injustice with hypocrisy. Cobden wrote to Mr. Peter Taylor, with reference to the agitation for the repeal of the Corn Laws: "We don't want the question to be argued, but to be taken up on the primitive grounds of right and justice. We don't wish it to be treated as a manufacturer's question, nor a capitalist's either; but as a bread tax that robs all the community for the clumsy expedient of putting a mere fraction of the booty into the pockets of the robbers." Yet it was a manufacturer's question, for, four days later, Cobden wrote: "Eighteen months ago the movement had its birth in the wrongs of a few manufacturers who were seeking to be relieved from injuries inflicted upon their own peculiar interests." These letters will be found in Dr. Garnett's "Life of W. T. Fox." It behoves us to remember these facts when we are asked to believe that Landlordism is the primal curse, and to ask ourselves what we have to gain by relieving the capitalist of all taxation, and raising the revenue of the country by a single tax on land values. A Chartist in the hungry 'forties said of the manufacturers: "And now they want to get the Corn Laws repealed -not for your benefit, but for their own. 'Cheap bread,' they cry; but they mean 'Vow wages.' Do not listen to their cant and humbug." We are now asked to believe that the Single Tax means cheap land for everybody, whereas it only means lower ground rents for manufacturers, with concomitant higher profits.

On the abstract grounds of right and justice, we have only to ask why the whole cost of the national services should be borne by only one section of the community to see the great injustice of the demand for the Single Tax. Landlords, after all, do no more damage to the working classes than do the manufacturers; and it must be admitted that the national services are at present performed more for the benefit of the manufacturers than of the landlords. We may grant that the private ownership of land does not ensure the most productive use of it; we may agree with Mr. Wedgwood that "the heavy rates upon houses, machinery, stabling, sheds, glass-houses, etc., the 50 per cent, exemption given to agricultural land, and the rebates on game-covers, are all a very definite discouragement of production, and a distinct encouragement to keep land vacant, or half-used, and cause a shortage in it." But who made agricultural production so unremunerative that a 50 per cent, exemption had to be granted? Who rushed the nation into the towns, and forced up rents by the simple process of massing people on comparatively small areas? Who but the manufacturers? Yet they now come to us, in the person of Mr. Wedgwood, and tell us that the road to freedom lies through agriculture, and that the only way to obtain the land for the people is to increase its cost by making it bear the whole taxation of the country.

It is argued by Mr. Wedgwood, as though he wished to demonstrate the vindictiveness that inspires the attack on landlords, that a tax on land cannot be shifted by the landlord on to the tenant. I care little for what the "most respected economists" may say; Michael Flurscheim, who devotes a chapter of his "Over-Production and Want" to the land question, talks common sense on this point. For the Single Tax, be it remembered, does not abolish the private ownership of land: its prime objective is to force land into productive use, and pay the whole cost of the national services. All the rebates and exemptions will be transferred to manufacture. Against the punitive intentions of the Single-Taxers, Flurscheim urges that, "though it is true that, as a rule, the landlord takes all he can extort from the tenant, this power of extortion depends in the last resort on the rent-paying power of the latter. Now, as any tax relief obtained by the tenant raises his rent-paying power, the landlord may certainly recoup, by a higher rent, any tax shifted on his shoulders from those of the tenant. If a tenant pays $300 rent and $50 taxes, and you make the landlord pay the $50 taxes, will not the rent rise to $350?

There is a statement made by Mr. Wedgwood himself that betrays the fallacy of his argument that the Single Tax will destroy the monopoly of the ownership of land. "Many of that minority," he says, "who exclusively possess the control of portions of the earth's surface, have not only occupied what will satisfy their own needs, but have also exercised their monopoly power of withholding from use, so as to keep other land vacant or half-used. They have no necessary inducement or need to do otherwise; and that it is actually done is shown by the fact that many country landlords get no more than 2 per cent, on the capital value of their land; thus proving that ownership, without even normal return, is all they want." If already landowners are content with 2 per cent., why should we suppose that they would resign their ownership, even if the 2 per cent, were denied them? It has already been predicted that England will gradually be turned into the pleasure domain of the world's aristocracy and plutocracy; and Flurscheim argues that the Single Tax could not prevent this conversion, "Suppose that, under the Single Tax," he says, "the Rothschilds and a few hundred other millionaires in England and America should share the whim of turning Great Britain into a deer-park, and British landlords should sell at reasonable figures because of the new tax, which destroys the selling value of their land. Under existing laws, what could prevent these men from having their will? Certainly not the land-value tax, even if it were as high as it would be were the present values taken as a basis of calculation, i.e., 200 million pounds a year. The income of Rockefeller and Carnegie alone is at present valued at 12 to 15 million pounds each; that of the Rothschild families is higher, and, without going any further, we have already obtained one-quarter of the yearly tax required. But how long would it be required? How long would there be a rental value of 200 million pounds in a depopulated England, in that magnificent new deer-park? That value would follow British enterprise wherever the evicted people went. The United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, would see their land values rise as the British land values fell; and finally the 200 millions might be reduced to something like 5s. an acre, to 20 million pounds, or even less, a mere trifle for such magnates. That such an event is practically impossible is begging the question, because it is only saying in other words that the Single Tax is impossible."

Into Flurscheim's arguments for land nationalisation by purchase I cannot enter here; but enough has been said to show that, if land monopoly is the root of all evil, as Mr. Wedgwood argues, and I am willing to agree, the evil cannot be abolished by the Single Tax, which, at the best, could only exchange a small number of private owners for a large number, and, at the worst, would enable industrial capitalists to complete the ruin of England by purchasing the land at forced prices. Already, as Mr. Wedgwood shows, industrial capitalists are becoming landowners abroad; and the process may well be repeated here if the Single Tax be imposed on land. By the abolition of the landlord, the capitalist producer would be freed from the burden of monopoly rent; and the Single Tax would simplify for him the question of the charges on industry. But with capital and land in the hands of the same people, the workers of England would be as badly off as ever.

THE SINGLE TAX

M. Fairley / 13 March 1913 (p.462)

Sir, - As your review of "The Road to Freedom" is a criticism of the Single Tax, with a direct attack on the bona-fides of Single Taxers, perhaps you will allow me a few words in reply. While it is always useful to scrutinise carefully the motives of a party who bring forward a measure, the measure, nevertheless, stands on its own legs as a step towards justice or the reverse; in other words, the thing advocated has nothing whatever lo do with the advocate.

Who. for example, would delay the abolition of slavery (industrial or chattel) because it happened to be brought forward by a man or a party who were not always just in their dealings with their fellow-man?

The first effect of the Single Tax is seen in the answer to the question: What is the difference in position between a tenant who pays the economic rent of his holding to a landlord, who in turn hands it over to the State, and a landlord who pays the economic rent of his estate to the State? Answer: There is no difference.

The second effect is seen if we ash how the landlord is to pay the economic rent unless he works the land to the full. He is now merely a tenant of the State, and no tenant can afford to keep any but a very small fraction of his land idle - i.e., he must, like all other tenants, work his land to the full, it necessary getting others to help him. Should he be unable to get sufficient help, he will be laced with a forced sale, which will reduce the selling price to the vanishing point. Now, the worker has no interest in the selling price of land, but he must have the use of land or perish. He can now get the use of land on condition that he pays the economic rent to the State, which is all that is necessary to ensure that each man will get the full product of his own labour and that the community will get the reward of their communal labour, which is the economic rent or Single Tax.

In conclusion, the Single Taxers have a definite programme mapped out, and have now got in Australia and Canada small instalments of their reform actually carried out, often in the teeth of the opposition of capitalists and landlords. Here, in this country, we have strenuous opposition from manufacturers, landowners, and Socialists.

The workers are eagerly looking for light and lending. You have admitted that "land monopoly is the root of all evil." It is now up to the Socialists to formulate a definite programme and policy, with the means or method of carrying it out, with which they can appeal to the people for their judgment and support. Let them fail in this, and they fail to justify their existence as reformers. The time for ideals is past. What we want is something done.

THE SINGLE TAX

A.E.R. / 20 March 1913 (p.487)

Sir, - Mr. Fairley's letter has puzzled me. He tells me that, "while it is always useful to scrutinise carefully the motives of a party who bring forward a measure, the measure, nevertheless, stands on its own legs as a step towards justice or the reverse; in other words, the thing advocated has nothing whatever to do with the advocate." This is an astounding affirmation, so far as politics is concerned; for we know that the clearest and most determinate principle means different things to different people. The recent case of insurance against sickness is an example. Most doctors would hold that you could only insure people against sickness by keeping them in good health, and would argue that any scheme that made provision for perfunctory medical treatment of disease or disability was not really insurance. The mass of insured people would argue that any scheme that reduced their income during health to provide them with a still smaller income during sickness was not an insurance against sickness in any intelligible sense of the word. To Mr. Lloyd George, insurance against sickness means "nine-pence for fourpence," and a whole host of unimaginable and unrealisable blessings for the people. If "the thing advocated has nothing whatever to do with the advocate," considering the changeling nature of political propaganda and its results, I can only demand that each new advocate shall "table his Bill" before I pretend to know what he advocates.

Certainly, in the else of the Single Tax, some such precaution is needed, for it is argued both by Henry George and the Socialists that private property in land is the root of all our trouble. But the Single Tax, proposed by Henry George, would not abolish private property in land; the landlord would still be the landlord, and the user of the land would still have to bear all charges, including the Single Tax, laid on the land. That, I think, was sufficiently demonstrated by the passages I quoted from Flurscheim. But I am now asked; "What is the difference in position between a tenant who pays the economic rent of his holding to a landlord, who, in turn, hands it over to the State, and a landlord who pays the economic rent of his estate to the State?"; and I am told that there is no difference whatever. There is one important and fundamental difference between the two propositions, for the alternative assumes that Socialism has been established and that the land has been nationalised. As a matter of fact, neither of these things has happened in England, nor are they contemplated by the advocates of the Single Tax. The Single Tax is not proposed as a means to the abolition of private property in land (the Socialist solution), hut as a means of abolishing monopoly rents, which hit shopkeepers and manufacturers rather hardly.

I am next told that the landlord cannot pay the economic rent (although the Single Tax is not economic rent) unless he works his land (o the full. I quoted Mr. Wedgwood to show that the landlord cares more for possession than for profit, and that the Single Tax would not make him relinquish possession. I quoted Flurscheim to show that even the economic rent of land could be paid by the landlord, and still the land need not be worked to the full. I have the more pleasure in quoting the following extract from the "Daily Chronicle," March 12, 1913, because Mr. Fairley tells me that, in Canada, the Single Taxers have got a small instalment of their reform actually in practice. The "Daily Chronicle" says: "The Duke of Sutherland is one of those British landlords who are buying great stretches of land in Canada. He is, however, also selling some of his estates in this country, and just recently Mr. J. W. Stewart, a wealthy Scotsman, who emigrated to Canada, has bought over 50,000 acres of the Duke's Sutherland shire estates. . . . Mr. Stewart is, of course, acquiring the Sutherlandshire estates more or less as a luxury, while the Duke is buying land in Canada as an investment." The italics are mine. Mr. Stewart evidently does not believe that the Single Tax will he imposed on his estates in Sutherland, and evidently docs not intend to work his land to the full, for he has acquired them "more or less as a luxury." On the other hand, the Duke of Sutherland actually finds that Canada, where the Single Tax is already in operation to some extent, is a more desirable place for investment in land than England. I think that I need not argue abstract economic questions when a fact of this importance is to hand.

Mr. Fairley tells me that "the worker has no interest in the selling price of land." Flurscheim, referring to the working of the Ashbourne Acts, quotes from the "Times," January 28, 1890: "One tenant bought the farm he cultivated at £550, and soon sold it, subject to the repayment of this sum", for 970 pounds. Another farm bought for 538 pounds was sold, subject to the purchase money, for £1,280. One which had fetched £755 was sold by the fortunate tenant who obtained possession of it through the new law, subject to the purchase money, for £1,725.'' It is clear that, unless private property in land is abolished, the worker may have a considerable interest in the selling price of land; and as the Single Tax will not abolish private ownership, and will only be burdensome to working farmers, it will be the worker, not the large landowner, who "will be faced with a forced sale, which will reduce the selling price of land to the vanishing point," at which price the people who want land more or less as a luxury will be pleased to buy.

I am told that "it is now up to the Socialists to formulate a definite programme and policy, with the means or the method of carrying it out, with which they can appeal to the people for their judgment and support." Programmes and policies belong to political parties, and there is no political Socialist Party in England; so that Mr Fairley's demand falls on air. If Mr. Fairley wants to know the Socialist solution of the problem, he can read the book, by Alfred Russell Wallace, or the publications of the English Land Nationalisation Society, or the chapter on Land in Michael Flurscheim's "Over-production and Want." He may also be recommended to read the series of articles on Guild-Socialism now appearing in THE NEW AGE. If he really wants something done, and that something to be beneficial, I can only advise him to restrain his impatience and study a subject before he accepts a solution; and if "the time for ideals is past," as he says, to remember that the Single Tax is only an ideal, that it is not practical politics, that, if it ever becomes so in England, it will leave the land in private possession, and will add nothing to the welfare of the people. For it is, or should be, clear that taxation (whether single or multiple) by a capitalistic State is simply the means whereby that State is maintained; and if one set of monopolists uses the State for the destruction of another set of monopolists, the result is that monopoly becomes more monopolistic; and if monopoly is the evil, the last state is worse than the first.

SINGLE TAX

M. Fairley / 10 April 1913 (p.564)

Sir, - I heartily agree with Mr. A.E.R. that "the clearest and most determinate principle means different things to different people," and on this account only I Should like to answer his letter, as his idea of the Single Tax and the idea that Single Taxers have of that measure Seem to differ.

We say that (1) the rental value (or the annual value of the land taken independently of all improvements) is being created day by day by the presence and activity of those who work and is created by nothing else; (2) that those people have the sole right to take this value and to Spend it on their communal needs.

Ask, therefore, everyone who says that he owns a piece of land to state what its rental value is and to pay to the State that rental value, whether that land is used or unused. This we maintain is just and equitable. Now the only reason that this measure is called the Single Tax is that it would be collected by the same machinery as taxes are collected. But you can call it "The taking for the community of the Rent of the Land," if that title is more pleasing.

I would like now to note one or two minor points in your correspondent's letter which I think should be cleared up. He says, "The Single Tax is not economic rent." Quite so, but, as explained above, the Single Tax will take the economic rent which is the rent of a piece of land whether used or not.

Re Canada, I should, apparently, have explained that only in certain districts do we find an instalment of the Single Tax in force. In the State of Alberta all towns and over fifty rural municipalities levy their local rates on land values, i.e., they take a portion of the rental value for the communal needs. In Saskatchewan, the position is about the same; British Columbia are introducing the principle on a small scale at present, but will probably follow the lead of Alberta. Australia would require a page to itself. These facts should, I think, be known to every social reformer and stock taken of the facts as the movement grows. I have not been able to find out whether the Duke of Sutherland's estates come under the influence of this measure; it would be of equal interest to know what be thinks of it. We know what the late Duke of Argyll thought of Henry George's proposal. He said: "If all owners of land, great and small, might be robbed, and ought to be robbed of that which society had from time immemorial allowed them and encouraged them to acquire and call their own; if the thousands of men, women and children who directly and indirectly live on rent ... are all equally to be ruined by the confiscation of the fund on which they depend - are there not other funds which would be all swept into the Same net of envy and of violence?" The Duke bad no doubt about the effect of the Single Tax.

One other point. From the official tax on New York City, which I have before me, the valuators separate the land value from the value of improvements (stone and lime, furniture, jewels, etc.), although no land value tax is levied so far. Now in that city the capital land value stands at 1,000 million pounds sterling, and is 62.6 per cent, of the whole, leaving 37.4 per cent, representing capital value of labour products. In the light of this, your correspondent's estimate of the total land value of Great Britain at 200 million pounds per annum seems rather small, for 200 by 20 years gives only 4,000 million pounds capital value, or four times only that of the city of New York.

Space forbids going into the enormous mineral land values of this country, which ought to pay their full economic rent to the community.


A.E.R. / 10 April 1913 (p.564)

A.E.R. replies: - Mr. Fairley tells me that the Single Tax is a tax on rental value up to its limit as declared; I knew that. Mr. Wedgwood told me the same thing. But in what way is this proposal superior to the proposal for taxing incomes up to their limit as declared? In what way is the Single Tax superior to any other tax pushed to its extreme? Why not tax bachelors up to the whole of their income; why not tax bicycles, or gramophones, or motor cars, or musical comedies, up to the limit of their declared value? Is it not obvious that bachelors would be less able to marry than they now are, and that motor cars, etc., would either be double their present price, or would not be produced at all? The bachelors, like the land, could not escape the tax, except by suicide: the land cannot even commit suicide. But if land is unused, how can it have a rental value? The imposition of the Single Tax on unused land is not impossible ; nothing is impossible to vindictive people; but it would be absolutely unproductive of revenue. It is an axiom in a Free Trade country that we tax for revenue, and as unused land can yield up revenue, the Exchequer will not be replenished from this source. It a value is given to unused land by a Government vainer, and a tax levied on that value, then it is obvious that we are not taxing for revenue, but for some punitive purpose. If the idea is to force this land into use, then it may well be defeated by that passion for possession which Mr. Wedgwood mentioned, and which Alfred Russell Wallace has declared to be the characteristic of rich people. If the land is forced into use, is it not obvious that the user will pay the tax? If, at the present time, with a 50 per cent, remission on agricultural land, the farmer cannot get a living in this country, how much will agriculture be improved when the land has to bear all the Charges of the State? I do not deny, I never have denied, that the Single Tax is a fiscal proposal, and can be imposed like any other tax; what I deny is that its results will abolish the evils of land monopoly. Mr. Wedgwood argued that the Single Tax would improve agriculture, stop the harmful growth of industrialism, raise wages, and free the workers from all monopolists. I have given my reasons for supposing that it will do nothing of the sort, that, on the contrary, at its best it will only simplify the incidence of taxation; at its worst, it will unify the monopolies of land and capital. If Mr. Fairley wants to ignore my arguments, he may; but he cannot expect me to continue the discussion. I do not intend to repeat what I have said; I cannot quote in your pages the whole of Flurscheim's arguments against the Single Tax, nor can 1 reprint the book by Alfred Russel Wallace. If Mr. Fairley will not read for himself: he must remain a Single-Taxer; I have nothing more to say to him.

SINGLE TAX AND PROFITEERING

Joseph Fels / 11 September 1913 (p.582)

Sir, - Your Open Letter addressed to the Trades Union Congress emphasises the importance of the figures provided by the recent Board of Trade inquiry into working-class rents and retail prices. You conclude that, because prices have advanced 13.7 per cent., while rents of dwellings have advanced only 1.8 per cent., therefore the real enemy is what you call the "profiteer" and not the landlord.

If you claim that the Board of Trade inquiry proves the absolute gain to the landlords to have been only 1.8 per cent., and that "manufacturers are extorting more than landlords" out of the workers, I think you arrive swiftly at most absurd conclusions. For what you say regarding the difference between money wages and "real" wages must be true also of money profits and rents and "real" profits and rents. In each case the " real " income is not the money received, but the goods that can be purchased with such money.

The Board of Trade inquiry includes the prices of beef, mutton, pork, tea, sugar, bacon, cheese, butter, potatoes, flour, bread, milk, and coal. These goods are purchased not only by the money received by the wage earner. They are also purchased by the money received by the landlord and by the money received by the " profiteer."

Now, if you contend that the landlord-robber has succeeded in increasing his extortion by only 1.8 per cent., despite Single Tax accusations of "rapacity," his gain must likewise be offset by the rise in prices. With his rent increased by 1.8 per cent., he has to pay 13.7 per cent, more for all the goods I have enumerated above, and on the average his " real " rent has actually diminished, just as "real " wages have diminished.

Applying this same strange argument of yours to the case of the " profiteer," it is apparent his benefit has been more imaginary than real. He has had to pay increased money wages varying from 1.9 per cent, for skilled builders to 4.1 per cent, for compositors. But he does not sell all the goods catalogued in the Board of Trade inquiry. Many "profiteers" sell none of them. At the best, the "profiteer " sells only a few, and for these he receives prices increased by 13.7 per cent., but he has to purchase all the rest and pay 13.7 per cent, more for them. Therefore, on your own showing, and making the same use as you do of the Board of Trade figures, his "real" profits have been considerably diminished. One "profiteer" has blackmailed and robbed another, and your contention that either landowner or "profiteer" has been enriched is flatly denied.

It should occur to you that there is a fallacy in considering that the rent paid by wage-earners for house room, after receiving their wages, is the only payment landlords extort from them and from the results of their labour. Yet that is the basis of your whole argument, and it is your reason for rejecting the assurances of the "satellites of the manufacturing employer" that the cause of the increased cost of living is landlordism.

Yon define wages as "the price paid in the competitive market for labour as a commodity." This is not a definition, for it does not include the considerable number of workers whose earnings are no greater than those of "factory hands" and who are not in the pay of any employer. But however wages may be defined, there is no disputing the fact that they are that part of the total wealth produced from year to year which is received by wealth producers, whether in the pay of employers or not. True, they are only a small part, and the distribution of wealth is unequal and unjust; but who gets the balance not received by wage-earners? You will not maintain it is all collared in " profits" by the so-called "profiteer." You yourself distinguish, when pointing the finger of scorn at the "Single Taxer," between the "profiteer" and the landlord, although in other parts of your Open Letter the distinction between the owner of plant, machinery, and buildings, and the owner of land is more obscure. You will not maintain that the landowner gets no part of the surplus which is not received by wage-earners, for you must grant that a large part of this surplus is secured by landowners as tribute for the permission to use the earth.

No "profiteer" has yet been able to exploit a landowner. It is the landowner who exploits the "profiteer," and he can screw up his tribute to the highest point any industry can bear by keeping his hold on the monopoly of land, and allowing only some sites and some areas to be used.

It is after the landowner has received this tribute, after rates and taxes have been paid for the sin of erecting buildings or installing machinery, after every effort is made to pass on these burdens to the consumer, that wages are paid. The produce of the factory, mine, or farm must provide the incomes of all and the revenue of the State. The community as a whole is robbed by the landowner, even though the so-called "profiteer" acts as go-between and pays the rent.

If by "profiteer" you mean anyone and everyone who employs a fellow-being, your quarrel cannot be with the "profiteer" as such. For great numbers of employers are scarcely better off than those whom they employ. They live from hand to mouth, have no special privileges, no monopoly, and no patent rights. Your quarrel manifestly is with a particular kind of "profiteer," especially the " great employing manufacturer "or the "large capitalist," who can generally afford to look on while other men do the work. The vice of the argument is that you do not distinguish among the "profiteers" who own (a) only buildings, plant, or machinery, (b) only land, (c) both land and buildings, plant or machinery. Most "large capitalists" belong to the third class. Part of their assets consists in land and a corresponding part of their profits is pure rent of land. Cement firms and salt firms, for instance, generally take good care to own the deposits of raw material upon which their industry is based, while landless labourers, deprived of all rights to these or any other natural resources, beg at the factory gates for the privilege of a job.

You quite rightly insist upon the great increase in the production of wealth, which is, as you state, proved by every test; but I repeat, you have to point the moral by showing who has pocketed the increase. You cannot use the term "profiteer," for it is abundantly clear that this term is a confusion. The balance, except for what is paid strictly in salaries and such peculiar payments as patent royalties, has been divided between interest and rent -interest upon stock-in-trade, buildings, plant, and machinery, and rent of land. But as stock-in-trade, buildings, plant, and machinery are being constantly reproduced, and as the owners of these things are constantly competing with one another, they cannot claim anything but the market rate of interest.

But land is not reproduced. It is limited absolutely in area. It is the essential condition of all existence. Its owners charge tribute for its use without giving anything whatever in return, or pocket a large part of the produce as rent and call it profits on their "investment." The more that can be produced on land, the greater is the tribute, so long as the monopoly is maintained - and repeated illustrations prove to the hilt how effectively both the dreadful "capitalist" and the common labourer can be "exploited" in this way.

The increased production has gone in rent. But you would disguise this fact with obvious confusions in terms. You would practise deception in trying to persuade the workers, on the authority of a Blue Book that proves nothing of the kind, that the landlord receives nothing but the few shillings a week paid by each wage earner for house room. When yon discuss your final proposals for abolishing the "bondage of wagery," you sink the landlord out of sight and advocate "a reasonable annuity for two generations to the owners of plant and machinery." Are your readers to gather that a "reasonable annuity" is also your method of dispensing compensation to landowners? If not, what do you propose to do in regard to the rent now paid for laud, and also in regard to the value of land for which no rent is paid because it is held out of use?

There are several considerations in regard to labour and wages I wish you to look at. Firstly, labourers are employed by other labourers. The producer of boots is employed by the wearer of boots, who in return produces bread or furniture or clothes. If producers of bread are prevented from producing, there is correspondingly less employment for the makers of boots and vice versa. The real employer of the bus driver is not the bus company, but the people who ride in buses. Every employed man makes a demand for the goods produced or services provided by other employed men.

Secondly, the general level of wages can never be more than the earnings men can get in the least productive occupation or on the least productive land. The condition of the man on the "margin," as both Mr. Shaw and Mr. Webb have shown, determines the condition of men in all other employments. The wage-earner will get the same wages whether he is employed by the greatest capitalistic concern or by the humblest and most self-sacrificing shopkeeper in a back street. So that, although wages are "a price paid for a commodity," they are not less than what wage earners can get in the least productive employment.

Thirdly, labourers, as you say, are too plentiful. But plentiful in relation to what? Certainly not in relation to the fund in the possession of the "profiteer," which is apparently your meaning - an implicit statement of the wage fund theory that wages are determined by the amount of capital that could be devoted to the employment of labourers. In obedience to that theory, you would "capture" all capital for the guilds, and thus make labour the master of the situation. But the theory was blown sky-high thirty years ago by Henry George, who demonstrated that wages are determined by the number of labourers seeking employment in relation to the number of available natural opportunities open to labour. It is only if these natural opportunities are scarce that labour will be "plentiful" and will find difficulty in securing employment. And as everyone has an equal right to the use of natural opportunities, the proper course is to destroy monopoly in them by obliging every holder to pay their annual value to the rest of the community.

That means the taxation and rating of land values, for every "natural opportunity" is laud in some form or other, whether it is the site of a house, an area suitable for a farm, coal deposits, slate quarries, or river water. The value of land represents the wealth which belongs to the community as a whole, and in appropriating it for the community we would not only "pool" this wealth, but we would force monopolists to let go the land they hold out of use, and thus multiply the available natural opportunities. It is only by giving each man an equal right "margin," all the surplus wealth which is produced on superior sites and soils being pooled for common benefit. In other words, there are more labourers to-day than there are opportunities for employment. The taxation of land values would, we insist, annex the wealth that belongs to all, expel the land speculator, and open to labour the limitless opportunities in town and country which Nature provides. This would make opportunities more plentiful than labourers, and raise wages, just as existing conditions of monopoly in these opportunities restrict employment and force wages to subsistence level with each labourer's effective demand for goods correspondingly curtailed.


Editors / 11 September 1913 (p.581-582)

[We willingly reply in some detail to this letter, although we know that Mr. Fels is a fanatic upon the subject. We will, however, assume that he is amenable to reason.]

It is primarily necessary to impress upon Mr. Fels the fact, well known to our regular readers, that we have no more feeling of sympathy for the landlords than for the profiteers. Both in their own way (which in the final analysis is very much the same' way) exploit labour. Mr. Fels complains that our distinction between rent and interest tends to become obscure. It is not for us to draw fine distinctions between the two. As a Single Taxer, Mr. Fels is penetrated with the belief that there are fundamental distinctions between the functions of the profiteering and land-owning classes. We do not deny that a profiteer, functioning as an administrator, differs in economic significance from a landlord who lives solely upon rent. But it is the same distinction on the other foot when we have a landlord functioning as an administrator compared with a profiteer who lives solely upon profits. The effects of the exploitation of labour by landlord and profiteer are precisely the same, so far as the wage slave is concerned. The French with logical clearness decline to make the distinction. A "rentier " draws his income from "rentes," precisely as he draws it from rent. Mr. Fels, not being a regular reader of THE NEW AGE (a moral lapse which we trust he will rectify), assumes that our whole attack is upon the profiteer. Accordingly he asks whether we are prepared to mete out the same justice to landlords as to profiteers when we advocate "a reasonable annuity for two generations." Of course we are. It shocks us to discover that Mr. Fels should have any doubt about it. But in the struggle to abolish wagery (the continuance of which Mr. Fels complacently accepts) we have deemed it wise to preserve a sense of proportion. If the profiteers exploit labour to a greater extent than do the landlords, then palpably the profiteer is the more serious enemy of the two. That was the point of our remark that drew this reply from Mr. Fels, who believes that the imposition of a single tax upon the land values "would annex the wealth that belongs to all, expel the land speculator, and open to labour the limitless opportunities in town and country which Nature provides. This would make opportunities more plentiful than labourers and raise wages." Mr. Fels, in short, invites us to leave the profiteer alone and concentrate our attack upon the landlord. But he admits that, after the Single Tax had done its deadly work, the wage system would continue. As the wage system is equally fundamental to the existence of both landlord and profiteer, and as we desire the destruction of wagery, we are not so foolish as to make flesh of the profiteer and fowl of the landlord. Both separately and in alliance they exploit labour by maintaining the wage system. So far as Mr. Fels believes in the continuance of wagery, he writes himself down an enemy of labour, and so clouds with suspicion his personally well-intentioned attack upon the landlords. We are therefore fully justified in warning the trade unionists against his particular propaganda. His letter completely proves the wisdom of our remark. Mr. Fels can only come into court with clean hands when he frankly accepts the justice and policy of wage abolition.

Before touching upon some of the details in his letter, we must remind Mr. Fels that the new conception of society from which wages are eliminated necessarily transforms the meaning of many economic terms. For example, to the wage earner, rent, interest, and profits connote the economic power which the possessing classes exercise upon the proletariat. The deduction (adumbrated by Ricardo) is this : rent is in reality the economic power that one man or class exercises upon another. Thus a man with £100 in gold at the bank rents it out for £5 perr annum. Another man with land valued at £100 rents it out at £5 per annum. The economic effect is precisely the same in both instances. Both, in fact, exact rent. The Single Taxers seem to think that the £5 exacted in the form of interest smells differently from the £5 exacted as rent. Our sense of smell, aided by reason and instinct, rejects any such theory. And in abstract justice we cannot morally distinguish between the two transactions.

There are some statements of fact in Mr. Fels' letter that call for comment. He quite rightly points out that the increase in rent of 1.8 per cent, must be offset by the advance in prices of 13.7 per cent. Therefore "real" rent has diminished. We believe this to be absolutely the fact, but how it helps Mr. Fels we are at a loss to understand. The landlord, certainly in all large transactions, rents his land on lease. If the cost of living advances, he cannot raise his rent. But the profiteer can, in association with his commercial colleagues, raise his prices once a month or once a year. To him it is largely a question of associated effort. If, then, "real" rents have actually diminished and "real" wages have fallen, somebody has run off with the plunder. We assert that it is the profiteers, whose income as a class has steadily risen in recent years up to 22% per cent. Granting the 13.7 per cent, advance in the cost of living, this gives the profiteering class a net advance of 9 per cent., which is precisely the percentage of the fall in real wages. Why, then, should we point our guns only at the landlords, when obviously the profiteers have the heaviest artillery? Mr. Fels cries mercy for the profiteers because they apparently blackmail and rob each other. No doubt they do; but profiteers of every denomination, in happy unity with the landlords, are all agreed that they must maintain the wage system so that they may exploit labour. Mr. Fels is in that galley. If we can sink it, he, too, will go down. At the Judgment Day he will get short shrift if he contends that we ought first to have sunk some other galley in the same fleet.

The truth, however, is that Mr. Fels does not know the true meaning of wages. He rejects one definition because "it does not include the considerable number of workers whose earnings are no greater than those of 'factory hands' and who are not in the pay of any employer." The simple answer, of course, is that they do not receive wages - the small shopkeeper, for example. But it is not our definition; it is the classical definition from Adam Smith to Marx. The term "wage" has a distinct and well-understood meaning, and Mr. Fels must accept it if he would publicly discuss any subject in which the wage system is included.

It is this inability on the part of Mr. Fels to appreciate the exact meaning of wages that leads him into another extraordinary blunder. He quite truly asserts that many profiteers are scarcely better off than those they employ. Therefore, he argues, "your quarrel manifestly is with a particular kind of profiteer, especially the great employing manufacturer or the large capitalist." Nothing we have written gives Mr. Fels any sanction for such a statement. Our quarrel is not with the individual profiteers, whether great or small, but with the system. The system permits every class and kind and degree of profiteer to buy labour as a commodity at a competitive price finally based on the subsistence level. Between the price paid for the labour commodity plus the price of the other raw material and the selling price of the finished product, landlord and profiteer are provided for. We tell the wage earner so to organize that he shall possess a monopoly of labour power, then to decline to sell his labour as a commodity and at all costs to retain his right (i.e., his economic power) in the product created by his labour. By organising himself into appropriate guilds he can thereby squeeze out rent, interest, and profits. In this squeezing-out process, both landlords and profiteers will be heard squealing. Which squeals first is only of academic interest to us. The purchase of labour as a commodity for exploitation is a sin and an abomination, not to be distinguished from chattel slavery. The Single Taxers do not appear to realise this, and are accordingly guilty of moral obtuseness.

Mr. Fels, for some reason we cannot grasp, next remarks that we implicitly accept the wage-fund theory. As Marx smashed the wage-fund theory a generation ago, and as our definition of wages has literally nothing whatever to do with this dead theory, and as, incidentally, we killed the theory ourselves in our series on the Wage-System, we appeal to Mr. Fels to believe that we are not utter ignoramuses. We solemnly assure him that Jeremy Bentham was dead before we were born.

The exact politico-economic situation that would be created by the successful imposition of the single-tax would be simply this: the profiteers would possess their present economic power plus the security of tenure they would obtain from State-rented land. As economic power precedes political power, they would be enabled to reduce or increase rents precisely as it suited their purposes. Rent, in the ordinary acceptation of the word to the profiteer, is a subsidiary, indeed almost a. negligible consideration. Mr. Fels thinks land would become so accessible to labour that the labourer would find available "natural opportunities," and so be able to secure higher wages. He bases this conclusion, so far as we can gather, on the assumption that whereas "buildings, plant, and machinery are being constantly reproduced" (therefore requiring large command of capital) "land is not reproduced." Therefore the ordinary capitalistic processes do not operate in agriculture, and accordingly, free access to the land spells freedom from capitalistic oppression. As a matter of fact, so long as wagery is the foundation of our industrial system, capitalistic processes are as necessary to agriculture as to industry. Economically considered land does reproduce itself. If it does not, how does it "run down"? If it does not, why the necessity for periodic fallow? If it does not, why have 250,000 farmers left the Middle West and migrated to Canada? Has Mr. Fels ever heard of manure? We are really forced to the conclusion that when the single-taxers discuss land they are all as mad as March hare.

Single Tax

Joseph Fels / 25 September 1913 p.643)

Sir, - Your long reply to my letter appearing in THE NEW AGE of September 11 is decidedly an invitation and an inducement to continue the discussion, always remembering I am a "fanatic" on the subject of taxing land values, and hardly deserving to be thought amenable to reason. I dare say there are readers of THE NEW AGE who would look on it as a useful publication if it were not so dreadfully fanatical on the subject of Guild Socialism, and probably Free Traders, Tariff Reformers, Conscriptionists, and Home Rulers would make more headway if they did not allow their fanaticism to be such a sad handicap. A charge of fanaticism is the unwilling tribute to sincerity forced from opponents who have a preference for the ad hominem methods of argument.

But the madness of March hares is scarcely more deplorable than the want of intelligence which persists in arguing the land question as if it dealt only with agriculture. Worse follies are committed in assuming that the value attributable to the expenditure of latiour or capital is what the Single Taxer means by "land value." It is a puerile question to ask me if I have ever "heard of manure." Does the value of land in London depend upon "manuring" or the "rotation of crops." Is the "periodic fallow" necessary to prevent the value of a building site, or of land containing coal, or of the Penrhyn quarries, from "running down"?

It would appear that in your effort to coin new terms for the "new conception of society" the "land" upon which towns are built is not "land" economically considered, but you have some other phrase up your sleeve which suits better the "new conception." It is a subtle way of trying to disguise the fact that the taxation of land values applies to all land having a value, whether in town or country, and that the main evil it proposes to deal with is the holding out of use of any kind of land at a monopoly price.

As you confess that the "fine distinction between rent and interest" does not concern you, I can understand your disinclination to make a distinction between the natural element of land and the products which are the result of applying human labour to land. But no blindness on your part can shut other people's eyes to the fact that access to" land is the first condition of all existence. No one can get employment unless he uses land. Builders will be out of employment if building land is withheld from use, or if the owners demand an excessive price. Farmers, smallholders, ironworkers, quarrymen, coal-miners are all in the same position. They are all dependent on the landowner's idea of what they should pay for the use of his land.

Some examples will show what I mean. In Hampshire, strawberry-growing was undertaken on furze land previously let at 1s. 6d. per acre. The venture has proved a success - to the landowner - for rents have risen as high as £5 and £6 10s. an acre, and new-comers find land held out of use at this price. They are denied employment, and are not permitted to subject themselves to the tyranny of the "system of wagery." Monopoly stands in their way; although there are "March hares" in our midst who think otherwise, and tell us in pompous fashion that, "economically speaking, land has to be reproduced," and that manuring and rotation of crops has a powerful influence upon its value!

For forty years lead mines in Derbyshire, which at one time furnished employment for 10,000 to 15,000 men have been shut down. They have had their price all the time, but it has been too high even for the "profiteers," who have been denied an excellent opportunity of "exploiting labour," while lead has been kept high in price and possible load-workers have been forced to compete elsewhere for a job.

In London there are 13,600 acres of valuable land which owners will not allow to be used, offering permanent employment for years to builders, plasterers, glaziers, stonemasons, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, cabinetmakers, etc., etc. All these men are asked to "make a monopoly of their liilmur," form "guilds," and buy with their own money the existing buildings and all land, used and unused alike. This is the alleged road to their emancipation, because, forsooth, the value of land is due to the "periodic fallow " and the use of manures!

The State has set up a scheme of buying land for smallholdings, and it has broken down. "Why? Because a price has to be paid out of all proportion to the rateable value of the land. A few experiences like that of the Surrey County Council, which was asked to pay 200 pounds for land rated at 1 pound per annum, have been sufficient, and the smallholders, whose earnings are not "wages," according to your "new conception," but Heaven alone knows what (for they lire neither interest nor rent), have to suffer the additional robbery of added rates and added taxes for putting land to a better and more productive use.

A return recently issued by the Local Government Board (White Paper 119) shows that in 1,076 boroughs and urban districts in England and Wales 2,533,035 acres of so-called "agricultural land" paid only £.400,689 in local rates, while the remainder of the total area, 1,351,104 acres (being the built on and used land), actually paid £35,028,612 in local rates. This official document shows in the most startling fashion how the use of land is penalised, how every shop, house, and factory is furiously taxed, while the speculators in so-called "agricultural land" within urban boundaries, which has a market value far in excess of its rateable value, are encouraged to hold land out of use. One only stultifies himself by ignoring the relation of the unjust incidence of taxation to unemployment, overcrowding, bad housing, and low wages; and the opponent of the taxation of land values can scarcely hope to gain credit by throwing the abuse at its advocates, which you are so prone to do.

With all respect, you do not propose to squeeze out "rent, interest, and profits" by organising labour as a monopoly. You propose to squeeze out "rent, interest, and profits" by granting a "reasonable annuity for two generations" to the existing owners of land and capital. That is to be your method of transferring property from one set of owners to another set of owners. The formation of guilds is merely the chosen method of controlling the wealth after it is transferred. The financial proposals are worth a warning. You will use the proceeds of taxation, or mortgage somehow the earnings of the producers of wealth, in order to perpetuate for sixty years the confiscation landowners now carry on, without taking any part whatever in production. Indeed, you would give them a considerably larger share of the nation's wealth than they now get, for you would have to treat all landowners alike and give annuities in return for the value of unused land as well as for the value of used land. Your "annuities" would be a doubly greater burden on the community than is the landowners rent to-day, and all the time they are being paid you would have to meet the cost of national and local taxation, which I assume would he exacted as it is to-day, with possibly a stiff income tax on the "reasonable annuities" you have already granted to landowners and capitalists! Before you dwell on the guilds it would be well if you would explain further all these financial proposals and say where the money is to come from. It would help your readers also to explain at what point, if any, the purchase of buildings, plant, and machinery would cease. It must be somewhere between the Great Northern Railway Station and the coster's harrow or my typewriter. And from some given date the making of new barrows and the building of houses by the mere individual must be interdicted.

It is not true that I invite you to leave the "profiteer" alone. I want to make it impossible for one man to live at the expense of another, and that can only be done by ranking every man free to take his sustenance from nature without paying another man for the privilege. As I mean by "wages" the return to labour, as distinguished from "rent," which is the return to land, and "interest," which is the return to capital, I look on any talk of "wage abolition" as perfectly absurd, for the earnings of labour are the "wages" of Labour, whether the labouring man works under an employer or not. If you will not accept this definition of a term, you will have to invent one to describe the earnings of independent fishermen, hunters, gold-diggers, match-sellers, smallholders, small shopkeepers, and great numbers of people who work on their own account, and who are neither "interest mongers," nor "profit mongers," nor "rent mongers."

The so-called "system of wagery" is a system of low wages and hard work to hoot. But the "profiteer" is not to blame. He does not force the workers to accept low wages. The workers force him by their own competition to pav the wages they could gain outside the factory or workshop, and these wages are not determined bv "subsistence level." They are and always will be determined by the produce any man can obtain on the least productive land available to him without payment of rent. They have reached subsistence level because in this and other fully monopolised countries there is no land available without payment of rent. It is all owned by someone or other, and the terms demanded by the owners are such as to take from the producer all save enough to allow him to live and reproduce his species. In fact, the greater part of land is withheld from use in order to create an artificial rent on the rest. To raise wages far beyond the subsistence level it is only necessary to force into use the limitless natural resources now withheld, and provide conditions in which the least productive land to which men need resort will give a high return to labour without payment of rent. That is not to say rent would be abolished, for all land above the least productive point would still command a rent - only the rent would belong to the community as a whole in public services, with all other taxation abolished. This is the Single Tax case, and any partial instalment of this liberating policy by placing some taxation on all land values would have corresponding effects.

To return to my illustrations, you would give "annuities" to those who prevent production on strawberry land, lead mines, small holdings, and town land, and you treat almost with flippancy the serious effects of rating and taxing all the improvements these would-be producers would make. I would tax and rate the value of all the land, and rigidly exempt the improvements from rates and taxes, and I leave you and your readers to judge whether under this plan "profiteers" would continue in the possession of their present economic power and would be "enabled to reduce or increase rents precisely as it suited their purpose."

In commending the taxation of land values I have only one more remark to make. The reason why 250,000 farmers have left the Middle West for Western Canada is largely the new taxation policy adopted in Western Canada, under which no improvements are taxed, but land value alone is assessed. The Press, both in the Middle West and in Canada has recognised this fact, and there are few rural or urban authorities in Alberta and Saskatchewan which are not advertising the virtues of the Single Tax system as an attraction to all new-comers.


Editors / 25 September 1913 (p.643)

We can deal with only a very few of the misapprehensions and fallacies contained in Mr. Fels' communication. That he has not yet done us the honour of reading our articles on the National Guilds is obvious from his further misrepresentations of our case. For example, we have never suggested that the Guilds should buy with their own money the land and buildings necessary in their industry. A new partner in a firm is not always required to buy shares; his indispensability is often enough a sufficient warrant. Similarly, the indispensability of a union with a monopoly of its labour would, in our opinion, be sufficient warrant without purchase of shares for its inclusion among the partners of its industry. The most serious, however, of Mr. Fels' misconceptions relates to the nature of wages. Wages, with him, is so broad a term as to include the income of a smallholder or small shopkeeper working by himself and on his own account. Needless to say, that is not the sense in which wages is employed by anybody but Mr. Fels. In another part of his letter, however, this conception is tacitly dropped, and we are presented with the definition of wages as the residue after rent, interest, and profits have been subtracted from the total product. If this definition were true, Mr. Fels' notion that by confiscating rent to the elimination of other taxation employers and money-lenders would leave more to the account of wages, would also be true. We saw, indeed, that he promises higher wages as a result of the nationalisation of rent. But wages are not a residue after other charges upon industry have been met; they are the cost of the raw material called labour. And this cost is roughly equal to the cost of the production of labour - that is, to the subsistence level of the proletariat. Does Mr. Fels think that, if a job-master suddenly discovered a method of getting his cabs for nothing, his horses would obtain a stable and golden harness apiece? As certainly as the "wages" of his horses are fixed by the cost of their efficient keep, the wages of the men he employs are fixed by the same formula. And this would remain unchanged, though, as we say, the employer were relieved of taxation altogether.

The nature of rent is similarly a subject of gross error in Mr. Fels' peculiar economics. Economically considered, rent is simply a device for putting all capitalists in their race for profits on scratch; it is a perfectly fair handicap under the prevailing system of profiteering. Mr. Fels admits this himself by stating that, even if the land were owned by the nation, rent would still have to he paid. What becomes of free access to the land and the idyllic picture of men taking their sustenance from nature if, before using the land, they must promise to give the State the excess of their product over that of the worst land in cultivation? We really do not see that the individual is any better off for being robbed of the fruits of his labour by the many constituting the State rather than by the few or one landowner to whom he now pays the same amount. "Oh, but," Mr. Fels will say, "he is thereby relieved of any other tax! The proceeds from rent will enable the State to abolish any other form of taxation." Supposing it does, how much better off will the wage-earners (the proletariat) be? At present the taxes they pay are practically nothing whatever. Almost every penny contributed by them to the State is returned to them in State doles of one kind or another. The concentration of taxation upon rent rather than upon interest or profits is therefore nothing to them save the transfer of money from one of their master's pockets to another. "But would they not," Mr. Fels will ask, "find the land made accessible to them?" Why should they? The rent is the same as before, though paid to Peter instead of Paul; and at the entrance to their plot there still stands the grim figure of Capital. Mr. Fels surely would not argue that capital would become less indispensable to the employment of land if rent were nationalised? On the contrary, capital would be no less necessary than it is to-day. In other words, with all the free access to land (at a rent, mark you), the existing proletariat would still be barred from its effective use unless they could raise - that is, pay interest on - the capital necessary. Why, we know, and probably Mr. Fels knows too, of plenty of land that can be had for no rent whatever --good land, too! The only obstacle to its use by the proletariat is the provision of capital. But that obstacle, if it exists, and is insurmountable when no other rent is charged, would obviously remain when the preliminary fence of a rent was also to be negotiated. In short, interest and profits would still bar the free access to land, even if rent were paid to the State instead of to the private owner.

We will not leave the subject without a solution, however, though we have discussed it many times before. In our proposals for the establishment of National Guilds, the factors of rent, interest, and profits are all three abolished, together with wages. Production for profit (or profiteering), which is the present system of industry, implies the existence of two classes - a class that owns land and tools and a class that owns nothing. The exploitation of the latter by the former, the payment of subsistence wages to the proletariat in return for all the product of their labour operating on land with tools, is the wage system. To abolish the class of the proletariat is ipso facto to abolish the robbery of his class by the profiteer. If he will not work for wages, there can be no rent interest, or profits for his present employers. They, it is true, possess the land and the tools; but without his labour these are useless. Hence our conclusion that, if Labour obtains a monopoly of its skill, it can "squeeze out" and take to itself all that is now called rent, interest, and profits. Not the taxation, therefore, of rent or interest or profits; no relief or raising of wages; but the abolition of the wage system, on which all four depend.


Joseph Finn / 25 September 1913 (p.644)

Sir, - Permit me to make some comments on Mr. Fels' letter (September 11) and on your reply thereto. You both agree that the increase of 13.7 per cent, on certain articles of food has reduced not only the actual wages of the workers, bat even the income of the whole capitalistic class. I should like to know whether or not there is some section of the capitalistic class which gains the 13.7 per cent, advance on those food-stuffs. Can a company sit down to play cards and all lose? If the increase of the 13.7 per cent, had been caused by a natural or industrial increase in the necessary labour to produce those articles; if the soil had suddenly become less fertile, cows yielding less milk; tools and machinery become less workable and labour less productive, then I could imagine how the whole of society can be the loser. But, as the above has not been proved, how is it possible for all sections of society to lose by an advance in the prices of certain articles? Surely there must be some section which pockets the advance.

Again, you and Mr. Fels seem to agree that the profiteers' and the landlords' incomes are diminished exactly by the same amount as the enumerated articles of food have advanced. THE NEW AGE is even more definite on this point than Mr. Fels, because you actually reduce the average income of the profiteers from 22-1/2 per cent, to 9 per cent. I ask you, how is this possible? A working man who spends the whole of his wages on the necessaries of life does really lose in wages as much as he has to pay for the advanced articles because lie spends the whole of his income. But it is loose economic reasoning to say the same about profiteers and landlords. The Duke of Westminster, Lord Rothschild, and Mr. Fels do not spend all their income on bread, cheese, butter, tea, potatoes, and coal; hence the loss they sustain in the advanced prices of the above commodities is ridiculously small in proportion to their incomes. I will now leave you in peace, Mr. Editor, as I agree with most of your criticism on the Single Tax idea. Would Mr. Fels be good enough to enlighten me on this point: When the Single Tax on the land has been imposed, and taxes on buildings, etc., abolished, what will there be to prevent the landowners making the tenant pay the tax on the land, as he is now made to pay all the rates and taxes on the buildings? Would the tenant pay the rates and taxes now if he could help himself? The trouble is that economic conditions compel him to submit lo the landlord's terms. Those economic conditions will not in the least be changed by the mere shifting of the taxes. There is nothing in the Single Tax to compel the present land monopolists to part with the land. They will feel the burden of the Single Tax as long as the old leases last, but when they will have expired the landlord will certainly make it the principal clause in the new leases that the tenant shall pay the Single Tax. So long as there are a hundred applicants for a shop, a site, or a farm, and only one landlord who owns that particular shop, site, or farm, so long will the landlord have the advantage. As the "monopoly" of all the principal industries is increasing, so in proportion are the chances of people to make a living by trade and commerce decreasing. Hence the competition for a suitable shop, factory, or farm must increase to the advantage of the landlords. Is it likely that the great lords, rich capitalists, and American millionaires who own parks and sporting land will sell their acres because they will not be able to pay the Single Tax? The trouble with Mr. Fels is that he believes more in Henry George than in himself. I, on the contrary, believe more in Mr. Fels' own idea about land reform than in Henry George. I remember listening to an address by Mr. Fels some years ago in connection with the establishment of an autonomous Jewish .State in Mesopotamia. He then spoke of the great advantage such a State would derive from being the owner of all the land. If I remember aright, he even promised to contribute half of his fortune to realise it. To take away the whole of the land from the private owners, at a reasonable price, and the State to become the landlord, letting small portions of it at low rents to all applicants -- that is the only right land reform. That reform was also advocated by the great Spinoza over three hundred years ago. Mr. Fels evidently believes that the Single Tax will be a step towards it. I am afraid that it will cause so much confusion that it will throw back the real solution of the land problem. I will just give one example: I am a shopkeeper, and pay about 80 pounds a year in rates and taxes. The owner of the land only receives £16 a year ground rent. If all the rates and taxes were shifted from my shop to the land, how would the landlord be able to pay £80 when be only receives £16?


Editors / 25 September 1913 (p.644)

Writing for ourselves, we readily agree that we were generous in allowing to Mr. Fels the pro rata reduction of real profits as a consequence of increased prices. The rise in the cost of living of the rich is, of course, relatively trifling, for the reasons given by Mr. Finn. The 13.7 per cent rise affects the whole expenditure of the working classes; it affects only a small part of the expenditure of the capitalist classes.

The Single Tax and the Guilds

Joseph Fels / 2 October 1913 (p.674)

Sir, -- I ask permission to trouble you once more with a few considerations beating on Guild Socialism and on the Taxation of Land Values, for I should be sorry to leave the discussion without clearing myself of the charge of misrepresentation. I wish to understand how you propose to transfer the ownership of land, buildings, plant, and machinery from those who now possess them, so that they shall cease to enjoy gratis any part of the wealth now being produced. The synopsis of your case was slated in your open letter to the Trades Union Congress, and, if anything said there conflicts with arguments or proposals in other articles I have not done you the "honour to read," I am not responsible. In your open letter you proposed "rough and ready justice" by way of recompense to the owners of plant and machinery, and said "our own proposal is to pay them a reasonable annuity for two generations." In reply to my letter in THE NEW AGE of September 11 you were "shocked to think " that I was not aware that you proposed also to give a "reasonable annuity to landowners."

I repeat now the question: "Where is the money to come from?" I said nothing to suggest you would expect the guilds to pay; but I contended, and again contend, that the annuities must be got from the proceeds of taxation or by mortgaging somehow the earnings of wealth producers for two generations. That is incontestable, and it is an astonishing method of "abolishing rent, interest, and profits" to disguise them under a new name, and make the "exploiters" annuitants instead of rent, interest, and profit mongers! That either means that the "exploiters" are to continue in receipt of their plunder, or it means they are to be deprived of their plunder without purchase. No wonder I am charged with "fallacies and misapprehensions" when I try to see clearly through, or to ask you to guide me through, such a maze of contradictions.

You do not assist your readers to see through my alleged fallacies, for in discussing wages you substitute a measure for a definition. Just as the statement that a "steamship is a thousand feet long," is no definition of a steamship, so it is no definition of wages to say that wages are "equal to the subsistence level of the proletariat." Wages are a given portion of wealth produced, and are the portion received by a man for having laboured as distinct from the "interest" received in virtue of the ownership of capital and the "rent" received in virtue of the ownership of land. You speak only of the employed class as receiving "wages," and therefore, as I have said, you must invent some economic term to describe the return received by those who work for themselves, whether they employ others or not. Suppose you invent the term "earnings," you are still left to explain why these "earnings" are so often as low as the "wages" paid to the employed class. You are thrown back on your own conception, not of the "new" order of things, but of present conditions, and you are bound to admit that the great majority of workers are employed by men who work as hard and often for as little as they get themselves. Such "employers" enjoy no "surplus value," and all the rhetoric about the wealth of the "employing class" or the exploitation by the "employing class" is quite ridiculous.

Not only "wages" (as you understand the term) but also the "earnings" of most people" who have to work for a living are at subsistence level. The results of labour are either stolen from them, or they are altogether prevented from producing by monopoly in land. As Karl Marx himself says the basis of the capitalistic system is the expropriation of labour from the land. The "wage slave" has no alternative but to work at subsistence level, for be knows his "earning" outside the factory or office could not be higher. If, however, it were possible for him to get high returns for his labour, without being robbed by someone with superior and indefensible privileges, he would not be content to work in a factory for less.

Karl Marx's quotation from Wakefield's "England and America" illustrates the point. It was the story of Mr. Peel, who took with him from England to Swan River, Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of 50,000 pounds. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him 3,000 persons of the working class - men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river. "Unhappy Mr. Peel," says Marx, "who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production was it that Mr. Peel had not exported to Swan River? He had exported 50,000 pounds worth of capital and 3,000 persons of the working class - men, women, and children. Why, then, did he not use his capital to exploit the labour of those working people as he might have done in England? There is only one answer, and it is conclusive. It was because those wage workers were now in the midst of free land. The one feature, the only feature of "English modes of production" which this Mr. Peel had not exported to Swan River, was land monopoly.

You contend that "the only obstacle to the use of land is the provision of capital." This is decidedly Greek to me. Capitalists to-day cannot get the use of land; smallholders backed with the public credit are denied independent living, and are driven into the hands of the farmer at 12s. a week; a firm like Cammmel, I.aird, and Co. were driven from Newport; builders at Wembley were shown the other road when they offered 32,000 pounds for land on which only £15 were paid in rates.

Rent, you say, is "simply a device." Two weeks ago you said rent was due to manuring and rotation of crops. Two weeks hence you may invent another view of rent, rather than accept the perfectly clear fact that one piece of land naturally gives a greater return to labour and capital than another piece of land, and the difference is rent. This difference can he magnified to the utmost possible limit by withholding land from use, and exorbitant rent is the result. It is absurd to deny that the taxation and rating of land values will force land into use, and, doing so, will provide much land that can he had free of rent, where "earnings" will not be the "cost of labour," but the full produce of labour. For all land above this margin fair rent will be paid, strictly determined by the surplus produce obtained, but that rent will go to the community and not to the landowner.

To Mr. Joseph Finn I have only the reply to make that I do not propose to "tax land." I propose to tax land value whether the land is used or not. At present the landowners tax land values and take the rent, but only allow certain areas of land to be used. Let the landowners speak for themselves about the taxation of land values and their ability lo recoup themselves by passing on the tax in higher rent to the tenant!

Let Mr. Finn ask any landowner who is holding out of use a piece of land in order to obtain 1,000 pounds ground rent per annum whether he will he able to get 1,500 pounds, were a tax of 10s. in the pound imposed, not alone upon him, but upon all landowners in the country. Mr. Finn's question about his own shop can only he answered with a knowledge of what an incoming tenant would pay for it now in the open market, without any restrictions as to use other than those demanded in the interest of public safety and public amenity.

Single Tax

Frederick Taylor / 9 October 1913 (p.707)

Sir, - Mr. Fels does not appear to me to have fairly answered your criticisms of his letters. His case as against yours was to prove that wages could be raised by the operation of the Single-tax; but in my judgment he has failed to make it. In its economic aspect and from Mr. Fels' own point of view, the Single-tax is only the means of transferring monopoly rent from the private owners to the State; it is, in fact, the nationalisation, by gradual taxation, of economic rent. But as you pertinently ask, what difference does it make to the proletariat whether rent is paid to Peter or to Paul, so long as it must be obtained from the surplus of proletariat production over proletariat subsistence? That it makes no difference to the wage earner whether his rent is paid to an individual, a corporation or the State is as clear as the corresponding fact that it similarly makes no difference whether Interest and Profits are paid to any one of these three. As I understood your analysis of the Wage System, you contend that "the surplus value of industry, extracted by Land and Capital operating on Labour as a commodity, alone provides Rent, Interest and Profits; and you propose to absorb all these in Labour by creating a Labour monopoly. Mr. Fels, on the other hand, would simply transfer the title deeds of one of these three, namely, Rent, to the State, leaving the other two still to be enjoyed by the monopolists of Capital. Collectivists, I believe, of whom Mr. R. B. Kerr appears to be a survivor, would go further than Mr. Fels and transfer to the State both Interest and Profit as well. But, again, your question is pertinent: how much better off is Labour provided it continues to be paid as a commodity for all the change in the personnel of its employers? The State under the new circumstances would be in loco not parentis, but capitalis. There might be more public officials and even State-provided amusements, and so forth: but I cannot see that wages would rise. Perhaps Mr. Fels will explain.

The Evasions of Mr. Fels

John J. Hereford / 9 October 1913 (p.707-708)

Sir, - I can easily understand your reason for not carrying on your controversy with Mr. Fels. He positively cannot repeat accurately the simplest of your statements, and that renders discussion with him futile. Nevertheless, Mr. Fels and his Single Tax colleagues are so persistent and controversially so unscrupulous that if you let the matter rest with Mr. Fels' last letter we shall shortly be told that you have been converted by his logic. I therefore beg that you will permit me to follow Mr. Fels through some of his extraordinary tergiversations.

(i) First, a simple and palpable misrepresentation. In his last letter Mr. Fels remarks: "Two weeks ago you said rent was due to manuring and rotation of crops." I could not bring myself to believe that you had written anything so idiotic, and accordingly looked up the quotation. It is in your issue of September 18. The reference to manuring and periodic fallow is the obvious reply to a statement made by Mr. Fels that land does not reproduce itself. You answer: "Economically considered, land does reproduce itself. ... If it does not, why the necessity for periodic fallow? . . .Has Mr. Fels ever heard of manure?" It will be first noted that Mr. Fels does not appear to know the difference between periodic fallow and rotation of crops. One naturally expects that particular kind of ignorance from Single-taxers -- but let that pass. The point is that you do not say that "rent was due to manuring and rotation of crops." Mr. Fels, relying upon your good nature, ascribes to you a statement you never made, apparently to make yon look foolish. What does it make Mr. Fels look like?

(ii) In his last letter Mr. Fels charges you with defining wages as "equal to the subsistence level of the proletariat." He puts these words in quotation marks as though it is your definition. And again he does it deliberately to make you look foolish. I will quote him accurately to prove his mala-fides. He says: ''You do not assist your readers to see through my alleged fallacies, for in discussing wages you substitute a measure for a definition. Just as the statement that 'a steamship is a thousand feet long' is no definition of a steamship, so it is no definition of wages to say that wages are 'equal to the subsistence level of the proletariat.' " Again I wondered if Mr. Fels had the slightest justification for presenting you to your own readers as a congenital idiot. Here are your ipsissima verba: "But wages are not a residue after other charges upon industry have been met; they are the cost of the raw material called labour. And this cost is roughly equal to the cost of the production of labour - that is to the subsistence level of the proletariat." This gross perversion of your words is not accidental, as the context of the words I have quoted clearly proves. But worse remains to be told. If this had been your only definition of wages we might forgive Mr. Fels, but you could not have been more explicit. Mr. Fels, in fact, in his letter in your issue of September 11 says: "You define wages as the price paid" in the competitive market for labour as a commodity." If Mr. Fels misdescribed his own trade products as unscrupulously as he misquotes you he would very soon find himself in jail. Now, is it you or he who looks the more foolish?

(iii) I have merely to remark that these misrepresentations are necessarily deliberate, because Mr. Fels relies upon them to make out some sort of a case. Being deliberate misquotations, they vitiate his whole argument.

(iv) I have not yet completed the instances of Mr. Fels' falsification of your words. I quote again from his last letter: "You contend that 'the only obstacle to the use of land is the provision of capital.' This is decidedly Greek to me. Capitalists to-day cannot get the use of land; small-holders backed with the public credit are denied independent living and are driven into the hands of the farmer at 12s. a week; a firm like Cammel, I,aird and Co. were driven from Newport; builders at Wembley were shown the other road when they offered ,£32,000 for land on which £15 were paid in rates." I freely admit that this twisting of your argument is not quite so dishonest as the two previous cases cited, but it is bad enough when faced with your exact words and their palpable meaning. Now let me quote yon: "Mr. Fels surely would not argue that capital would become less indispensable to the employment of land if rent were nationalised? On the contrary, capital would be no less necessary than it is to-day. In other words, with all the free access to the land (at a rent, mark you) the existing proletariat would still be barred from its effective use unless they could raise - that is, pay interest on - the capital necessary. ...The only obstacle to its use by the proletariat is the provision of capital. But that obstacle, if it exists, and is insurmountable when no other rent is charged, would obviously remain where the preliminary fence of a rent was also to be negotiated." Mr. Fels says that this statement is Greek to him. It is assuredly perfectly clear to everybody else. It is certainly rather odd that a particularly smashing argument is not only Greek to Mr. Fels, but yet not sufficiently Greek to prevent him from giving it a meaning it obviously and palpably and undeniably does not possess.


We may now estimate the exact value of Mr. Fels' contributions to this controversy. He seems to think that the editor and readers of THE NEW AGE are as foolish as would be the buyers of land upon which a progressive tax was levied, whilst the sellers run off with the plunder. Personally, I do not think that (except jerry-builders) there are so many fools to buy land Single Taxed as Mr. Fels supposes.


Editors / 6 November 1913 (p.708)

Mr. Wedgwood, we gather, does not favour nationalization. Being something of a thinker, albeit slow, he has been influenced against nationalisation by the arguments, we should say, of Mr. Belloc concerning the Servile State. No nationalisation for him, but a swingeing fine, in the form of a Single Tax upon landowners who do not put their land to full economic use! We really despair of making Single-taxers realise how ridiculous their proposals are, how Utopian practically and how suicidal if they could be adopted. Single Tax seems always to be associated with a low but hopeful order of mentality; as Voltaire - even so long ago - declared; and to debate with Single-taxers is something of a condescension. Nevertheless, as we are avowedly at Ephesus we will not shirk it. In the first place we have to point out to Single-taxers that if they could establish the Single Tax in this country they could do so much more that the Single Tax would be toying with their subject. But why, we may ask them, does not Mr. Lloyd George incorporate this tax in his land legislation? He is professedly one of them, a Georgeite of Georgettes. As a "sincere" man he believes, as they believe, that only the Single Tax in necessary to salvation. Why then does "Land Values" have to complain so bitterly of him, and Mr. Wedgwood to threaten him with an opposition vote? The answer is that Mr. Lloyd George is in the firing line while his Single Tax colleagues are comfortably seated in Mr. Fels' armchairs speculating on the wonderful tactics they would adopt if only they were where he is. The experiment, unfortunately for comedy, of putting any one of them in Mr. Lloyd George's place cannot be tried; but we can very well imagine it. Not one of the bunch would be able to proceed a step further towards Single Tax than Mr. Lloyd George himself; and for the simple reason, that since economic power precedes political power and ownership of land is economic power, a single step taken beyond the limits set by the landowning classes would land Mr. Lloyd George or any other Single Tax adventurer outside politics and into the obscurity of a private propagandist society again! So much for the impracticability of belling the cat when the mice are only mice.

But in the second place, let us suppose that the miracle has been performed and that Mr. Fels' subscriptions and Mr. Wedgwood's arguments have established the Single Tax. What might be expected to be the outcome of it? Landowners discovered permitting their land to lie idle would be fined (or taxed - it is much the same thing) and, if they could not pay the fine, they would have to sell their land or have it confiscated piecemeal. By this means, say the Single-taxers, whole cantles of land, now unoccupied and unused, would tumble into the market, creating such a glut that any of us could buy land almost by the pennyworth. A pretty picture, indeed, if only it were true; but it is romance. It has never occurred, we suppose, to the Single-taxers to compare land and sea? No, it has certainly never occurred to them. It happens, however, that there exists all round our coasts an element comparable in many respects, as an instrument of wealth, with the element of land itself - the sea. It is nobody's monopoly, it is untaxed, it is not subject to improvements, and no rent is charged for its use. In addition, by the application of Labour applied to tools, it can provide the saleable commodity known as fish. Now what, from the Single-taxers' point of view, could be more ideal than this state of things? If land could be made as free, abundant, accessible and productive as the sea round our coasts, would they not think they were in the Promised Land at last? But now consider the economics of the sea and refer to Mr. Stephen Reynolds for confirmation of our statements. The sea without boats, market organization - in a word, without Capital - is useless to the proletariat of the fishing villages. Though it is at their doors, and they have free access to it, the key that opens its use is of gold, and it is in gold (or Capital) that they are lacking. What is the result? Three miles out are the great fishing trusts with their enormous capital of steam-trawlers and their industrial organisation of the commodity of labour to the number of fifty thousand men. The sea is theirs though they have not made it, and their Capital controls the markets on the dry land. And within the three-mile limit are the peasant proprietors - rather, let us say, since the Trusts have come - were the peasant proprietors - for they are to-day an almost extinct race. Indeed, a Commission is at this moment sitting to devise a means of getting the proletariat of the fishing villages "back to the sea" - the unrented, free, accessible sea - precisely as the Single-taxers would have a Commission to return the proletariat to the rented, taxed, and inaccessible land. The inference, we hope, is plain even to Single-taxers, that to break down the monopoly of land and to leave the monopoly of Capital is to cut off only one head of the giant - the virtue and strength of which will certainly flow into the other.

Joseph Fels died in February of 1914. The discussion of the Single Tax disappered from the pages of The New Age after the above exchanges between Joseph Fels and the various writers reprinted above. The public's interest in the idea of the Single Tax was significantly curtailed by the outbreak of war in 1914. Interestingly, then, we find only days after the end of the First World War an editorial on the Single Tax appearing in The New Age, reproduced below. The Georgist response is provided by Frederick Verinder, a leader of the movement who had assisted in the planning of Henry George's tours of the United Kingdom in the 1880s.

A Reformer's Note-Book

Editors / 14 November 1918 (p.26)

. SINGLE-TAX. - The tenacity with which the Single-tax proposal sticks