In his criticism of my article, Mr. James Snyder says, in your last issue, that the "collection of rent" and the "taxing of land values" are projects so "different that one of them can wreck the best laid plans of Georgeists." I fail to understand the distinction. The rent of land is the income derived from the ownership of land which is in excess of the income derived from the best free land in production. The owner of rent-producing land can hire labor to work his land by paying a wage equal to the amount labor can get by working the best free land available; and merely by exercise of the sole function of ownership he can keep the difference between the wealth his better land produces and that which the poorest land in use would yield to the same quantity of labor. This difference is the rent of his land. This rent accrues to the landowner for the sole reason that his title of ownership is socially or legally recognized and enforced, not for any productive act of his.

The market value of land is a mathematical function of its rent; it is caused by its capacity for yielding rent, which is the income the landowner does nothing productively to earn and which is what he sells when he sells the land. Land that is exchanged for wealth thus has its value set by the amount of rent it yields; and the amount of its value is precisely equivalent to that of any other investment that returns an income equal to the rent yielded by the land, speculative inflation apart. In the jargon of the economic writers, the value of land is its rent "capitalized" the calculation of what quantity of capital would return that quantity of income. To collect the rent of the land and to tax it at the full going income of its capitalized value are therefore one and the same operation by whichever name you call it. the effect is to pay the expenses of the state by taking the income yielded by the ownership of land ; or so at least I have always understood the matter. If Mr. Snyder has valid ground for distinction of two processes named by the two phrases, I regret to say he has not made it clear enough for me to see.

From a distinction that seems to me hollow. Mr. Snyder goes on to use two senses of the ambiguous word "value" as though they were interchangeable, and so arrives at an absurdity. He says, "If we tax land values 100% the land, values disappear, we have neither tax base nor taxes, the government is bankrupt." If we tax land values 100%, the marketability, the exchange value of the land disappears, but the capacity of the land to produce wealth, to produce an excess of marketable products over the production of the best available free land, is not necessarily diminished. This depends on that original productive quality of super-marginal land and on the distribution of population from which rents arise in the first place. If we tax land 100%, its value as marketability is destroyed, but its value as productivity is unaltered. So long as the land whose marketability has been destroyed by the single tax continues to produce an excess of wealth beyond the cost of the labor and capital employed at rates determined by the productiveness of labor and capital on the least productive lands in use, just so long will the flow of rent available for the expenses of government continue. The problem of assessing the tax after the market values of lands have been destroyed is an administrative problem, doubtless a difficult one, but it is not one of fundamental policy. The fundamental policy of the single tax aims at the destruction of the abuses inseparable from effective private ownership of land it aims at the substance of public ownership under the familiar forms and the nominal aspect of private control. We must not be surprised if in destroying substantial private proprietorship we lose some of the administrative conveniences characteristic of the form.

Mr. Snyder's view of the nature of rent appears to me to diverge very widely indeed from that of Henry George. If I understand him, he holds that rent is a consequence of certain explicitly productive functions of government (the building of bridges, power dams, etc.) which are exactly like in kind, though perhaps superior in scope, to those of private productive enterprise. These productive enterprises of government confer increased value upon the portions of land which they serve, and the increased income of these lands is the rent on which alone the government is to levy its taxes.

If Mr. Snyder believes that the whole of the phenomenon known as "ground rent" or "economic rent" the total share of the social income received or diverted by the ownership of land, as distinguished from the shares received by capital and labor is a consequence of these activities of government, I think the point wants a great deal more support than he has given it. That phenomenon has been traced to other causes, and he would need at the least to show that these other causes are sufficiently characterized and specified by the formula: services of government.

It is true that in a sense hind rent may be considered to be a value imparted to the land by the activities of government; that is, this value could not exist without the stability of social relations and productive processes characteristic of an orderly and regulated, a policed, community; and government may be viewed as the principle of cohesion, security, and regularity in the orderly society. But the same thing may be said for the other forms of productive income wages and the return for the use of capital. No regular voluntary productive operation could take place if society lacked rules that secured to effort and risk the enjoyment of some settled portion of their resulting product. The husbandman would soon weary of planting if unchecked brigandage commonly robbed him of his ripened fruit; and to the degree that government protection induces the planting the fruit may be said to be a consequence of the activities of government. Government regularizes, enacts, and effectuates the modes in which the members of a society acquire and alienate their property, and in doing so may be considered the prime cause for the existence of all property not consumed at the very moment of production. Not only rent, but in this same sense wages and interest also are ''values imparted by government."

This view of government is not so much inaccurate as it is too all- embracing to furnish us with answers to specific questions about what distinguishes the separate phenomena of rent, wages, and interest. It is a logical principle that any one of the contributing conditions of a phenomenon may, within a given field of relevancy and in response to a given question, be isolated as the causative agent. If we ask the question, What portion of the wealth of society is due to the existence of government? the answer must be, All of it; it is the cause of whatever phenomenon would cease to exist in its absence, all other conditions remaining the same. The existence of an accepted social order is a ground condition for the production of any wealth whatever; and it is the essential function of government to embody and make effective those regularities of conduct and securities for the production of wealth that express the stable will of society. If we ask, What acts of government cause the phenomenon of rent? it would be fatuous to respond that rent was caused by the building of roads, power dams, and such overtly productive, extra-political services of government; for the phenomenon of rent and rent-caused penury could exist in quite as virulent form as they do if government undertook none of these productive enterprises, though it could not exist in the absence of exercise of the genuinely political functions of government. Nor could society afford to leave the strong right arm of its organized will to subsist precariously by trucking and huckstering such evocative turnips and carrots, to the detriment of its essential functions. Universal wisdom is no more for the most stringently rationed of politicians than it is for the business men; but one private enterprise may sink without serious damage to the community, while a government forced to curtail its vital duties by the failure of an expected income from an unwise investment would keep society trembling on the brink of anarchy.

No. The one service of government which affects rent is the "service" attended to by Georgeists namely, the service of regularizing, legalizing, and securing the private receipt of rent the private appropriation of land : the power of excluding society from the land at will, of admitting society to the use of land only on condition of payment arbitrarily fixed, which evermore drives the landless laborer farther into the desert searching for a livelihood as his only alternative to accepting a decreased share of the product his labor might bring forth on richer land. The total market value of all land is a consequence of this one governmental service, without which not even the bridge-building business could increase land values. This is the one truly political function which imparts value to the land, and the only possibility private landowners have of enjoying the superior income which their land affords them over the best free land, the best worthless land, is in the continued exercise of this one political function.

The contention of Georgeists is that the exercise of this function by government unjustly enriches one segment of society, whose members have not turned a hand to produce this superior income, and unjustly pauperizes another segment whose members cannot live without access to the land and who by their productive labors create the wealth thus diverted to the unequally favored landowners. They further contend that the stupid and unsystematic imposition of the taxes required for the expenses of government increase the impoverishment of the landless, both directly and by throttling the production and exchange of wealth; and that both of these great causes of poverty would be abated if the government abolished all of the other taxes it now collects and imposed the full weight of its expenses upon the unearned income now accruing to private landowners.

My article, to which Mr. Snyder's letter was a reply, considered the question whether this unearned income would be adequate for the expenses of government; concluding that it would be adequate. Mr. Snyder's only direct comment on this speculative question is in the following words: "It is true that rent would be insufficient for all the present expenses of government"; but as he offers no considerations of his own to support this assertion, and as he reviews none of the considerations in the article from which it was concluded that rent would be sufficient, I am unable to see in what precise respect I have roused his disagreement. His own separate conclusion, that if. government were limited by law to collecting rents created by its own productive enterprises, and if its only expenses were the costs of its productive enterprises, then, given practical wisdom, its income would equal its outlay, is unassailable; but I cannot see that it sheds any light on the question whether true economic rent, the differential income of lands superior in productiveness to the best available free land, would be sufficient for the expenses of government.