Let Us Now Praise the Back Roads of Alabama - washingtonpost.com.
There's a nice article in Saturday's Washington Post about Fairhope, Alabama, a town founded just over 100 years ago to put into action the ideas of Henry George. It sits on Mobile Bay.
Founded in 1894 as a utopian community based on the fair-tax theories
of economist Henry George, the town has long been a magnet for
intellectuals, Southern or otherwise; Sherwood Anderson, Upton Sinclair
and Clarence Darrow all spent time there. Even today, long since
subsumed into the greater Mobile metropolitan area, it remains a
popular place for writers, painters and craftspeople to set up shop.
Arden, Delaware, just outside Wilmington, does something similar, and it, too, is a lovely place to live.
The rest of Alabama might learn from Fairhope's fine example. (There are places in Alabama where sales taxes are as high as 10% ... not quite as bad as Chicago's, but awful nonetheless.) In most of Alabama, property taxes are quite low (see Susan Pace Hamill's work), and that underlies the state's problems. In Fairhope, the Single Tax
Corporation, which owns a significant chunk of the land, doesn't tax
the buildings, but charges each property owner in proportion to the
value of the land each occupies.
Upton Sinclair wrote a good article called "The Consequences of Land Speculation are Tenantry and Debt on the Farms, and Slums and Luxury in the Cities." It begins:
I know of a woman — I have never had the pleasure of
making her acquaintance, because she lives in a lunatic asylum, which does
not
happen to be on my visiting list. This woman has been mentally
incompetent from birth. She is well taken care of, because her father
left her when he died the income of a large farm on the outskirts of a
city. The city has since grown and the land is now worth, at
conservative estimate, about twenty million dollars. It is covered with
office buildings, and the greater part of the income, which cannot be
spent by the woman, is piling up at compound interest. The woman enjoys
good health, so she may be worth a hundred million dollars before she
dies.
I choose this case because it is one about which there can be no
disputing; this woman has never been able to do anything to earn that
twenty million dollars. And if a visitor from Mars should come down to
study the situation, which would he think was most insane, the
unfortunate woman, or the society which compels thousands of people to
wear themselves to death in order to pay her the income of twenty
million dollars?
The fact that this woman is insane makes it easy to see that she is not
entitled to the "unearned increment" of the land she owns. But how
about all the other people who have bought up and are holding for
speculation the most desirable land? The value of this land increases,
not because of anything these owners do — not because of any useful
service they render to the community — but purely because the community
as a whole is crowding into that neighborhood and must have use of the
land.
The speculator who bought this land thinks that he deserves the
increase, because he guessed the fact that the city was going to grow
that way. But it seems clear enough that his skill in guessing which
way the community was going to grow, however useful that skill may be
to himself, is not in any way useful to the community. The man may have
planted trees, or built roads, and put in sidewalks and sewers; all
that is useful work, and for that he should be paid. But should he be
paid for guessing what the rest of us were going to need?
Clarence Darrow wrote at least two excellent things I'd like to share:
- How to Abolish Unfair Taxation which ends with "The "single tax" is so simple, so fundamental, and so easy to carry
into effect that I have no doubt it will be about the last reform the
world will ever get. People in this world are not often logical; in
fact, there is never any considerable number of them that are logical.
I am pretty sure the people will never get started in the right
direction; they will go a long way around."
- The Land Belongs to the People which includes this: "This earth is a little raft moving in the endless sea of space, and the
mass of its human inhabitants are hanging on as best they can. It is as
if some raft filled with shipwrecked sailors should be floating on the
ocean, and a few of the strongest and most powerful would take all the
raft they could get and leave the most of the people, especially the
ones who did the work, hanging to the edges by their eyebrows. These
men who have taken possession of this raft, this little planet in this
endless space, are not even content with taking all there is and
leaving the rest barely enough to hold onto, but they think so much of
themselves and their brief day that while they live they must make
rules and laws and regulations that parcel out the earth for thousands
of years after they are dead and, gone, so that their descendants and
others of their kind may do in the tenth generation exactly what they
are doing today — keeping the earth and all the good things of the
earth and compelling the great mass of mankind to toil for them."
and
"Now the theory of Henry George and of those who really believe in the
common ownership of land is that the public should take not alone
taxation from the land, but the public should take to itself the whole
value of the land that has been created by the public — should take it
all. It should be a part of the public wealth, should be used for
public improvements, for pensions, and belong to the people who create
the wealth — which is a strange doctrine in these strange times. It
can be done simply and easily; it can be done by taxation. All the
wealth created by the public could be taken back by the public and then
poverty would disappear, most of it at least. The method is so simple,
and so legal even — sometimes a thing is legal if it is simple — that
it is the easiest substantial reform for men to accomplish, and when it
is done this great problem of poverty, the problem of the ages, will be
almost solved. We may need go farther."
And you might be interested in a fine talk given by Ed Lawrence, a current resident of Fairhope, entitled Henry George: The Relevance of His Philosophy Today.
