Exploring some old newspapers, I found a letter to the editor that I thought was a nice simple expression. It was written by someone named Warren T. Lowe, of Media, PA, in 1930.
Land Basis to All Business
To the Editor of the Inquirer:
Mr. W. M. G. in criticizing my letter intimates that land can be used only for farming. Many people make this error. All business propositions use land. All activities of life have it as their basis. We use it before birth, after death and every instant between these events.
We stress value instead of area. A farm of one hundred acres employs a few men; one acre, in the center of a large city, may employ a thousand. There is a natural value of land due to the advantage one parcel has over another; there is also an artificial value due to speculation. As business expands the latter rises until it permeates the whole structure, when it chokes further progress and is followed by business stagnation.
Henry George discovered the remedy, viz., Take in tax the annual ground rent, thereby killing speculation; then remove all other taxes, thereby giving the greatest "boost to business" it ever had.
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And that same year appeared another LTE from the same fellow:
Machine Age and Land Values
To the Editor of the Inquirer:
Your correspondent, "Jersey" makes some good points, but with one of them I would differ. Instead of the advantage of efficiency in the use of machinery going to owners of machinery it goes to the landlords, which is shown in the following three examples:
(1) Henry George was asked by a man, "If I owned all the money and you owned all the land, what would you do?" Ans. "I would say to you, give me all your money or get off the earth." He could have used marchinery or any other form of capital instead of money with the same result.
(2) Henry Ford put out a tractor which displaced eight horses and three men on the farm. There were 900,000,000 acres of land below the margin of cultivation which this transaction raised above it. Did it raise wages? No; it raised the rent and selling price of that land.
(3) In the early days of California, wages of labor were $500 a month and interest on capital 24 percent; rent was nothing. Today wages are but a fraction of that; the Government sells bonds for less than 3 percent; gilt-edged securities bring 4 to 5 percent interest; but rent is measured by the hundred millions.
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