LVTFan's Blog

The Single Tax: An Essay on the Single Tax in 50 Words

All men have equal right to life.

Life depends absolutely upon land.

Therefore all have equal right to land.

Some must occupy more valuable land than others.

Equal right demands that landholders pay the yearly value of land Into a common fund for common purposes.

This is the single tax.
SAMUEL BRAZIER.

in The Public, 1900

A Poem of Political Economy -- likely J. W. Bengough, from 1887

A Poem of Political Economy
from Grip, mid-1887
likely by J. W. Bengough

Capital, Land and Labor
    Were triplets at their birth,
And started out together
    To cultivate the earth;

Quoth they, “We’ll work together,
    And all the wealth we make
Will be divided fairly,
    And each a third will take.

“Capital’s share is Interest,
    Land’s share we’ll know as Rent,
While Labor’s we’ll call Wages.
    And each will be content.”

The business grew and prospered,
    And wealth was made galore,
But, lo! while Land waxed wealthy
    The other two grew poor.

And it was seen, most strangely,
    That with the rise of Rent,
Both Interest and Wages
    Lower and lower went!

“There’s something wrong, dear brother.”
    The others said to Land,
“There’s something crooked somewhere
    We’d like to understand.

“While you are fat and jolly,
    And from all care are free.
We, though we do our portion
    Are pressed by poverty.”

Said Land, “My dearest brothers,
    The facts are as you state—
While capital and wages fall
    Rent grows at inverse rate.

“And why? — the thing is simple,
    And very plain to see: —
For all your raw material
    You’ve got to come to me.

“And I (through ‘private ownership’)
    Am thus empowered to say,
As much as I see fit to ask
    You both have got to pay.

“We’re on a different footing,
    As you may now perceive,
You’ve got to have my help, you know,
    Or, simply, you can’t live.

“And since (through ‘private ownership’)
    I ask more than my share,
It follows that my partners
    Are left a little bare!”

“Most excellently reasoned,”
    Said Labor. “clear as day!”
“The very thing,” said Capital,
    “That I was going to say.”

“Well, now,” said Labor thoughtfully,
    “I think I see the chip
That spoils our dish of porridge—
    It’s ‘private ownership.’

“We’ll just dissolve this little firm
    And form again with two
Called Capital & Labor —
    Both workers — that will do.

“And Land (or raw material)
    Since it by Heaven is sent
We’ll treat as common property
    By wiping out all rent.

“Then while the wealth producing
    Will go on as before,
The workers will enjoy it,
    And neither will be poor.”

 

J. W. Bengough was a prolific illustrator and cartoonist, and he clearly had a way with words.  He published Grip for many years, and late did weekly cartoons for The Public.  See also his Up-To-Date Primer and Whole Hog.    He coined the phrase "Natural Public Revenue."     Look for "Grip" on Google Books; you won't be disappointed!

The Earth-for-All Calendar: November 20 -- Isaiah

They shall build houses and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat.

— Isaiah, LXV., 21-2.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: October 5 -- Spencer

Equity, therefore, does not permit property in land.  For if one portion of the earth's surface may justly become the possession of an individual and may be held by him for his sole use and benefit as a thing to which he has an exclusive right, then other portions of the earth's surface may be so held; and eventually the whole of the earth's surface may be so held; and our planet may thus lapse into private hands.

— HERBERT SPENCER, in 1850, Social Statics, Chap. IX.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: October 4 -- Bagehot

In the early ages of society it would have been impossible to maintain the exclusive ownership of a few persons in what seems at first sight an equal gift to all (the land) — a thing to which everyone has the same claim.   

— WALTER BAGEHOT (1826-1877), Economic Studies, Essay I., Part I., p. 31.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: October 3 -- Marmontel

Let us suppose that a people is excluded from the ownership of the land.  I say that this exclusion, even if followed by no other injustice (which I think impossible), by making a man a stranger to the commonwealth, makes him indifferent to the existence of the State.

— MARMONTEL, Address in Favor of the Peasants of the North (1757), Oeuvres, Vol X., p. 72.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: October 2 -- Jefferies

That any human being should dare to apply to another the epithet "pauper" is, to me, the greatest, the vilest, the most unpardonable crime that could be committed.  Each human being by mere birth has a birthright in this earth and all its productions; and if they do not receive it, then it is they who are injured, and it is not the "pauper," oh, inexpressibly wicked word! — it is the well-to-do who are the criminal classes.

— RICHARD JEFFERIES, The Story of My Heart, Chap. X., p. 122.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: September 30 -- Exodus and the Bishop of Meath

The land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

— Exodus, XX., 12.

Any settlement of the land of a country that would exclude the humblest man in that country from his share of the common inheritance would be not only an injustice and a wrong to that man, but moreover would be an impious resistance to the benevolent intentions of the Creator. 

— BISHOP OF MEATH, Letter to Clergy and Laity, April 2, 1881.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: September 29 -- Froude

Land is not, and cannot be, property in the sense in which movable things are property.  Every human being born into this planet must live upon the land if he lives at all.  He did not ask to be born, and, being born, room must be found for him. The land in any country is really the property of the nation which occupies it.

— J. A. FROUDE, Ireland, Nineteenth Century, September, 1880, p. 362.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: September 16 -- Marmontel and Scott

"If we are equal and if we are brethren, make me free," he would say to you; "and as a first favor cease to rob me of the gifts which nature has provided for me."

— MARMONTEL, Address in favor of the Peasants of the North (1757), OEuvres, Vol. X., p. 84.

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
        This is my own, my native land?

— SIR WALTER SCOTT, Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto VI., I.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: September 13 -- Winstanley

That which is yet wanting on your part to be done is this, to see that the oppressor's power be cast out with his person; and to see that the free possession of the land and liberties be put into the hands of the oppressed commoners of England.

— JERRARD WINSTANLEY,  Epistle Dedicatory to Oliver Cromwell, in

The Law of Freedom in a Platform, or True Magistracy Restored.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: September 12 -- Grant Allen

"But how is it that you allow these chiefs — landlords, don't you call them? — to taboo the soil, and prevent you all from even walking on it? Don't you see that if you choose to combine in a body, and insist upon the recognition of your natural rights — if you determined to make the landlords give up their taboo, and cease from injustice, they'd have to yield to you? And then you could exercise your natural right of going where you pleased, and cultivate the land in common for the public benefit, instead of leaving it as now, to be cultivated anyhow, or turned into waste, for the benefit of the tabooers?"

— GRANT ALLEN, The British Barbarians (Words spoken by Bertram).

The Earth-for-All Calendar: September 6 -- A. R. Wallace

A great landholder may legally convert his whole property into a forest or hunting ground, and expel every human being who has lived upon it.  In a thickly populated country like England, where almost every acre has its owner and occupier, this is a power of legally destroying his fellow-creatures; and that such a power should exist, and be exercised by individuals, in however small a degree, indicates that as regards true social science, we are still in a state of barbarism.

— ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE,The Malay Archipelago, Chap. 40.  Final Note to the book. (1869)

The Earth-for-All Calendar: September 4 -- Sir Thomas More

For they account it a very just cause of war for a nation to hinder others from possessing a part of the soil, of which they make no use, but which is suffered to lie idle and uncultivated; since every man has by the law of Nature a right to such waste portion of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence.

— SIR THOMAS MORE, Utopia (1516), Book II., tit. Of Their Traffic.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: September 2 -- Gerrit Smith and Thomas Paine

The vacant land belongs to the landless.  The simple fact that the one is vacant and the other landless is of itself the highest proof that they should be allowed to come together.  Alas, what a crime against nature that they should be kept apart.

— GERRIT SMITH, Smith's Speeches in the U. S. Congress, p. 247 (1854). 

The earth in its natural uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race.

—THOMAS PAINE, Agrarian Justice (1797),  Paine's Writings, Vol. III,, p. 329.

The Earth-for-All Calendar: August 23 -- Horace Greeley and Henry George

He who has no clear inherent right to live somewhere has no right to live at all.

— HORACE GREELEY, Land Reform, Hints Toward Reforms (1850), p. 312.

Consider from the point of view of an observer of Nature a landless man — a being fitted in all his parts and powers for the use of land, compelled by all his needs to the use of land, and yet denied all right to land. Is it not as unnatural as a bird without air or a fish without water?

— HENRY GEORGE, Property in Land, Chap. II., p. 55.