Excerpt from Land and Freedom, Vol. 28
"Buy a Lot in North Hollywood now. Do you Want People to Work for you? Then Invest in Our Lots and Get the Reflected Value of all the Community does for us. Do you Want to Share in the Wages of all North Hollywood Workmen? The Profits of its Store Keepers? Even the Car Fares Paid by the Shop Girls on Their Way to and from Work? You Wont have to Do a Thing. By and by you will be Able to Live on What Other People do. Now is the Opportunity to Live a Life of Ease and Perhaps Even of Luxury, and, Without Contributing to the Prosperity of the Community, Get Most or all of this Prosperity."
Such an advertisement is only a little more frank and candid than the one that lies before us. We have merely reduced its terms, and it is capable of further reduetto ad absurdum. Concealed in its insidious appeal to avarice and ignorance is the element of indifference to a great social wrong that takes from those who labor the wealth they create for the benefit of the idlers. Can civilization be anything but what it is when, rooted in laws and custom, this great wrong persists?
Prof. Lee Bidgood, of the Department of Political Economy in the University of Alabama, is the author of a book used in his classes, and in it (page 152) he says: "Again Single Taxers are incorrect in supposing that increase in value without the effort of the owner - the unearned increment - is peculiar to land. We sec such increase going on everywhere in respect to all sorts of property. The ethical basis of the Single Tax is therefore fallacious."
So that ends it. If there is any species of property that increases in value outside of old books, old violins, old wines, and old paintings, the Professor fails to indicate them. "All sorts of property," says the Professor. That is pretty inclusive. Yet "all sorts of property" tend to disintegration and decay. Houses built thirty years if not constantly renovated have arrived at their hour of dissolution. Machinery is shorter lived. Clothes shorter yet. Foods shorter still, unless we except plum pudding. Ah, plum pudding! The unearned increment in plum pudding has eluded the Professor. Yet it supplies another fine excuse for not taking for public purposes the socially created land values of the community!
But even plum pudding is a product of labor. It can, unlike land, be produced ad libitum. That is the reason why labor products do not increase in value. To urge the increase in value that comes to a few things which are not commodities and owe their value - always fluctuating and uncertain - to the vanity and wealth of collectors - looks like a joke or an evasion. And it is a joke. It is a joke on the Professor. Delivered with the air of an oracle it may have an effect on some of the youthful minds Prof. Bidgood teaches. But we call on his students to challenge this contention. He is teaching economics - the values he no doubt has in mind, values only to the virtuoso, are not the values which enter into the science of economics.
Concerning Land Ownership
A Lthough Henry George is a master of the art of lucid exposition of economic subjects, it would be idle to deny that there has been some misunderstanding of the meaning to be attached to certain phrases which he uses in describing the evil which he finds to lie at the root of social injustice and which paralyses all attempts to ameliorate social conditions as long as the fundamental error lies unremedied. This evil he finds to be "private property in land," or "private ownership of land," because such property or ownership, if carried to its logical conclusion, permits the exclusion of all persons not owning land from their natural right to live by the application of their labor to land. Many people jump to the conclusion that the only alternatives to private ownership of land are public ownership of land or common ownership of land, and are disposed to believe that so far as land is c. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Land and Freedom, Vol. 28 (Classic Reprint)
