144 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK
to be “a form of investment neither more nor less lucrative than
others.” On the ethics of confiscation Clark concludes that
morally as well as legally “pure capital when invested in land,
has the same rights that elsewhere belong to it.” And as to con-
fiscating all land values by the single tax, he exclaims: “would
it be robbery? No; it would be the quintessence of robbery.”
Two years later at the “Single Tax debate” at Saratoga, Clark
developed in a very interesting way his ideas of pure capital as
seeking investment in whatever form the State has said it may
take. He sees it as a policy of expediency for the public welfare
in the long run. The State “has said that it [capital] may go
into land. For ends of its own it has so decided; and the ends
are good.”
But Clark felt that he had got hold of a deeper truth, more
than a mere argument on a current issue. This monograph repre-
sents in most respects a completely new start toward a sys-
tematic theory of distribution which has little in common with
his views in The Philosophy of Wealth, excepting “effective
utility” (the marginal principle). It is needless to restate the
argument of this well-nigh classical essay. Though brief, it 1s
rich in ideas, and any one who has not read it will be well repaid
by its careful study.
But read to-day, even by the most friendly critic, the argu-
ment reveals certain defects, partly arising out of its original
polemical impulse, and partly due to the influence of the older
conceptions upon Clark’s thought. As to the latter, traces of the
labor theory of value remain in the confusion between the process
of evaluating “concrete instruments,” including natural land,
and the “personal sacrifices incurred in the service of society”
in bringing concrete instruments into existence. When “the fruit
of twenty years of labor” is exchanged for a piece of unimproved
land, the value in the land is declared to embody “the fruit of
personal sacrifice” of the buyer." But whence came the value of
the land before it was sold? Again, though including the most
imperishable land among the things which embody pure capital,
Clark sees the “concrete forms of capital” as constantly vanish-
ing. “The bodily tissue of capital lives by destruction and
replacement.” In truth, Clark had not developed a consistent
L Op. cit., pp. 55, 60.
LE
a