GROUND RENT A SOCIAL PRODUCT 9 
The value of these special privileges is held to be 
ground rent, which in turn is held to be very largely, 
if not entirely, a social product. 
IV.—The Office of Ground Rent 
The true office of ground rent is that of a board 
of equalisation—equalisation of taxation, of dis 
tribution, and of opportunity. The tendency of an 
increase in the tax upon ground rent is not only to 
equalise taxation and distribution, but to equalise 
the opportunity of access to what is erroneously called 
the land, which of itself, even in a city, would be of 
little or no use if it had a perpetual fifty-foot tight 
board fence around it. In this clear distinction 
between land and land value, which cannot be too 
critically noted, may there not be found an explosion 
of the notion that a man has a right to the private 
appropriation of ground rent, because his father 
bought and paid for the land fifty or one hundred 
years ago? 
The question is: When he bought the land fifty 
or one hundred years ago, did he buy and pay for 
the land value of to-day? In 1686 a company having 
five shares and five stockholders bought a lot of 
land in Philadelphia for |j. In 1900 the same com 
pany, with its five shares and five stockholders, sold 
the value of the same land for $1,000,000. Does it 
sound reasonable to say that for one pound sterling 
in 1686 these five men bought and paid for the 
$1,000,000 land value of 1900, with its ground 
tent of $40,000 a year? Would not such a sale 
in 1686 of goods to be delivered two hundred and 
fourteen years later be dealing in futures with a