90 
THE A B C OF TAXATION 
because, unless the owner can get a rent sufficient to 
pay interest on the cost of the house, over and above 
taxes, no more houses will be built, until they become 
so scarce as to force rent to a point that will cover the 
cost of maintenance. 
How can taxation be confiscation? Etymologically 
the words have nothing, and colloquially almost 
nothing, in common. To confiscate is, according to the 
Century Dictionary, “to adjudge to be forfeited to the 
public treasury by way of penalty” —the meaning is 
inseparable from the idea of forfeiture. To tax, on 
the contrary, is “to levy money or other contributions, 
as from subjects or citizens, to meet the expense of 
government.” 
Is it just to allow the landowners’ investment, now 
exempt, to remain exempt? Does either legal equity 
or ethics require that the land should be exempt from 
an increased tax, or that its owner should have even 
partial, much less total, immunity from the burden of 
taxation? Because a new tax upon land would reduce 
proportionately the selling price, should owners of 
land for that reason continue to go scot free? 
The advance in Boston’s tax rate per thousand for 
1907 ($15.90) is $3 over that of 1897 ($13.00.) The 
capitalised value of this increase, $650,000,000 multi 
plied by $3 per thousand, multiplied by twenty 
years (the number years purchase), is $39,000,000. 
Do we hear that Boston has confiscated $39,000,000 
worth of her citizen’s land in the last ten years? 
Boston has to-day some $560,000,000 of new land 
value, which it did not have fifty years ago. Mean 
time the tax rate doubled from $8 in 1856 to $16 in 
1906. The capitalised value of this $8 increase in