226 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK 
sing, would strike up in chorus: “I didn’t raise my boy to be a 
farmer.” 
VII 
One thing is certain: we shall never have a sound, contented, 
debt-free rural life until the process of farm turnover has been 
much slowed down. Anything that makes country life more 
fruitful and agreeable would help: the organization of cooperative 
societies; the establishment of institutions like the Danish folk 
schools; university extension; the building up, through a far- 
sighted urban philanthropy, of the rural church. One could 
enumerate a thousand things that would help, each in its own 
small way, and in the aggregate they would help considerably. 
But we are too impatient a people to throw ourselves enthusias- 
tically into a program that might not show tangible results for 
half a century. We insist on remedies that work more promptly 
and efficaciously. And we can find them if we set about it. 
In the recent boom period there were thousands and tens of 
thousands of men who could have sold their farms at a huge 
advance over the price they had paid, but hesitated until the 
opportunity passed. They are still holding down those farms 
and are not very happy over it. Why didn’t they sell? Because 
the income tax, then heavy, would have taken a big slice of the 
profit. They thought it wise to wait until the income tax had 
subsided. 
Now let us enact a profits tax that will take the whole, or 
almost the whole of the profit from the sale of land. We will let 
bygones be bygones, and take present values as our base. Let 
four-fifths of any advance upon this base go to the community. 
And that it may not become a new device for plundering the 
country for the benefit of the city, let the proceeds of the tax 
be applied locally to the abatement of other taxes. 
Such a tax would practically abolish the unearned increment 
subsidy to agriculture. Every buyer of land would have to look 
to actual earnings, not to rising values, for the return on his 
capital. This means that on the buyer’s side the process of farm 
turnover would be retarded. If the prices of farm products rose, 
as they must sooner or later, a large class of farm owners would 
find that they were in a privileged position, so long as they held 
their farms as owners. They would be enjoying the full benefit