The Freedmen's Savings Bank

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 175265076X

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-129631

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Fleming, Walter Lynwood http://d-nb.info/gnd/120660560X

Title:: The Freedmen's Savings Bank

Place of publication:: Chapel Hill

Publisher:: Univ. of North Carolina Press

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: x, 170 S.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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227 of better prices. But they could not write any considerable part of these high prices into their capital, through the sale of their farms, since the community would take most of the advance in selling prices. A man with a good farm would find it wise to hold it until the end of his working life. He would have a privilege worth transmitting to a son if the state wisely refrained from taxing such inheritances. But would not the danger arise that these privileged land- owners would eventually become absentee landlords, living in the towns or in Florida or California, and stripping the land of its surplus? There would be a danger of this unless the State had the ingenuity to levy a special tax on lands not operated by their owners, a tax heavy enough to discourage the development of this form of property right. VIII It may be objected that such a tax would operate to produce a certain rigidity of status in rural relations. A good farm would often remain generation after generation in the same family. Small farms would not so easily be merged into larger and more economical ones; farms that are too large would not be so easily subdivided. Suppose we admit that there is something in these objections. Yet the disadvantages are insignificant in comparison with the benefits that would flow from a better stabilized system of farm tenures. With the reduction in the rate of farm turnover the mortgage indebtedness would be gradually paid off and the balance of exchange of products between country and city put on a sound basis. The country community would attain the means of improvement and would become a more agreeable place to live. The greater stability of tenures would not only make the social life of the country more satisfying, but it would lay a basis for cooperation such as cannot exist where the farm population is ceaselessly shifting. The gains from cooperation, from improvements in farm prac- tice, in transportation, would fall to the farmer as cultivator, not as landowner. If it appeared desirable to effect an artificial increase in agri- cultural prices through public action, the benefits would fall to

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