JUSTICE OF THE SINGLE TAX 111 
Wealth is mercurial and fugitive. While wealth is a 
private product, so to speak land value is a public 
product, publicly created and publicly maintained. 
What more than these differences is needful to make 
reasonable and convincing a separate classification of 
land and wealth, especially for purposes of taxation? 
The right of property in wealth is the right of a man 
to eat his bread in the sweat of his own brow. The 
right of property in land to-day is the right of a man 
to eat his bread in the sweat of another man’s brow. 
Usufruct means property in what the land produces 
this year by the application of one’s own labour. 
Private ownership, including as it does to-day the 
private appropriation of ground rent, means property 
in what the land may produce for the next ten, one 
hundred, or one thousand years by the application of 
the labour of others. 
The Capitalised Tax 
By the capitalised tax is meant a sum, the interest 
of which would pay the tax. It is usually found by 
multiplying the tax by twenty because 5 per cent inter 
est is one-twentieth of the principal. For every $16 of 
tax, the selling value of land is less than it would be if 
free of this tax, by I320, an amount which at 5 per cent 
would pay the tax, $16, and leave for the selling 
value a purchasing price which would net 5 per cent 
return to the investor. 
Value and Valuation 
There can be, strictly speaking, only one value for 
anything, and that is, what it will sell for. But there 
may be many valuations of the same thing, and a thing