THE  A  B  C  OF  TAXATION

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not  a  tax  at  all,  but  a  divinely  natural  provision,
restoring  to  every  man  his  inalienable  share  in  the
value  of  the  land.
Just  in  Its  Apportionment
Full  single  tax  would  mean  all  national  taxes
apportioned  to  cities  and  towns  in  proportion  to  their
respective  land  values;  all  local  taxes,  including
national,  assessed  upon  land  values  alone.  In
“Natural  Taxation,”  page  147,  Mr.  Shearman  makes  a
plausible  claim  that  for  the  year  1890  “all  national
and  local  taxes,  if  collected  exclusively  from  the  ground
rents  of  the  United  States  would  have  absorbed  only
44J  per  cent  of  those  ground  rents,  leaving  55J  per
cent  to  the  owners  of  the  bare  land  as  a  clear  annual
income,  besides  the  absolutely  untaxed  income  from
all  buildings  and  improvements  upon  their  land.”
Repeated  calculation  of  the  ground  rent  of  the  state
of  Massachusetts  and  of  the  City  of  Boston,  as  well  as  of
many  other  cities  and  towns,  has  fully  justified  Mr.
Shearman’s  position  that  gross  ground  rent  is  approximately ­
  double  the  amount  of  taxes  in  each  case.
The  constitutions  of  the  several  states  and  the  moral
sense  of  all  the  people  maintain  that  government  should
not  take  private  property  for  public  use  without  full
compensation.  Single  taxers  maintain  not  only  that
there  is  no  right,  but  that  there  is  no  need  to  do  this,
even  under  forms  of  taxation.
We  would  exempt  personal  property  because  by
the  same  system  under  which  you  collect  a  tax  upon
the  poor  man’s  “visibles,”  you  are  putting  upon  the
rich  man’s  “invisibles”  a  tax  which  you  cannot  collect.
Equalisation  is  possible  only  by  abolishing  the  tax