THE SINGLE TAX AND THE FARMER 129
land value of the whole state, and since the unimproved
land value, which alone would be taxable under the
single tax, is less than 50 per cent, of the assessed
valuation, or one-twentieth of the whole, it follows that
the value of fertility* as a contributor to rent is not only
a debatable value, but almost a negligible factor in the
diminishing twentieth of the taxation problem.
The Minor Importance' of Agricultural Rent
Search in the principal authorities shows that in the
treatment of rent about fourteen times as much space
has been devoted by them to agricultural as to urban
rent.f The Massachusetts valuations for 1907 offer a
*There is respectable economic opinion to the effect that fertility is not a social
but an individual product; that it is the result of individual labour expended upon
the land; and that the amount paid for the fertility of land, as distinct from its
situation, is interest on capital invested, rather than a true rent.
“Treat the land as mere situation and ascertain what would be its value if the
fertility of the soil were exhausted. The value of the soil itself will be the cost which
would be necessary to bring it up from a state of exhaustion to its existing state of
fertility. The valuing of improvements will remain as it is at present. We shall
then have three items for the assessor to ascertain, namely, land, soil, and improvements.
The first is a social value based on a market surplus, which is true rent.
The second and third are individual values, the product of effort and abstinence.
The first is individually unearned, but socially earned; the second and third arft.
individually earned. . . .
“If the single taxers will work out both a theoretical and a practical system by
which the situation value of agricultural laud can be identified with the site value of
urban land, and by which the fertility of the soil can be identified with capital, the
prospects are good for winning over both the economists and the farmers.”—Professor
John R. Commons, University of Wisconsin, in The Public, March 21, 1908.
“W T hen studying the phenomenon of land rent, urban land and land used in manufacture
and commerce rather than that utilized for agricultural purposes should be
considered. Writers who persist in studying agricultural rents are investigating the
more obscure manifestations of rent phenomena. . . . The true function of all
land is, in fact, reduced to that of land in a city: namely, to that of furnishing a site
upon which to do business. The value of the site depends upon the 'market opportunity'
which it offers. . . . Land in its proper sense furnishes standing room
and situation with regard to markets. According to this definition, land performs the
same function in agriculture as for all non-agricultural purposes.” Professor Frank
T, Carlton, Albion College, Quarterly Journal of Economics, November, 1907.
i. tFor details see Appendix C.
I
