176 
THE A B C OF TAXATION 
This rental tax will make compulsory the adequate utilisa 
tion of natural bounties exactly in proportion to the growth 
of the community and of civilisation, and will thus compel 
the possessors to employ labour, the demand for which will 
enable the labourer to obtain perfectly just wages. The rental 
tax fund growing by a natural law proportionately with the 
growth of civilisation will thus be sufficient for public needs 
and capacities and therefore all taxes upon industry and upon 
the products of industry may and should be abolished. While 
the tax on land values promotes industry and therefore increases 
private wealth, taxes upon industry act like a fine or a punish 
ment inflicted upon industry—they impede and restrain and 
finally strangle it. 
In the desired condition of things land would be left in the 
private possession of individuals, with full liberty on their 
part to give, sell, or bequeath it, while the state would levy on 
it for public uses a tax that should equal the annual value of 
the land itself, irrespective of the use made of it or the improve 
ments on it. 
The only utility of private ownership and dominion of land, 
as distinguished from possession, is the evil utility of giving 
to the owners the power to reap where they have not sown, 
to take the products of the labour of others without giving 
them an equivalent— the power to impoverish and practically 
to reduce to a species of slavery the masses of men, who are 
compelled to pay to private owners the greater part of what 
they produce for permission to live and to labour in this world, 
when they would work upon the natural bounties for their own 
account, and the power, when men work for wages, to compel 
them to compete against one another for the opportunity to 
labour, and to compel them to consent to labour for the lowest 
possible wages—wages that are by no means the equivalent 
of the new value created by the work of the labourer, but are 
barely sufficient to maintain the labourer in a miserable exis 
tence, and even the power to deny to the labourer the oppor 
tunity to labour at all. This is an injustice against the equal