10

THE  A  B  C  OF  TAXATION

vengeance?  True  it  is  that  the  land  sold  to-day
is  the  same  land  bought  in  1686.  But  it  is  just
as  true  that  its  value  to-day  is  not  the  value  of
the  land  itself,  but  is  the  value  of  the  rights  and
privileges  pertaining  thereto,  and  exterior  to  the  land
itself.  The  demand  that  enhances  land  value  is  not
for  land  itself,  but  for  the  command'  of  these  same
rights  and  privileges.
Land  value  being  a  social  creation,*  and  rent  being
socially  maintained,  equal  access  to  the  rights  and
privileges  pertaining  to  the  land  can  be  promoted
by  the  taxation  of  ground  rent  alone,  and  by  this
means  only.  Ground  rent,  the  natural  tax  feeder,
extracts  from  the  user  of  land  the  exact  measure  of
his  advantage  over  other  men  in  his  exclusive  enjoyment ­
  of  rights  and  privileges  pertaining  to  his  own
location,  and  the  whole  tendency  of  the  taxation
of  ground  rent  is  to  equalise  participation  in  these
common  rights  and  privileges,  by  commuting  into
dollars  and  cents,  which  can  be  divided,  those  indivisible ­
  advantages  of  location,  which  can  only  be  enjoyed
individually.  Whatever  of  rent  goes  into  the  public

*  Professor  J.  B.  Clark,  then  of  Smith  College,  now  of  Columbia  University,
said,  in  a  discussion  at  Saratoga,  N.  Y.,  in  1890:
“The  community  has  created  the  value  that  resides  in  land,  and  whoever
usurps  the  ownership  of  it  deals  a  blow  at  the  community.  What  is  more,  he
strikes  at  the  basis  of  the  civil  order,  since  governments  have  been  evolved
in  and  through  the  effort  to  secure  to  each  producer  the  value  that  he  brings  into
existence,  and  it  is  anarchic  in  principle  to  habitually  counteract  this  effort.
“Of  the  wealth  that  resides  in  land,  the  State  is  certainly  the  creator  and  the
original  and  lawful  owner.  As  a  sovereign  it  has  a  certain  ultimate  ownership ­
  of  all  property.  Treasures  of  every  kind  are,  in  the  last  analysis,  its  own.
As  the  creator,  not  of  the  substance  of  the  earth,  but  of  the  value
residing  in  it,  the  State  has  a  producer’s  immediate  right  to  use  and  dispose
of  its  product.  If  any  theory  depreciates  either  the  State’s  reserved  right
over  all  wealth  or  its  special  producer’s  claim  to  the  wealth  residing  in  land,  so
much  the  worse  for  that  theory.”