192 History of Local Rates 
“Is not this,” someone may say, “proving too 
much ? If, as you admit, the owners of prospective 
building land, now worth more than the normal 
number of years’ purchase of the actual income, will 
be damaged, does it not follow that occupiers will be 
benefited ? These owners are going to pay more 
rates : then somebody must pay less.” The answer 
to this is that the extra amount taken from the 
owners of the prospective building land will go 
immediately in relief not of occupiers but of owners 
of sites already built on: this land will have to pay 
less rates in consequence of the extra payments of the 
owners of the prospective building land, and will con- 
sequently become more valuable. There is not the 
least reason to suppose that the occupiers will get a 
half-penny. 
All that the occupiers can get is their share in the 
loss of the whole community from the adoption of a 
scheme which has a very unfavourable effect on pro- 
duction by causing a worse distribution of people and 
capital and also of expenditure of resources between 
different ends. 
Opposition to a scheme for relieving buildings from 
who has bad any practical experience of the working of building by-laws 
would scarcely be found with this childlike belief that greater 
stringency in these regulations would be a satisfactory substitute for 
she force of self-interest which it is proposed to remove. 
For a fuller treatment of the thesis put forward in the text above 
see the paper read by the present writer at the Congress of the Royal 
Economic Society held on January 9, 1907, printed in the Economic 
Journal, March, 1907, pp. 34-46. See also Major Leonard Darwin’s 
paper in the same Journal, September, 1907, pp. 330-44, in which the 
same conclusion with regard to concentration inside each town is 
arrived at, and Mr. Edgar Harper's criticism, and the resulting con- 
troversy in Economic Journal, 1908, pp. 28-41, 314-19 and 609-11: