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 enjoy 
ment 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 indivis 
ible 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 owner 
ship 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.”