The Chronicle. PUBLISHED DAILY LEVIN. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1912. "UNIMPROVED VALUE" RATING.

Horowhenua Chronicle, 23 October 1912, Page 2

The Chronicle. PUBLISHED DAILY LEVIN. WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1912. "UNIMPROVED VALUE" RATING.

This date of the poll of Levin ratepayers, on a yea or nav issue regarding rating oil unimproved land values, is fixed for Wednesday, !litli November. Between now and then a good deal will bo written upon and around this subject; for the present it will bo suffice to bespeak for the issue fair consideration, and that degree of regard for the interests of our fellownien which all humanity should exercise. The subject is one that should 'be voted upon with Jin o.yo to the truo and best interests of the community, not with the mercenary view merely as to how many shillings per annum will he knocked off the rates of any individual, or per contra, placed upon someone less fortunately placed in this respect. Some interesting sidelights on the history and incidence of single-tax (a. cousin in reason to rating on unimproved value rating) aro set out in an article by Land Lovell Price, who is a reader in Economic History to the University of Oxford. He says that the three central ideas of the scheme of single taxing are (1) that the original source of wealth is land; (2) that rent is a payment for the use of tho contribution made by Nature to production; and (3) that tho pressure for augmented supplies of food inevitably leads to an increase of rent, at the cost of the other classes of society. It should, however, be added that tho presuure of population is understood to include tho demand for dwelling space in freqUente situations, and that, in this connection especially, an "unearned increment" of income from landed ownership lias been scribed to the general influence of the community rath or that the unaided gift 1 * of Nature.

The single tax, under the title of the impot unique, was propounded in tho eighteenth century by the French physiocrats because they thought that it was only in .agriculture that "nature worked along with man"; and they hold that in taxing rent you would be tapping woalth at its source, and that all the subsequent processes of manufacture and trade, wholesale and retail, were "unproductive." compared with the original extraction of the raw materials from the earth. Adam Smith did not regard the interests of landlords receiving rent at all opposed to the interests of the other classes of society. That position was left for Jlicardo to adopt in tho next' century; and it is .with his name that the economic f/heory of rent is generally connected, jtte argue the increasing presaute of population would cauro a resort to poorer soils for the supplies of the necessary too.d, and that the rents obtained- for tho richer soils would increase in oonsequence; and he used the term "rent" to denote | that part of the income derived from the ownership of the land would be attributed' to its "natural" inherent indestructible qualities. In Henry George's "Progress and Poverty," ■fhipb plained some vogue about a ,q;aarior of & century ago, the whole argument was skilfully instated with groat elaboration and no little ejorjuence; but the notion and the policy of a* single tax on rent may cqi-

rectly 'be described as flerived from the combination of the three ideas that have been mentioned.. Ricardo assumed in his theory of rent the existence of an isolated community. He conceived also of one kind of agricultural produce, v> heat, being supplied to a single market from soils differing in the characteristics alone of natural fertility. The possibility, however, of the importation of additional supplies of food from external sources outs away at once the ground fo rthe supposition of mi inevitable increase in the rent of agricultural land in any particular community at the expense of other classes: and within the confines of any area changes in the crop that is raised, in the market to which it is sent, and in the modes of conveyance or in other circumstances of production or sale, may after the order of the superiority in which the different soils should he 1 Ringed, and convert what was rela- !j tivelv highly rented land into land ,! yielding a low rent in comparison Jj and vice versa. In actual fact the / occurrence of a serious fall of agri- 'i cultural rents in the older countries o itho world is still fresh in our , memories, and it is obviously not the rural landlords of England who Uavo been acquiring unearned incro- ,j mcnts during the last twenty-five j years. Hut movement of population, whether they be due to the j changing whims of capricious fash- s ion or to other more substantial ]

causes, exert ever and again similar influences on the urban rents of particular towns or of special quarters in those towns; and accordingly if land speculation be sometimes or often conspicuously successful, the risk of partial loss or of entire failure is no more absent from this sphere of enterprise than lucky gains of more or less considerable proportions are an unfamiliar sequel of other exhibitions of courage or foresight.

The separation, secondly, of what is earned by individual action from what as unearned may be held to be due to " Nature " or to society at large is, it may be urged, manifestly not rery easy in such cases; but the problem involved in the distinction is common to the income derived from landed ownership and to other forms of income. Land is useless without labour, and also without capital ; and we are all, in a greater or less degree dependent on the help of natural forces and on the environment of human society, while undeserved good fortune, as unmerited bad fortune, is the froquent lot of mankind. Such compelling reflections have prompted economic theorists and Socialist reformers alike to extend the idea of " rent," in the sense of a surplus accruing from position at some vantage point which separates a man or a class from competing rivals, to the possessors of capital and to the performers of labour from the management of a business down to the practice of a handicraft; and in the process they have been bound to recognise more clearly than before the pregnant fact "that circumstances may curtail or destroy, as they may create, or enlarge, the advantage and its attendant unearned" gains. The wider scope given to the conception has thus served to emphasise its remoteness from complete workability. It belongs, in short, to metaphysical economics : it is nebulous and intangible. The Finance Act of 1909-10 tried to translate it into practice in the case of land, but the puzzled endeavours of the Parliamentary draftsman have been significantly followed by the unsatisfying guesses of the official values faced by an impossible unfamiliar problem.