SINGLE TAX SOCIALISM. Wanted, the Co-operation of the Landlords.

Free Lance, Volume III, Issue 108, 26 July 1902, Page 8

SINGLE TAX SOCIALISM. Wanted, the Co-operation of the Landlords.

THERE was one delightful little motion passed at a meeting of the Single Tax League on Monday night. It would be all right if this was the Garden of Eden, and nobody had any right to anything, and everybody would much rather the other fellow had all the good things of the land than himself. Here is a part of the resolution .—". — " 1. That we oppose the re- purchase of estates for settlement on the broad principle that, as the unearned increment belongs to the State, no private owner has a right to be paid for it." The Single Tax League here practically says as we can't start the world over again, and the men who own the land have no right to it, that the Government should give them notice to quit, and take their holdings for the use of the people. The Single Tax League are going the wrong way about this nationalisation of land business. All their resolutions won't have one jot or tittle of effect in deposing the lords of the soil. The methods they should have taken would be to gently approach the landowner, and prove conclusively to him by argument that he had no right to the land he had purchased, and which was earning increment that he was unable to stop. The landowner would see at once the force of the argument, and would hand in his title deeds to the State, camp in a tent outside his paddock, and wait until the Government had leased him the little bit of land to which he was socialistically entitled. As the unearned increment belongs to the State, and the land should belong to the State, the Government should at once be approached by the Single Taxers to pass a Bill empowering it to sue the former owners of land now belonging to the Government and occupied by Crown tenants. * • • The Government has aided and abetted the former owners by increasing their ill-gotten gains, and it is only a fair thing that all that money should be recovered and distributed or used by the State for the common benefit of everybody in New Zealand. In future when the Government takes land under the Public Works Act it should follow the advice of the Single Tax Leaguers, and not pay for it. It's theirs, anyhow, and the man who has the deeds has no title under the League's fanciful law. It would lead to a delightful feeling of good fellowship and camaraderie. The Single Taxers want to get at the vitals of the landowner by taxing his land value, and they don't want him to have any land ! You see, the land is every man's heritage, and if you are on the spot fifty years before the other fellow, when he comes along, if you haven't improved it, he is entitled to half. * * * The same with goldfields. If you are on a good alluvial patch of land, even though you've got a miner's right, the land is not yours in real truth. It belongs to the State. The man who is working in the pot hole next door to you works quite as hard for nothing. What you've got is unearned increment. Give it to the State. The State will give the other fellow his share. That No. 4 clause, if it gets a show, will revolutionise the unearned increment industry. When the land reverts to the people, the landowners are deposed, and the State takes what it wants without money and without price, it will be high time for the millennium to commence. But unfortunately the Single Taxers have first of all to reduce the landowner to a condition of meekness that will rob him of all the characteristics that make for what men call success. It is rather a steep contract when you come to think it out.