John MacDonnell
Charles B. Fillebrown
[Reprinted from the book, Natural Taxation,
published 1917.
Part I / The Authorities / Chapter 5]
It is odd that a man whose writings have apparently escaped the
notice of today's economists should be the only living writer whose
work forty?two years later finds place in this symposium. The reason
for this obscuration of a brilliant name appears to be that, after
having at the thesis age lighted the economic firmament with two
excellent and attractive volumes, this author lapsed into the law, and
so was lost to the world as an economic reformer.
Several remarkable coincidences may be noted in the careers of these
two English American contemporaries, John MacDonnell and Henry George.
In 1871 MacDonnell at 25 was Writing a Survey of Political Economy,
while George at 32 was publishing Our Land and Land Policy.
McDonnell at 27 was publishing the land question in 1873; George at 39
was Publishing Progress and Poverty in 1879. So far as any records
goes, they pursued entirely independent ways.
The stories of these men have also their contrasts. Of The Land
Question the late Alexander MacMillan, founder of the great publishing
house, said to the author: "Our reader thinks well of the book.
It is original, and though there is no profit in it, I am interested
in it, and will publish it, which he did, and the book met with
scholarly appreciation. Progress and Poverty on the contrary,
went begging for a publisher but met with phenomenal popular favor.
Antedating by six years Henry George's Progress and Poverty,
one is greatly attracted by the clearness with which MacDonnell set
forth many of the principles to which George gave extended treatment.
His exposition of the burdenlessness of a land tax brings great
strength to the cause, because it fills a wide gap in the front line
left by Henry George, which was but slowly detected by many of his
followers. His statistics of the urban values of his own time, as well
as his effectual disposal of fertility as a source of economic rent,
more than anticipated Mr. George.
Inasmuch as Mr. George wrote his Our Land and Land Policy as
early as 1871, one naturally wonders if that pamphlet had given
special stimulus to Mr. MacDonnell's thought. The fact is that he was
not so influenced, as his book had a totally different origin. He
found in the pamphlet some sentences which agreed with his own
conclusions, but they were arrived at independently and in a very
natural way. His own discussion goes a long way in helping to
distinguish the socialization of rent from the nationalization of
land. The interest evoked by the time and circumstance of his writings
and their recovery, as it were, for readers of today, is the reason
for giving so much importance in this collection to his notably
thorough work. No student of economic problems can read these
stimulating volumes without regret that the author did not resist the
blandishments of English law and bestow upon the world the ripe fruits
of his early promise.
Sir John MacDonnell, K. C. B., M.A., was born in 1846. He was a
graduate of Aberdeen University, and has long been familiarly known to
the law in almost every capacity opened to that profession. He is
known as a writer upon law, especially on international law, for the
chief reviews and magazines and periodical press, untiring in the
cause of law reform and busy just at present with a book on Treaties
for the Carnegie Endowment Trustees. He is a Fellow of the British
Academy, and editor of Corporation Legislation, a journal not
unknown in America.
Soon after graduation, MacDonnell became connected with the Scotsman,
a newspaper which advocated the old economic doctrines in their
extreme form. A former editor had been McCulloch, the great expositor
of the old classical political economy. He was invited by the
proprietors to write a series of articles, or a sort of manual of
political economy, to correct popular heresies. To the amazement of
the proprietors, his study led him to profound disagreement with the
orthodox economists. He published a volume stating his conclusions
which were at variance not only with the older school, but also with
much of Mill's teaching. The book was welcomed as opening up some new
paths, and first led many prominent economists to doubt the efficacy
of the old doctrines.
At his own home in the Highlands, he had seen some cruel effects of
the existing land system, and was brought by them and by continued
study to examine the subject and to write this Volume, the Land
Question, which was published in 1873.[1]
In it all the essentials of the single tax are clearly set forth and
ingenious methods of effecting an easy transition from our present
systems of taxation are suggested. Several passages from his book are
here reproduced to illustrate his line of thought.
He thus describes the nature and origin of economic rent:
Monopolies they, indeed, all are; but some, if not all of
them, are natural, spontaneous, and inevitable. They may be used
well or ill, but monopolies they will remain.... One class of them,
such as land and mines, are monopolies because they, like other
natural agents of production, are limited. They yield rent in the
economists meaning of the term..... Economists had been at great
pains to explain the nature of rent. Starting from the fact that the
soil of a country is limited in extent, they have pointed out that
even were it homogeneous, of uniform fertility, and equally
commodious in all parts, the right to possess it would draw with it
the power to extract rent as population expanded. The monopoly of
the necessity of existence must create one kind of rent. Economists
have also explained that even if the soil of a country be
practically unlimited, differences in fertility and situation will
originate another kind of rent, that kind which Ricardo has called,
not very happily, perhaps, the price paid for "the original and
indestructible powers of the soil."
In the following passage, he clearly shows that economic rent belongs
to the community because it is produced by the community.
I cannot conceive the distinction between land, or
natural monopolies, and other kinds of property being put more
clearly and forcibly than in the following passage which I take from
an essay by Professor Cairnes: "A bail of cloth, a machine, a
house, owes its value to the labor expended upon it, and belongs to
the person who expends or employs the labor: a piece of land owes
its value -- so far as its value is affected by the causes I am now
considering -- not to the labor expended upon it but to that
expended upon something else -- to the labor expanded in making a
railroad, or in building houses in an adjacent town; and the value
thus added to the land belongs, not to the persons who had made the
railway or built the houses, but to someone who may not even be
aware that these operations are being carried on -- nay, who perhaps
has exerted all his efforts to prevent their being carried on."
Of the total proceeds of any acre of ordinary land, so much is the
return on the permanent or durable capital -- drain, fences, etc.,
invested therein; and so much is they return on the circulating
capital renewed annually, or at short intervals; and the residue is
ascribable to permanent and inherent attributes of the soil,
situation, proximity to markets, roads, railways, etc., and to what
I may term the general state of society. That the first part should
accrue to the landowner, if, as not unfrequently happens, he
furnishes the capital for permanent improvements, is right; that the
second should go to the usufructuary or farmer is also clear; and
what seems equally indisputable is that the last, consisting of
economic rent, should go to the general body of society. It having
been shown that "economic rent" is paid for differences in
quality and situation of land, created by no man, or that it
originates in circumstances not to be credited to the landowner, it
would naturally have been expected that from Ricardo's principles
would have been unanimously and instantly deduced the conclusion
that economical rent should not become the subject of private
property, that no private individuals should be permitted to
monopolize "the original and indestructible properties of the
soil," and what no man has created or earned by labor of his,
no man should own. It would have been only natural for all who
accepted the preceding account of rent to hold that rent which
proceeded from the common labors of the community should belong to
it, that wages were not more fitly the reward of the laborer or
profits the reward of the capitalist, than was rent, as Ricardo
understood it, the appanage of the Community or State, and that, to
quote the popular phrase, "the Land Was the Property of the
People." For these reasons absolute property in land would
appear to be theoretically unjust whenever economical rent appears.
Of Course, There May Be Cited Other Reasons Why This Should Be so;
and, to Name Only One, Land Is a Necessity of Existence, and Society
Might Not Subsist Were Men Free to Employ It As They Please. We
Would Not Tolerate a Race of Proprietors of the Stamp of the
Notorious Lucas, Who Wished to Let His Fields Run to Waste. We
Should Be Sacrificing the End to the Means Were We to Suffer the
Landowners rights to Make the Existence of Society Impossible,
Uncertain, or Difficult. But one Sufficient Reason for Denying
Absolute Property in Land, Springs from the Fact That Its
Proprietors Becomes, in the Natural Course of Things, the Recipient
of an unearned residuum.
We shall, perhaps, be told that there is a great objection in
principle to the conclusion here arrived at: it would bring the
state into a region and from which it should be excluded. Now,
laissez-faire is a good rule when the meddler is antagonistic to the
meddled with; but he seems to violate laissez-faire most deeply who
lets value which the community, or assuredly no single individual,
has created be taken from it by private persons. And if it be
possible for the state, or for municipalities, to manage any or all
of these monopolies, there seems little standing in the way of the
assertion that they are the primary resources of government. Since
there are many things from which their owners may, with ordinary
exertion, or no exertion at all, draw rent, or something above the
usual profits on capital, if too much has not been expended in the
purchase, and since the state, every needy, is compelled at present
to draw its revenue from taxes which are a hardship to all, and a
grievous burden to the poor, it is no paradox to affirm that the
maintenance of the state should be provided, as far as may be, out
of those funds which nature herself seems to have appropriated to
public purposes, or arising as they do out of common warm public
exertions. The onus of providing the expediency of letting even one
of those funds fall into the private domain rests on those who
propose it. In one point of view, it matters little perhaps whether
the public or private persons hold the sites of cities. But if one
mode of tenure brings vast wealth or competence to a few, and
releases so many from the wholesome bondage of labor, and if the
other relieves the whole community from burdensome taxes or rates,
and eases all a little without giving idleness to any, need we
hesitate or doubt as to which is preferable. Such being the
alternatives, do we not squander or pawn the natural and primary
resources of the state when we suffer private hands to monopolize
them? That which presses on no man, yet benefits all, is on the face
of it a better mode of obtaining a revenue than that which mulcts
all, it may be, unequally, and perhaps to the grievous injury of
some. That which, taking from no man is just earnings, yet provides
for the just common wants, is conspicuously superior to a system of
which the true principle, according to Mr. Lowe, is that you must
pinch every class until it cries out. And offer is made of a mode of
raising revenue, which takes from none what they have rightly
earned, which need rob no man of what he has rightly bought, and
which will replenish the treasury, no man being mulcted, no man
wronged; and are we to reject this offer, and forever allow so many
private interests to gather round this public domain that it shall
be useless and perverted. To a like question the answer once made
was decidedly negative. For a time the revenue of this, as of every
other state of Europe, came from rent. But the answer was revoked:
the feudal duties incident to property fell into desuetude, and
ultimately they were abolished; much of the Crown land was
squandered; and for centuries the nation has been reaping the
harvest of its errors, each sheaf whereof has been some tax, often
vexatious and cruel. Ministers cannot govern the contrary for less
than 70 million pounds. We vex the poor with indirect taxes, we
squeeze the rich, we ransack heaven and earth to find some new
impost palatable or tolerable, and all the time, these hardships
going on, neglected or misapplied, there have lain at our feet a
multitude of resources ample enough for all just common wants,
growing as they grow, and so marked out that one may say they form
nature's budget. Such seems the rationale of the subject of which
the land question forms a part. And so we may say that, if property
in land be ever placed on a theoretically perfect basis, no private
individual will be the recipient of economic rent. Bastiat, it may
be mentioned, saw that logic and justice demanded no less; and,
anxious to escape from such a conclusion and to buttress the fabric
of society as he found it, he sought to undermine the Ricardo's
theory, and to prove, in the face of familiar facts, that all rent
was the return on the landowner's capital. Less logical economists
in this country have at once expounded Ricardo's theory and defended
the position of the English landowner. How few have seen and own the
simple truth which follows from his doctrine is somewhat amazing,
and equally strange is the small number of those who, having seen
the truth, were courageous enough to utter it.
Here he indorses Henry George in looking forward to the rent tax as
the single tax and in pointing out the natural law by which its volume
is apportioned to the growing needs of the community:
But, granting the above to be the ideal both of obtaining
revenue, it would follow that just as we should seek to replace
loans by taxes, so should we seek to substitute for the latter rent
drawn from natural monopolies; and it would seem not unreasonable to
hope that as loans have ceased to be the regular resources of all
solvent governments, so may taxes. Thus only shall we have the
benefits of government without the burden.....
And, granting the above theory to be true, does their not arise a
conception of a beautiful, simple, and useful law, providing for the
expenditure of the state, without the aid of statesmen's ingenuity,
and with all the certainty of a physical law? We recognize the
possibility of the normal revenue constantly keeping pace with the
normal expenditure. Note the simultaneous movements in both the
social wants and the social resources and means. A country, let us
suppose, is barbarous and sparsely peopled; we contemplate Persia,
or the India of pre-Anglican times. In that low state of
civilization the acknowledged common interests are few, and a land
revenue, or the rent of the soil, will suffice to cover the common
expenses. Then comes to denser state of population: we contemplate
modern European countries; the general expenses of society have
grown. But, simultaneously with their growth, grows also the needed
nutriment, and wherever the common expenses are, of necessity,
heaviest, that is, in great towns and cities, there do these
monopolies of which we have spoken multiply and wax in
remunerativeness. There flourish pauperism and crime, costliest
scourges, and there also does the value of land rise highest, and
there, too, appear docks, telegraphs, etc.., and other natural
monopolies, in the most lucrative form. The wants come, and their
causes bring also the wherewithal to satisfy them. Sheer pedantry it
would be to limit the expenditure of any state in all circumstances,
and however trying the emergencies, to the resources provided by
these funds. So long as there exist pauperism and a permanent
criminal population, so long as there are wars to be waged, and
indemnities to be paid, so long certainly must we resort to taxes or
loans. In times of transition, too, such as 1859, for instance, was
to India, there may be experienced difficulty in making the
expenditure and revenues of all sorts balance. But the ideal to
which we should strive to attain, and which may be opened to others
states less compromised than England by a long history, seems to be
that which I have described. Though that harmony cannot be
practically illustrated here, it may be so where there is no call to
meet emergencies.
De Tocqueville has told us -- and it scarcely needed a de
Tocqueville to tell us -- that a danger ahead in democratic times is
the danger lest the power of the government should be employed by "our
masters" in bleeding the rich, and adsorbing the earnings of
all those whose means tower above their neighbors. Communism, or
some of its evils, may invade under the guise of improved taxation
or a democratic budget. Graduated income taxes may be gradients to
it. And truly, when no principle governs the selection of taxes, or
the amount to be taken by means of them, it is hard to convince the
interested that they are pushing taxation to extremity. Let those,
therefore, who regard the advent of democracy as inevitable, and who
do not desire to see government's ruling by largess is extorted from
the wealthy by the proletariat, welcome a revenue system which seems
to set natural limits and barriers to the demands of potent and
rapacious poverty. Let them recollect that there is a peril lest
future revenue come from the income tax: that the majority of the
electors are not subject to it; that they may encourage resort to
it; and that, indeed, this danger almost approaches a certainty,
unless we manage to dispense with an income tax. Let them embrace
with gladness a system which enlists justice on their side, or
rather, what is different, a consciousness on the part of the
rapacious that justice is against them. It may prove well hereafter
if the share of the state is defined almost as sharply as the
portion of the capitalist or the laborer.
We see, then, the possibility of government, local and imperial,
without taxation. To no transcendental motives does the project
appeal. It demands no miraculous drought of administrative talents
or public virtues. It is simple and intelligible. It is nothing but
giving the body politic the blood to which it has secreted. And even
those who say that the principle is a barren theory, or that we
invoke it too late to apply it, will own that it is in unison with
much that goes on around us -- with the growing disbelief in
laissez-faire as sterility taught of old, the taking over so many
branches of industry by the state, the perplexity, strikingly
revealed in the report of more than one committee, of how to
regulate railways without owning them, the growth of companies of
almost state dimensions, and the necessity of investing than with
state privileges.
He admits practical difficulties but denies that we should be
deterred thereby from moving toward a natural system of taxation,
especially when we consider the social benefits which will follow its
adoption:
Those, too, will admit that revenue reform would become
clear, that all scrappy suggestions would be welded into one
principle which a child might understand, and that the march of the
financier would be certain, if not easy, were there truth and value
in this principle, the departure for which has perhaps not the least
of unrecorded errors. I know how far out of the path we and others
have strayed, how hard it is to hark back, and how easy it is to
speak in three words that which generations of strong minds will not
accomplish. We have been putting hills and seas between us and this
principle. Not in our time, perhaps never, will they be wholly cast
down and utterly dried up. But I still presume to think that it is
good to contemplate a splendid possibility, some dim similitude of
which may one day be realized, to the unspeakable benefit of
society.
I have written the above in deference to the observation of Turgot:
"It is always the best with which one ought to be occupied in
theory. To neglect this search under the pretext that this best is
not practicable in the actual circumstances, and is to wish to solve
two questions at once; it is to renounce the advantage of placing
the questions in that simplicity which can alone render them
susceptible of demonstration; it is to plunge without a clue into a
inextricable labyrinth and to wish to investigate all routes at
once, or rather it is voluntarily to shut one's eyes to the light by
putting oneself in the impossibility of finding it." It will be
well, as he advises, to separate the two questions, "What
should be done?" and "What can be done?" Now, if
theorists have been prone to exaggerate the ease with which
principles of the above character could be carried into effect,
there has been another error of an opposite kind.
He makes several ingenious suggestions for overcoming the
difficulties of the transitional period. If the state is to purchase
the land, the purchase may be affected by paint to present landowners
that difference between a permanent and a temporary annuity for, say,
fifty years, or by making present payments are the reversionary value
of the land. But that all the benefits of land nationalization without
the complexities and difficulties involved in government ownership may
be obtained by the expedients of taxation is clearly hinted in the
following remarkable passage:
I presume to think that the acquisition of the soil by
the state seems easier or in the light of the simple truths. Time
the rather than the huge votes of money, judicious and temperate
taxation rather than purchase, may help very much to nationalize the
land.
In the following passage he anticipates one of the most modern modes
(and undoubtedly the most simple and equitable mode) of ultimately
securing to the state the whole or major part of all economic rent. He
points out that an old land tax is a burdenless tax, and that
therefore equity not only permits but also demands that the rate
should be increased at regular intervals. Otherwise landowners as
such, escape taxation altogether:
There is another mode which, only give time, would
facilitate the same work. It may be shown that if a special tax be
imposed upon land, and if it be suffered to subsist, it will, in
course of time, cease to be felt as a tax. Land will be bought and
sold subject to it; offers will be made, and prices will be settled,
with a reference to it; and each purchaser who buys for the purpose
of earning the average rate of profit will reduce the purchase
money, owing to the existence of the tax. If he does not, it will be
because he prefers something to profits. Hence the land tax imposed
in 1693, so far as it is not redeemed, has probably ceased to be
felt as a tax. "It is no more of a burden on the landlord than
the share of one landlord is a burden on the other. The landowners
are entitled to no compensation for it, nor have they any claim to
its being allowed for, as part of their taxes."[2]
Hence, too, it follows that if it was originally fair to impose a
tax of 4s, it is now fair to add a tax of the same amount; or, in
other words, if the landowner of the reign of Victoria may be justly
called upon to bear as heavy a burden as that borne by his
forefather, the land tax must be raised to 8s, of which 4s will be a
rent charge or the share of a joint tenant, and only the remainder
will be of the nature of a tax. Ceteris Paribus, the
landowner's profits will be as high under the eight shillings land
tax as were those of his predecessor under the 4s. No doubt it may
be said that the landlord's return on his capital is constantly
diminishing.[3] But this decline is
simultaneous with a general law lowering of the rate of profits
derivable from all branches of industry; and, admitting the facts to
be as alleged, it still would be true that the relative subtraction
from the landowners incomes owing to the 4s and the 8s taxes would
be the same. In course of time the same causes which effaced the
first four shillings would remove the weight of the 8s: whenever
land is sold, it will be so with an eye to the existence of the
latter tax. The process will not stop here; assuming that rents do
not fall, that land is freely sold, that the equivalent taxes levied
upon personalty, and that the increments of taxation are imposed at
very distant intervals, in the lapse of time each addition to the
land tax will be shifted from the landowners. Thus it would seem
that there is no taxing them always unless the land tax be
repeatedly raised, and that, if such an impost is just at all, the
state must in fairness to keep whittling at the portion of the
landowner until, at some distant period, it is absorbed by taxation.[4]
Ricardo and the earlier writers on the subject confined their
attention almost exclusively to agricultural rent. A merit of
McDonnell's treatment is the emphasis which he places upon urban rent.
It is here where the abuses of privilege are most rampant. The
following passage is noteworthy in this connection:
So far the principles which ought to govern property in
land. Let us proceed to apply them with an eye to the special
circumstances of the various kinds. There are many reasons why we
should begin with urban land. With respect to it there is ample
scope and most pressing urgency for the application of the
principles which we have stated. In the ground rents of cities are
to be seen perfect samples of "economical rent," due to
monopoly, produced by no man's labor, assuredly not always by the
labor of the owner of the soil. The rents of houses, so far as
ground rent is an element therein, are solely the prices paid for
situation, or "the original and indestructible properties of
the soil." Thus the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of
Westminster exacts some of hundreds of thousands of pounds annually
from those who enrich their property. They are remunerated because
certain land is situated in Middlesex -- a circumstance in which one
may be pardoned for failing to recognize the beneficent hand of the
owner. Of the annual ratable value of London, for instance, computed
and £23,000,000, an increasingly large portion is the value of
ground rents. When a square foot of land in Victoria Street lets for
one pound sterling, we may judge of the immense revenue flowing from
this source into private purses. Those increments scarcely ever
proceed solely from the diligent exertions of the proprietors. Were
they imbeciles instead of good men of business, they must earn more
than thousands of boiling artisans; were they Solons or Solomons, it
would not make much difference. Their position of affluence is
independent of virtue or vice, prudence or folly. They exist; that
is their service. It was the sole service of most of their
ancestors. In the prices paid for sites in cities, we see the most
surprising instances of rises in value of that character which Mr.
Mill terms of the "unearned increment." A few examples
occur to me. Somewhat marvelous of so they may seem, they cannot be
scouted as exceptional. A piece of land in Holborn, purchased in
1552 for £160, now yields £5,000 a year; a wharf in Castle
Baynard, bought for 2,000 pounds in 1670, lately realized 110,000
pounds; and an acre of land at South Kensington, which sold for £3,200
in 1852, fetched £23,250 in 1860. We are told that the price of
an acre of the most valuable uncovered land in the city of London
after the great fire of 1660 was £30,000, or about one-third of
the value of the land when built upon. At the present time the
highest rate for unbuilt land may be taken at £1,000,000 an
acre and such value constitutes fully three-fourths of the value of
the property after it has buildings on it.
What contribution do those proprietors make to local taxation? It
may be asserted that some of their property contributes absolutely
nothing to the newly imposed rates, and inadequately to the older
rates. The assertion may be proved. At the time when many of the now
running leases of ninety-nine years were entered into, there would
have been no anticipation of the outlay caused by, and the rates
imposed in consequence of, the Thames Embankment and the Main
Drainages Scheme. These items could not have formed a factor in old
bargains; and such rates imposed, let us bear in mind, for purposes
of permanent improvement, must have fallen wholly on those
possessing temporary interests -- the owners of houses and the
occupier's. It is no doubt true that at certain periods in the first
half of this century, the poor -- and country -- rates were high in
Middlesex. Thus, in 1803 the poor- and country-rates, with the
portion of the church-rate, amounted to 3s 5 1/4d, and in 1868 rates
of all kinds to 3s 11 3/4d. But the general tendency has been toward
a steady increase of the rates. Nor did these exemptions begin with
the imposing of the Metropolitan Consolidated Rate to meet the wants
of the Metropolitan Board of Works. One who examines the local or
private measures, passed for the most part in the reins of George
III and George IV, in order to "pave cleanse, light, water, and
embellish" the various squares of London, will find them
studded with acts of favoritism to landlords. Looking, for instance,
and into George IV, c. 58, relating to Grosvenor Place and other
lanes and streets adjoining, I find its 140 clauses one giving
powers to commissioners to compel owners and builders of houses
where there ought to be streets to pave, level, or gravel them. But
the act as specially exempted Robert, Earl of Grosvenor, from paying
for the improvement of his own property. It also empowered him to
put whenever fences or gates he was pleased to erect on streets
which others maintained. A similar provision appears in many of the
Act's passed in the last century for the purpose of paving or
embellished in the various estates on which much of the west of
London is built. Some of the Acts -- for instance, that relating to
the Calthorpe estate -- practically absolves the owner of the
freehold from all charges. The ratepayers, in short, were mulcted in
order to improve and "embellish" the landowners' estates.
Thus, the Duke of Bedford went to some expense to with respect to
Oakley Square. But I find that the Vestry of St. Pancras repaid him.
The facts remain as they are here stated, somewhat shabby and
incredible though they may seem.....
We have stirred late, and we cannot now move with ease, but
something may yet be done in the right direction; and when London
possesses a local government superior to that which that formed by
the Local Management Acts, and similar to that which Mr. Mill has
proposed, we may take the first great step. Here, if anywhere, there
is a sphere and an occasion for the application of Mr. Mill's theory
of the unearned increment. Here in the most flagrant form, is that
divorce between industry and earnings which breeds communism; and
those who hesitate to urge the acquisition of the entire soil by the
state may fearlessly put into operation their principles with
respect to London and other great cities. For we are not quite too
late. Justice may be done, and even generosity accorded, to all
concerned, and yet we may be drawing near, at no mean speed, to that
ideal time in which the soil shall belong to the community.
To sum up: it is but justice to Sir John MacDonnell to assert that no
more recent writer has set forth with greater force and clearness than
he, the true nature of economic rent and its peculiar fitness as a
source of national and municipal revenue. He recognizes it as a social
product and hence as the legitimate property of the state. He
emphasizes the importance of urban rent. Finally, his statements are
always sane and temperate. He recognizes the difficulties of
correcting long-standing abuses, however glaring, and he proposes
solutions to the difficult problems which for ingenuity and breadth of
vision have not been excelled.
FOOTNOTES
- Macdonnell, Sir John, The
Land Question, MacMillan & Co., London, 1873.
- Mill, J.S., The Principles
of Political Economy.
- Thiers, L.A., De la
Propriete, p.153.
- For a detailed statement of
this method worked by Mr. C.B. Fillebrown for the city of Boston,
see Catechism, No. 65 (chap. xv infra, p.234.
|
