PROTECTIVE TARIFF 397 



rents are conspicuously high. Our discussion in this book, how- 

 ever, is concerned almost entirely with farm lands. While the 

 large claims of the single taxers as to the efficacy of the single 

 tax are doubtless far from being one hundred per cent true, yet 

 they are in part true so far as urban conditions are concerned. 

 Here land has only site value. But this view has little validity as 

 applied to farm lands. The site of the land is secondary; its fer- 

 tility is primary. And its fertility, if maintained and increased, 

 is due in large part to the brains of the owner. If the single tax 

 were applied to farm lands, it would have the immediate effect of 

 increasing the taxes on those lands that are unimproved but yet 

 have use value; on small farms with costly buildings and improve- 

 ments the taxes would be lessened; on the average farm with 

 average buildings the improvements exempted would just about 

 offset the increase in the land tax or in other words, there would 

 be little change in the size of the tax. In fact, the Minnesota 

 State Tax Commission, after giving very careful and sympathetic 

 consideration to the whole single tax question both in theory 

 and in practice reached the conclusion (in their 1912 Report) 

 that, "To the average owner and occupant of a home or a farm the 

 change (to a single tax) would probably not mean much one way 

 or the other." * 



II. PROTECTIVE TARIFF 



Introductory Statement. The United States ranks among the 

 " protective tariff" countries of the world. With the exception of 

 about thirty years of our history (the period from 1830 to the Civil 

 War, 1860) we have been frankly for high "protection." A pro- 

 tective tariff takes two forms: (1) it may be so high as to prohibit 

 entirely the importation of the foreign competing article; (2) it 

 may impose a duty, not prohibitive, on imports, causing the im- 

 ported article to sell so high in America as not to compete on even 

 terms with the American made article. The American manufac- 

 turer, in such a case, is able to charge more for his wares, evidently, 

 than if competition were unrestricted, and the ultimate consumer 

 is the one who pays the tax. The first strictly high protective 

 tariff act was the Act of 1816. The duties were raised in the next 

 act that of 1824. Four years later came a substantial increase, 

 with the so-called "Bill of Abominations" of 1828. Since this led 

 to the near-secession of South Carolina from the Union, and the 

 Nullification (of the tariff) controversy, rates were lowered in the 

 next acts. Tariff and Slavery, Nullification and Secession, then 



1 Third Biennial Report, Minnesota State Tax Commission, 1912, p. 177. 



