304 PRINCIPLES OF RURAL ECONOMICS 



produced. This man, the seller, has secured this large sum of 

 money without having earned it. The present purchaser, hav- 

 ing paid for something which he ought not to have paid for, is, 

 according to some of the more 'extreme and' partisan single 

 taxers, entitled to no consideration. The $500 which repre- 

 sents the rent of the land ought to be taxed away, even though 

 this would virtually confiscate the $10,000 which had been 

 paid for the land. Some of the more moderate single taxers, 

 with a somewhat keener sense of justice, propose either to 

 compensate the present owners or to tax away only the future 

 increases in rent, exempting entirely from taxation any value 

 which is due to improvements which the owner has made or 

 shall hereafter make upon his land. It is difficult to find any 

 valid objection to this more moderate program aside from the 

 difficulty of applying it, which is, after all, probably less than 

 that of applying any system of taxation now in existence. 



It is so startling as to be almost unbelievable, and yet it 

 is a demonstrable truth, that if the government had pursued 

 from the beginning the policy of taxing only the rent of land, 

 we should have had a practically burdenless tax. The farmer 

 in the above illustration would not have had to pay $10,000 

 for the naked land, for the naked land would never have had 

 any particular selling value. Whatever value it had would have 

 gone to the government in the form of taxation. On the other 

 hand, every improvement placed upon the land by its owner 

 would have escaped taxation altogether. The result would 

 have been that this farmer instead of paying $20,000 for the 

 farm, that is, $10,000 for the land and $10,000 for the im- 

 provements on it, would have paid only $ 1 0,000 for the improve- 

 ments. Having saved $10,000 as the purchase price of the 

 farm, he would be able to pay the taxes with the interest thus 

 saved ; that is to say, if he had $20,000 in cash, he could pay 

 $10,000 for the farm and put the other $10,000 at interest. 



