Land Nationalization

Henry George was no Socialist ; he wished neither to attack individual initiative nor to abolish free competition ; on the contrary he desired to assure to every man the undiminished pro duct of his labour. But real property seemed to him a formidable obstacle to the realization of free competition, since it constituted a monopoly and a denial of the principle "to every man the pro duct of his labour" by allowing the proprietor to enrich himself in idleness. To eliminate the evil effects of ownership of land, was it, however, necessary to abolish it? What, he argued, is the essential fault in the system of real property? That it allows the owner of the soil the whole of the surplus values arising out of social accidents, such as the increase of population and demands, the growth of towns, rises in the price-level and, in general, all those things' embraced under the name of progress. In so far as it arises out of circumstances outside the individual's control, rent of land is an injustice and should be abolished. But it can be abolished without abolishing property, simply by confiscating this increment through taxation. So justice will be satisfied, for everything that is the outcome of social factors will revert to society, while the owner will retain whatever is the result of his personal efforts.

Paul Toubeau's system is also a system of taxation, but not on the value of land or yield, simply on its area, so much the square metre, whether it be a garden or a sand-dune. At first sight such a system seems absurd. It is, however, based on the idea that space is the one factor absolutely independent of human labour ; man cannot create space, he can only occupy it. By taxing space, or area, alone, man is given an incentive to make the best use possible of it ; the frequent and scandalous case of the specu lative owner who leaves arable land uncultivated or urban sites unoccupied in the expectation of a rise in values is avoided. On the other hand, as the metric tax is unaffected by the produc tivity of the soil, it leaves the owner the full benefit of this factor; the better use to which he can put it, the better for him. In a word, the object of this system is to ensure the maxi

mum utilization of all space. If the owner finds that he cannot secure a return sufficient to pay the tax, he has always the resource of abandoning his land to the State, which will doubtless be able, sooner or later, to make a profit out of it, for as Cecil Rhodes said, "where there's space there's hope." Toubeau's system has the disadvantage compared to that of Henry George, of leaving the owner the benefit of surplus-values not acquired by his own action ; it thus fails to correct the main injustice of ownership of land. On the other hand, it escapes the principal objection to Henry George's system—the central diffi culty of determining and distinguishing in the yield from the land what is due to personal labour and what to accident.

Nationalization Through Wider Ownership.

It does not appear as though any of these systems of nationalization were likely to be effected at present. The enormous response that Henry George's ideas met in the United States and, still more, in England, has almost died away. Since the World War all taxa tion, including that on land, has been so much increased as to make a further increase hardly practicable; the aim attempted has, in fact, been attained and more than attained, for landlords are abandoning their estates out of inability to support the charges on them.

The example that Soviet Russia has given of the system of universal expropriation by the State is not very encouraging, for this experiment has produced a reaction' in all Russia's neigh bours, driving them along a precisely opposite course—towards stabilization and the multiplication of small properties. The great agrarian reform which has been effected in eastern and Central. Europe, almost simultaneously, has aimed at multiplying the num ber of small proprietors, of substituting peasant ownership for the large estates. It has resumed and extended the individualist work of the French Revolution of 1789. (C. G.)