Individual Liberty - Evernote

he has not yet escaped, and never can escape, the fact that, if government were to
confiscate land values, any man would be liable to be turned out of doors, perhaps
with compensation, perhaps without it, and thus deprived, maybe, of his dearest joy
and subjected to irreparable loss, just because other men had settled in his vicinity or
decided to run a railroad within two minutes' walk of his door. This in itself is enough
to damn Mr. George's project. That boasted craft, Land Nationalization, is floundering
among the rocks, and the rock of individual liberty and the inalienable homestead has
just made an enormous hole in its unseaworthy bottom which will admit all the water
necessary to sink it.
Henry George's correspondents continue to press him regarding the fate of the man
whose home should so rise in value through increase of population that he would be
taxed out of it. At first, it will be remembered, Mr. George coolly sneered at the
objectors to this species of eviction as near relatives of those who objected to the
abolition of slavery on the ground that it would "deprive the widow Smith of her only
'nigger.'" Liberty made some comments on this, which Mr. George never noticed.
Since their appearance, however, his analogy between property in "niggers" and a
man's property in his house has lapsed, as President Cleveland would say, into a
condition of "innocuous desuetude," and a new method of settling this difficulty has
been evolved. A correspondent having supposed the case of a man whose
neighborhood should become a business centre, and whose place of residence,
therefore, as far as the land was concerned, should rise in value so that he could not
afford or might not desire to pay the tax upon it, but, as far as his house was
concerned, should almost entirely lose its value because of its unfitness for business
purposes, Mr. George makes answer that the community very likely would give such
a man a new house elsewhere to compensate him for being obliged to sell his house at
a sacrifice. That this method has some advantages over the "nigger" argument I am
not prepared to deny, but I am tempted to ask Mr. George whether this is one of the
ways by which he proposes to "simplify government."
Henry George, in the Standard, calls Dr. Cogswell of San Francisco, who has
endowed a polytechnic college in that city, and for its maintenance has conveyed
certain lands to trustees, a "philanthropist by proxy," on the ground that the people
who pay rent for these lands are really taxed by Dr. Cogswell for the support of the
college. But what are Henry George himself, by his theory, and his ideal State, by its
practice, after realization, but "philanthropists by proxy"? What else, in fact, is the
State as it now exists? (Oftener a cannibal than a philanthropist, to be sure, but in
either case by proxy.) Does not Mr. George propose that the State shall tax individuals
to secure "public improvements" which they may not consider such, or which they
may consider less desirable to them than private improvements? Does he not propose
that individuals shall "labor gratis" for the State, "whether they like it or not"? Does
he not maintain that what the State "does with their labor is simply none of their
business"? Mr. George's criticism of Dr. Cogswell is equally a criticism of every form
of compulsory taxation, especially the taxation of land values. He has aptly and
accurately described himself.
There must be a limitation to great fortunes, says Henry George, "but that limitation
must be natural, not artificial. Such a limitation is offered by the land value tax." What