Here’s some common critiques I received on my previous essay… Georgism is just a land value tax, bro. No, land value taxes were advocated for (Adam Smith, Thomas Spence, David Ricardo, Mill, Mrs. Fawcett, Francois Quesnay, Anne Turgot, etc.) and existed long
Here’s some additional quotes I found of him supporting a single full land value tax…
Progress & Poverty (1879)
“It is difficult for small farmers and homestead owners to get over the idea that to put all taxes on the value of land would be unduly to tax them.”
“When it is first proposed to put all taxes upon the value of land, and thus confiscate rent, all land holders are likely to take the alarm, and there will not be wanting appeals to the fears of small farm and homestead owners, who will be told that this is a proposition to rob them of their hard-earned property. But a moment's reflection will show that this proposition should commend itself to all whose interests as land holders do not largely exceed their interests as laborers or capitalists, or both.”
“There need not have been a customs duty, an excise, license, or income tax, yet all the present expenditures could be met, and a large surplus remain to be devoted to any purpose which would conduce to the comfort or well-being of the whole people.”
“All peoples have recognized the common ownership in land, and that private property is an usurpation, a creation of force and fraud.”
“We already take some rent in taxation. We have only to make some changes in our modes of taxation to take it all.”
“We may put the proposition into practical form by proposing— to abolish all taxation save that upon land values.”
“But this is so natural and easy a matter, that it may be considered as involved, or at least understood, in the proposition to put all taxes on the value of land.”
“There are the temporary monopolies created by the patent and copyright laws. These it would be extremely unjust and unwise to tax, inasmuch as they are but recognitions of the right of labor to its intangible productions, and constitute a reward held out to invention and authorship.”
“It is much better that these monopolies should be abolished.”
“Businesses which are in their nature monopolies are properly part of the functions of the State, and should be assumed by the State. There is the same reason why Government should carry telegraphic messages as that it should carry letters; that railroads should belong to the public as that common roads should.”
“Tax manufactures, and the effect is to check manufacturing; tax improvements, and the effect is to lessen improvement; tax commerce, and the effect is to prevent exchange; tax capital, and the effect is to drive it away. But the whole value of land may be taken in taxation, and the only effect will be to stimulate industry, to open new opportunities to capital, and to increase the production of wealth.”
“In countries like the United States there is much valuable land that has never been improved; and in many of the States the value of the land and the value of improvements are habitually estimated separately by the assessors, though afterward reunited under the term real estate.”
“The effect of substituting for the manifold taxes now imposed a single tax on the value of land would hardly lessen the number of conscious taxpayers, for the division of land now held on speculation would much increase the number of land holders.”
“The elder Mirabeau, we are told, ranked the proposition of Quesnay, to substitute one single tax on rent (the impôt unique) for all other taxes, as a discovery equal in utility to the invention of writing or the substitution of the use of money for barter."
“The needle of the seamstress and the great manufactory; the cart-horse and the locomotive; the fishing boat and the steamship; the farmer's plow and the merchant's stock, would be alike untaxed. All would be free to make or to save, to buy or to sell, unfined by taxes, unannoyed by the tax-gatherer. ”
“the effect of putting all taxation upon the value of land would be to relieve the harder working farmers of all taxation.”
“Thus to put all taxes on the value of land, while it would be largely to reduce all great fortunes, would in no case leave the rich man penniless.”
Social Problems (1883)
“Indirect taxation, the other device by which the people are bled without feeling it, and those who could make the most effective resistance to extravagance and corruption are bribed into acquiescence, is an invention whereby taxes are so levied that those who directly pay are enabled to collect them again from others, and generally to collect them with a profit, in higher prices. Those who directly pay the taxes and, still more important, those who desire high prices, are thus interested in the imposition and maintenance of taxation, while those on whom the burden ultimately falls do not realize it. The corrupting effects of indirect taxation are obvious wherever it has been resorted to, but nowhere more obvious than in the United States.”
“While every citizen may properly be called upon to bear his fair share in all proper expenses of government, it is manifestly an infringement of natural rights to use the taxing power so as to give one citizen an advantage over another, to take from some the proceeds of their labor in order to swell the profit of others, and to punish as crimes actions which in themselves are not injurious.”
“All it is necessary to do is to abolish all other forms of taxation until the weight of taxation rests upon the value of land irrespective of improvements, and take the ground-rent for the public benefit.”
“And in doing this we could abolish all other taxation, and still have a great and steadily increasing surplus.”
“Practically, then, the greatest, the most fundamental of all reforms, the reform which will make all other reforms easier, and without which no other reform will avail, is to be reached by concentrating all taxation into a tax upon the value of land, and making that heavy enough to take as near as may be the whole ground-rent for common
purposes.”
“To appropriate ground-rent to public uses by means of taxation would permit the abolition of all the taxation which now presses so heavily upon labor and capital.”
“It would utterly destroy land monopoly by making the holding of land unprofitable to any but the user. There would be no temptation to anyone to hold land in expectation of future increase in its value when that increase was certain to be demanded in taxes.”
The Science of Political Economy (1898)
“The first one to use the term is said to have been Antoine de Montchretien in his “Treatise on Political Economy” (“Traite' de l’e'conomie politique”), published in Rouen, France, 1615. But if not invented by them, it was given currency, some 130 or 140 years after, by those French exponents of natural right, or the natural order, who may to-day be best described as the first single-tax men.”
“That Quesnay and his associates saw the enormous significance of this “net product” or “unearned increment” for which our economic term is “rent,” is clear from their practical proposition, the impot unique, or single tax. By this they meant just what its modern advocates now mean by it—the abolition of all taxes whatever on the making, the exchanging or the possession of wealth in any form, and the recourse for public revenues to economic rent; the net or surplus product; the (to the individual) unearned increment which attaches to land wherever in the progress of society any particular piece of land comes to afford to the user superior opportunities to those obtainable on land that any one is free to use.”
“the benefit which would result from the perfect freedom given to industry and trade by a substitution of a tax on rent for all the impositions which hamper and distort the application of labor, was doubtless as clearly seen by them as it is by me.”
“Afterwards, with the great idea of the natural order in my head, I printed a little book, “Our Land and Land Policy,” in which I urged that all taxes should be laid on the value of land, irrespective of improvements. Casually meeting on a San Francisco street a scholarly lawyer, A. B. Douthitt, we stopped to chat, and he told me that what I had in my little book proposed was what the French “Economists” a hundred years before had proposed.”
“Even if Adam Smith had seen the place of the single tax in the natural order, as the natural means for the supply of the natural needs of civilized societies, prudence might well have suggested that his inquiry should not he carried so far. I mean, not merely that prudence of the individual which impelled Copernicus to withhold until after his death any publication of his discovery of the movement of the earth about the sun; but that prudence of the philosopher which, from a desire to do the utmost that he can for Truth and Justice in his own time, may prevent him from advancing a larger measure of truth than his own time can receive.”
“Thus H. M. Hyndman has dug up from the British Museum a lecture by Thomas Spence, delivered before the Philosophical Society of Newcastle, on November 8, 1775, a year prior to the publication of the “Wealth of Nations,’ and for which the Society, as Spence puts it, did him “the honor” to expel him. In this lecture Spence declares that all men “have as equal and just a property in land as they have in liberty, air, or the light and heat of the sun,” and he proposes what now would be again called “the single tax”—that the value of land should be taken for all public expenses, and all other taxes of what ever kind and nature should be abolished. ”
Substack apparently limits the word count in comments so I'll have to share the rest elsewhere: https://qr.ae/pssaEH
Thanks for reading!
Here’s some additional quotes I found of him supporting a single full land value tax…
Progress & Poverty (1879)
“It is difficult for small farmers and homestead owners to get over the idea that to put all taxes on the value of land would be unduly to tax them.”
“When it is first proposed to put all taxes upon the value of land, and thus confiscate rent, all land holders are likely to take the alarm, and there will not be wanting appeals to the fears of small farm and homestead owners, who will be told that this is a proposition to rob them of their hard-earned property. But a moment's reflection will show that this proposition should commend itself to all whose interests as land holders do not largely exceed their interests as laborers or capitalists, or both.”
“There need not have been a customs duty, an excise, license, or income tax, yet all the present expenditures could be met, and a large surplus remain to be devoted to any purpose which would conduce to the comfort or well-being of the whole people.”
“All peoples have recognized the common ownership in land, and that private property is an usurpation, a creation of force and fraud.”
“We already take some rent in taxation. We have only to make some changes in our modes of taxation to take it all.”
“We may put the proposition into practical form by proposing— to abolish all taxation save that upon land values.”
“But this is so natural and easy a matter, that it may be considered as involved, or at least understood, in the proposition to put all taxes on the value of land.”
“There are the temporary monopolies created by the patent and copyright laws. These it would be extremely unjust and unwise to tax, inasmuch as they are but recognitions of the right of labor to its intangible productions, and constitute a reward held out to invention and authorship.”
“It is much better that these monopolies should be abolished.”
“Businesses which are in their nature monopolies are properly part of the functions of the State, and should be assumed by the State. There is the same reason why Government should carry telegraphic messages as that it should carry letters; that railroads should belong to the public as that common roads should.”
“Tax manufactures, and the effect is to check manufacturing; tax improvements, and the effect is to lessen improvement; tax commerce, and the effect is to prevent exchange; tax capital, and the effect is to drive it away. But the whole value of land may be taken in taxation, and the only effect will be to stimulate industry, to open new opportunities to capital, and to increase the production of wealth.”
“In countries like the United States there is much valuable land that has never been improved; and in many of the States the value of the land and the value of improvements are habitually estimated separately by the assessors, though afterward reunited under the term real estate.”
“The effect of substituting for the manifold taxes now imposed a single tax on the value of land would hardly lessen the number of conscious taxpayers, for the division of land now held on speculation would much increase the number of land holders.”
“The elder Mirabeau, we are told, ranked the proposition of Quesnay, to substitute one single tax on rent (the impôt unique) for all other taxes, as a discovery equal in utility to the invention of writing or the substitution of the use of money for barter."
“The needle of the seamstress and the great manufactory; the cart-horse and the locomotive; the fishing boat and the steamship; the farmer's plow and the merchant's stock, would be alike untaxed. All would be free to make or to save, to buy or to sell, unfined by taxes, unannoyed by the tax-gatherer. ”
“the effect of putting all taxation upon the value of land would be to relieve the harder working farmers of all taxation.”
“Thus to put all taxes on the value of land, while it would be largely to reduce all great fortunes, would in no case leave the rich man penniless.”
Social Problems (1883)
“Indirect taxation, the other device by which the people are bled without feeling it, and those who could make the most effective resistance to extravagance and corruption are bribed into acquiescence, is an invention whereby taxes are so levied that those who directly pay are enabled to collect them again from others, and generally to collect them with a profit, in higher prices. Those who directly pay the taxes and, still more important, those who desire high prices, are thus interested in the imposition and maintenance of taxation, while those on whom the burden ultimately falls do not realize it. The corrupting effects of indirect taxation are obvious wherever it has been resorted to, but nowhere more obvious than in the United States.”
“While every citizen may properly be called upon to bear his fair share in all proper expenses of government, it is manifestly an infringement of natural rights to use the taxing power so as to give one citizen an advantage over another, to take from some the proceeds of their labor in order to swell the profit of others, and to punish as crimes actions which in themselves are not injurious.”
“All it is necessary to do is to abolish all other forms of taxation until the weight of taxation rests upon the value of land irrespective of improvements, and take the ground-rent for the public benefit.”
“And in doing this we could abolish all other taxation, and still have a great and steadily increasing surplus.”
“Practically, then, the greatest, the most fundamental of all reforms, the reform which will make all other reforms easier, and without which no other reform will avail, is to be reached by concentrating all taxation into a tax upon the value of land, and making that heavy enough to take as near as may be the whole ground-rent for common
purposes.”
“To appropriate ground-rent to public uses by means of taxation would permit the abolition of all the taxation which now presses so heavily upon labor and capital.”
“It would utterly destroy land monopoly by making the holding of land unprofitable to any but the user. There would be no temptation to anyone to hold land in expectation of future increase in its value when that increase was certain to be demanded in taxes.”
The Science of Political Economy (1898)
“The first one to use the term is said to have been Antoine de Montchretien in his “Treatise on Political Economy” (“Traite' de l’e'conomie politique”), published in Rouen, France, 1615. But if not invented by them, it was given currency, some 130 or 140 years after, by those French exponents of natural right, or the natural order, who may to-day be best described as the first single-tax men.”
“That Quesnay and his associates saw the enormous significance of this “net product” or “unearned increment” for which our economic term is “rent,” is clear from their practical proposition, the impot unique, or single tax. By this they meant just what its modern advocates now mean by it—the abolition of all taxes whatever on the making, the exchanging or the possession of wealth in any form, and the recourse for public revenues to economic rent; the net or surplus product; the (to the individual) unearned increment which attaches to land wherever in the progress of society any particular piece of land comes to afford to the user superior opportunities to those obtainable on land that any one is free to use.”
“the benefit which would result from the perfect freedom given to industry and trade by a substitution of a tax on rent for all the impositions which hamper and distort the application of labor, was doubtless as clearly seen by them as it is by me.”
“Afterwards, with the great idea of the natural order in my head, I printed a little book, “Our Land and Land Policy,” in which I urged that all taxes should be laid on the value of land, irrespective of improvements. Casually meeting on a San Francisco street a scholarly lawyer, A. B. Douthitt, we stopped to chat, and he told me that what I had in my little book proposed was what the French “Economists” a hundred years before had proposed.”
“Even if Adam Smith had seen the place of the single tax in the natural order, as the natural means for the supply of the natural needs of civilized societies, prudence might well have suggested that his inquiry should not he carried so far. I mean, not merely that prudence of the individual which impelled Copernicus to withhold until after his death any publication of his discovery of the movement of the earth about the sun; but that prudence of the philosopher which, from a desire to do the utmost that he can for Truth and Justice in his own time, may prevent him from advancing a larger measure of truth than his own time can receive.”
“Thus H. M. Hyndman has dug up from the British Museum a lecture by Thomas Spence, delivered before the Philosophical Society of Newcastle, on November 8, 1775, a year prior to the publication of the “Wealth of Nations,’ and for which the Society, as Spence puts it, did him “the honor” to expel him. In this lecture Spence declares that all men “have as equal and just a property in land as they have in liberty, air, or the light and heat of the sun,” and he proposes what now would be again called “the single tax”—that the value of land should be taken for all public expenses, and all other taxes of what ever kind and nature should be abolished. ”
Substack apparently limits the word count in comments so I'll have to share the rest elsewhere: https://qr.ae/pssaEH