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Land tax ninety-seven years on
Excerpt: This comes from the Guardian archive - and is probably out of copyright
This comes from the Guardian archive - and is probably out of copyright
The Lords and Tories fear a land tax
Tuesday September 28, 1909
The GuardianThat the Lords will reject the Budget - or postpone it, which is the same thing - till after a general election, the spokesmen of the Opposition seem now agreed.
No one with eyes and a memory really doubts why they will; what they dislike, as they started by showing quite simply, are the land taxes.It was only when the land taxes were found unexpectedly very popular that this attitude had to be abandoned.
All sorts of refinements were resorted to in order that the land-owning peers who condemned the Budget because it touched their pockets might be saved. Since then we have a series of alternative cries.
Lord Rosebury disclosed the appalling spectre of commercial insecurity, happily not visible on the markets; and then Mr. Balfour lit a still brighter lantern inside a larger turnip and labelled it Socialism.The drawback to all these devices has been that they have not really touched the obnoxious land taxes. When they are described as Socialism, the description, if not dismissed at once, tends rather to make people think less ill of Socialism.
Some other direct weapon had to be found. The latest and most logical was that which Mr. Balfour tried to wield last night - the plea that they were not levied solely for the benefit of the local authorities.
Now no one who puts to the landowner who receives unearned increment Mr. Churchill's question, "How did you get it?" can fail to see that the local authorities, by expenditure out of the rates, have helped confer the increment.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer [Lloyd George] sees that, and he proposes to hand half the yield of the taxes over to them. But when Mr. Balfour and Mr. [FE] Smith condemn him for not letting them have the whole, they expose themselves to two crushing replies. Their whole criticism is based on the asking of that very question "How did you get it?" which every spokesman of the landowners has told us it is so wicked to ask.
Where a public authority has helped to create a great value, it is justified in taking a reasonable toll of the value. This is what, in defence of the land taxes, we have urged all along; and if when urged on behalf of the municipality it is, in Mr. Balfour's words, "a simple principle" and one which he "appreciates", how when urged on behalf of the State does it become "Socialism" and robbery and spoliation, and, in fine, the beginning of the end?
[Lloyd George's budget proposed a tax on sales of land. It had to be dropped because of opposition.]
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Fantastic! And let us not forget exactly what they had to give up in order for this not to be put through in what would surely have been a popular referendum - the right to govern itself. the Parliament Act of 1911 was their castration in return for not having LVT. Those on the left who think LVT is a rich man's charter should take note!
I always think Cobden on the subject over half a cetury earlier is very good too:
"For a period of one hundred fifty years after the [Norman] Conquest, the whole of the revenue of the country was derived from the land. During the next one hundred and fifty years it yielded nineteen-twentieths of the revenue. For the next century down to the reign of Richard III it was nine-tenths. During the next seventy years to the time of Mary it fell to about three-fourths. From this time to the end of the Commonwealth, land appeared to have yielded one half of the revenue. Down to the reign of Anne it was one-fourth. In the reign of George III it was one-sixth. For the first thirty years of his reign the land yielded one-seventh of the revenue. From 1793 to 1816 (during the period of the land tax), land contributed one-ninth, from which time to the present [1845] one-twenty-fifth only has been derived from the land. ...Thus, the land which anciently paid the whole of taxation paid now only a fraction. ...The people had fared better under the despotic monarchs than when the power of the state had fallen into the hands of a landed oligarchy who had first exempted themselves from taxation, and next claimed compensation for themselves by a corn law for their heavy and peculiar burdens." [from a speech delivered during the Parliamentary debate on the Corn Laws, 1845]
The growth of income taxes was the last victory of the landed classes keen to palm off the running costs of the country they owned on the working people.
And you can find a lot about "Mr Churchill's questions" here. Which is all the more remarkable owing to his own background.
The question of how public goods and services ought to be paid for is longstanding and hotly debated. What history reveals is a pattern of entrenched privilege that continues to be protected even as societies adopt the processes of democracy. This is true of Britain, and is equally true of the United States where, despite the elimination of hereditary titles and the adoption of a written constitution (with a bill of specified rights), ownership of land became and remains a primary source of entrenched privilege.
The concentrated control over land and natural resources IS the primary cause of widespread, generational poverty. We were warned of this by many of the history's most thoughtful individuals (e.g., Locke, Smith, Turgot, Paine, J.S. Mill, Henry George, Tolstoy, Churchill ... the list goes on). Henry George, most forcefully, declared that true liberty would never be realized until resolution of the land question. Despite tremendous gains in productivity, every society continues to be plagued by unending poverty caused by the failure to collect for public purposes the rental value of land while penalizing those who actually produce goods and services with heavy taxation.
Have we not waited too long for justice to be secured?
Sincerely,
Edward J. Dodson, Director
School of Cooperative Individualism
Cherry Hill, New Jersey (U.S.A.)