Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1916-07-02

of use for speculative purposes. More than half of the land in every towr and city is so held. It is the same way in the country. Although tht land is not used, you can not get it At least you can not get it on terms you can accept. The landlords otherwise called groundhogs, are tot fise to permit anything of the kind.
 They want to live without worK They want to get big rentals for tn: land they permit to be used, and then to live on the income. When they have occasion to employ labor, they want to be cheap. It is a beautiful scheme. And it works. When you look at your pay envelope, you know it works.
 Now, let's beat them at their own game; Let's get busy in politics and work for a reformation in our tax laws. We have a rule by which tc proceed. A tax discourages the thing taxed. Let us then tax everything we do want. That's simple, isn't it! Now first of all, we don't want land held out of use for speculative pur- poses. That hurts all of us. The workers have to pay the drones for every speculative advance in land values. So let's tax land speculation But how? Simply by placing big tax on the value of land-not the acreage, but the value. mind you-re- gardless of whether or not the land is used.
 User of Land Profits.
 Then the man who usese his land will not be hurt. But the man who holds his land out of use, or who only partially uses it vii. be soaked. And he's the man we're after.
 The beautiful thing about it is that when land values are taxed the land lord can not add the tax to his rent. Roughly speaking. the rent of any site is it's desirability measured by the competition of those who want it.
 Now if by taxation we soaked land speculators so hard tllat they coul: no longer hold their land out"of use, they would have to bring it into use or let some one have it who would. That would increase the number of available sites. And any such in- crease in sites without correspond ing increase in the number of peo- pie who want them, inevitably re- duces rents. And reduced rents mean cheaper land.
 So, all we have to do is to make the tax on land values high enough and all sites would then be available. Since the state of Texas has enough land to support the present popula- .tion. of the, world, think. what it would mean !. if land speculation were: abol- ished in this way.
 Good land would then be almost # not quite as cheap as Bill Jones or Tom Smith found it just after the war of the AnErican Revolution. Anyone who wanted land for use could get it practically without money and without price. All he would have to pay would be the taxes.
 Now of course all men are not farmers. All men would not want to go onto farms. They wouldn't have to do so to get the benefit of this fundamental reform. If very small percentage of men did so then by talk ing themselves out of the labor mar- ket, they would so change the ratio between men and jobs that the wages of all men everywhere would be raised automatically by the competi- tion Of jobs for men.
 The man who operates lathe at the gear works would benefit no less than the man who actually left the city and went onto farm of his own.
 Just as gravity pulls rock down the mountain side, while at the same time it pushes a balloon into the skies. so also competition will de- press or elevate wages according to the ratio between men and jobs. And by a staff tax on land values this ratio may be reversed so as to in crease the wages of all men every where.
 Pm for it. Are you?
 (Reprinted from The Indiana Rorum, Indianapolls.)