Increasing public interest in taxation problems sometimes confronts forested regions, whose welfare is largely dependent upon forest industry, with agitation for new systems framed without forestry in mind. It is not within the province of forestry organizations to quarrel with any of these insofar as they are sincere attempts to improve social conditions. As such, single tax should properly be left to political economists and to the community for decision as to whether land ownership is the only means by which capital exploits labor and is the source of all our social ills. But foresters and forest welfare do owe it to the public to speak when any measure advocated by those ignorant of or indifferent to forest conditions threatens the perpetuation of forest resources.

SINGLE TAX A DANGER TO FORESTRY

(From the adopted report of the Fifth National Conservation Congress, Washington, D. C., November, 1913.)

The single tax, applied to forests, forces cutting regardless of demand. This means the utter waste of all but the choicest part of the tree; the export to foreign countries, hence the loss to us, of the surplus above our present wants; and the early destruction of a source of tax revenue which should be stable and enduring. It also means the wrecking of the great majority class of lumbermen-the small independent men who have no great financial backing—and placing the control of lumber prices with those who are in position to take advantage of the situation without the slightest benefit to the consumer or any desirable effect of distributing forests among small hands, such as is argued by single-taxers in the case of farm lands. It means only over-cutting and, to accomplish this as economically as possible, only by the largest and perfectly organized operations such as require great capital. With respect to the growing of new forests, to supply the future consumer, continue a tax revenue, and to preserve streamflow, the result would be even more suicidal, for destruction of the project would be attended by no salvage whatever. The forests simply would not be grown.

The only alternative to these evils, under single tax, would be to separate forests from land absolutely, regarding the former as improvements, a distinction impossible to arrive at justly and practically under conditions grading from virgin forest to purely man-grown reproduction, with even the former existent to a certain but unmeasurable degree because of fire protection afforded by the owner. It is wholly unlikely that the public would seriously consider exempting all speculatively-owned forests from taxation. To continue regarding them as land, under single tax, would have the destructive effect described. To exempt them, but compensate by increasing the tax on the land which bears them, would require over-taxing identical land, now denuded but which should be reforested, so that reforestation would be impossible. Consequently, should single tax ever be considered seriously in any forest community, it will be highly necessary to exempt forest lands wholly from its application, either by continuing them under the old general property tax or preferably placing them under a yield tax system which, in effect, applies the income tax principle to this class of property.

E. T. ALLEN

(An address before the State Tax Conference in Seattle, May 27-29, 1914, under the auspices of the University of Washington.)

I have been asked, rather unexpectedly, to marshal in orderly array the obvious answers to the single tax heresy. This is not a pleasing task for one of sympathetic nature, because in the first place single tax is not an argument, but a faith. People believe in single tax not because a thorough study of political economy, pro and con, leaves them na other decision, but because they have discovered a divine revelation which makes study of the other side irreverent. One hesitates to attack such a faith. In the second place, the answers are so many that the whole subject does not seem worth the time required to present them.

In the time I do have, however, I shall not ask you to listen to my own rhetoric but shall try to give a digest of the conclusions of the world's best thinkers who have studied all sides of the question, not as single taxers, or primarily as anti-single taxers, but as unbiased political economists.

Single tax is unjust. While it professes to return society-made values to society, it exempts the many forms of wealth which, quite as much as land values, are due to the existence of society. There is no such thing as individual production. All wealth is made by exploiting community-made conditions, including the needs and services of labor. The most ardent single taxer, who declares that the product of his brain, hand, and industry is his own, and consequently different from community-made values, owes his whole existence, is alive and heard today, only because society has given his wares a market. He and you and I, each alike, owe a debt to this society and should pay it, as taxes, according to our ability to pay. There is no justice in singling out land and sparing other society-made values. All are thus made.

Single tax is uneconomic. By confiscating land values it reduces land to a mere instrument for temporary use. This means abuse of the soil because cultivated by those without enduring interest in its fertility, also lack of land reclamation and development. These mean less food to supply consumers and higher food pricesattacks upon the community's very existence.

Single tax is dangerous. Aside from all its principles, it places the tax-gathering power-the most dangerous power in govern

but one exempted from any need of watching men or methods to prevent oppression, extortion and extravagance, a most corrupt and powerful machine is certain to follow.

Single tax is impracticable. It can not produce the required revenue. Whatever may appear from figures based on present land values, its effect must reduce such values to a point where they cannot support the tax. The poorer and less developed the community, the quicker will its tax sources be destroyed.

Single tax is ambiguous. It is incapable of the clear definition and understanding necessary to intelligent adoption or execution. It is based wholly on upsetting social conditions and bringing about new ones that cannot be accurately forecast. Instead of attempting to utilize the history of eight centuries of English-speaking people in tax reform, it attempts to bring about an untried situation and legislate for it in advance without experience. Naturally it cannot present any clear-cut working method.

Single tax requires impossibilities. It purports to spare values due to the land owner's personal effort, but in practice this cannot be done. What assessor can measure the labor and expense involved in cultivating or improving any tract unless he knows its exact original condition and of every hour and cent spent upon it later? No two tracts, however alike now, represent identically the same effort.

Single tax punishes the poor. The rich can evade its consequences, at least partially, for there are many alternative investments. But the wage earner whose sole hope of investment is in a home of his own, the farmer who knows no trade but using the land, the consumer whose food is to be curtailed in production and then subjected to speculators who can hold it without taxthese have no alternative.

Single tax says to the little investor as well as to the big oneto the wage earner who invests his savings in a home and to the settler who braves privations to acquire one: "You shall have no profit. Profit belongs to us." Will it also guarantee him against loss?

Single tax is an abandoned device for tax reform. All progressive countries are working toward taxing all wealth on the basis of its ability to pay. It is a proposal hundreds of years old, exploded every time it has been studied seriously, and now kept alive chiefly by funds contributed by enemies of true tax reform.

Single tax is seldom a home movement. The chief reason it is before most communities is that an Eastern millionaire, Fels, founded a fund supplying large sums for hired writers, speakers and petition carriers.

No good movement ever depended on paid agitators.

There is double cause to suspect agitation paid for by interests with no stake in the community.

There is treble cause when it seeks legislation to favor such interests at the expense of others.

Single tax exempts Mr. Fels' business and big business generally. Single tax increases the farmer's and home owner's taxes. It destroys the value of their property. Both of these things, the last because of the first, are professed objects of single tax. Its breath of life is in attacking the morality of land ownership. It is by these things that it proposes to produce the millenium.

Single tax arrays against the small land holder all the personal prejudices that can be fostered against the large land holder. We may feel more charitable toward the former, but he is bracketed by single tax in a class deserving punishment. He will not always

escape.

The tax gathering power, if unjustly used, is the world's greatest instrument for corruption, oppression, and destruction of individuals and industries. What safeguard remains for the farmer or home. owner when all other classes are arrayed against him, exempt and without interest unless to profit by extortion, extravagance and political power?

Single tax does not help the wage earner. He pays practically nothing now upon his personal effects. It is his employer who will profit the man who rides in automobiles and grows rich, not by owning land but by exploiting the needs and services of labor.

What the capitalist saves by single tax must be paid by land, passing the burden back to the wage earner in the form of higher food prices. More than that, the speculator in cornered necessities of life, paying no tax while holding them, can wait till the consumer pays his price.

Single tax exempts wealthy proprietors of great sawmills, factories and department stores, idle inheritors of great fortunes, middlemen, wholesalers who control the necessities of life, bankers and bondholders, liquor dealers and loan sharks, landlords of houses and tenements. Does this sound like a wage-earners' law?

Single tax professes to punish the great land and timber owners.

anything on their investment, but after they get their millions allowing full enjoyment without being taxed at all.

Single tax says it seeks to confiscate rent, because rental values are community-made, and to exempt profits of individual effort. Examine this theory from a common sense business standpoint and ask how it is to be done. There is no such sharp distinction between rent and profit for the assessor to recognize. They shade into each other.

Rent may not endure, for land may lose as well as gain value. Though rent is chiefly due to growth of population, it is no more so than the value of any business, and the land holder without skill and effort to serve the community is more apt to lose than gain.

There are exceptions, made much of by single tax writers, but it is a rule that returns from land are made by those who use their capital, earnings or labor, rather than keep it idle, and who develop their property at individual risk and expense, instead of waiting for others or for the community to do it. This is true of the farmer, the home builder, the developer of city additions, and the reclaimer of desert or swamp. There are plenty of failures also.

Single tax denies these services and risks. At least, it cannot measure them. In order to guarantee the community all profit which might otherwise go to an exceptional lucky idler, it is obliged to confiscate them along with community-contributed values. It does this to no other form of human effort. Nowhere else is the investor asked to take all the risk, pay all society's taxes, give up any profit to society, and yet be unreimbursed by society if the venture fails. If it is denied that single tax does this, ask how the assessor is to separate rent and profit.

But here, and I ask you to mark it well, is the conclusive proof of the utter destructiveness of the single tax:

It will penalize the great middle class which constitutes society. While its advocates may make much of the "unearned increment" and point out a few fortunes acquired thereby, the fact remains that land is only to a small extent owned by the rich. These prefer more rapid means of money making, means which wealth can control. Land is chiefly owned by the farmer and the ordinary citizen who invests in a home or in land as a safe form of applying his earnings. It is the ruling passion of our people to own a home and, more than this, to invest their savings in something which is safely beyond the manipulations of their financial masters. They