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About The independent. (Lincoln, Neb.) 1902-1907 | View Entire Issue (May 14, 1903)
12 THE NEBRASKA INDEPENDENT. MAY 14, 190 3. the Uebraska Independent Lincoln, htbraska. UBERTY BUILDING. 132$ 0 STREET Entered according to Act of ConfTMsof March y, 1879, at the Postoffjce at Vncoln, Nebraska, u ttcond-class mail matter. - , PUBLISHED EVERY THURSDAY. FOURTEENTH WAR. $L 00 PER YEAR : ' ' . ' i i " ' When making remittance do. - not leate money with newt agencies, postmasters, etc., to be forwarded by them.' They frequently forget or remit a different amount than was left with them, and the subscriber fails to get ttoper credit. . ' - t ' Address all communications, and niakt all drafts, money orders, etc, payable to ' . tbf lUbrasha Jndtptnderit, . Lincoln, Neb". ' Anonymous -"communications will not be ticed. Rejected manuscripts will not b returned. ' The single .tax will destroy the "va cant lot industry ' ' And the land shall not be sold in perpetuity. Lev2523 "What labor needs is not protec tion, but Justice. "Tom L. Johnson. The land isSaineTsosays the Lord. Lev. xxv : 23. "All bosh," says the landlord, "the land is mine." "The poor ye shall always have vith you," as long as the land spec ulator dwells in your midst. There are a thousand things hack ing at the branches of evil. The sin gle tax is hacking at the root. Three classes only pay full personal property" taxes in cities the poor, the ultra honest and the orphans. The man out of a job regulates wages. The single tax would givj , every one employment and raise wages. sCx The home is the safeguard of re publican institutions, and the single tax would make it possible for all to have one. . . The singl3NtaxNwould lower rent, raise wages, encourage industry, equalize opportunities, and thereby benefit all. . Labor applied to land produces all wealth! Why, then, are laborers poor? - Read "Condition of Labor," by Henry George. True government secures to each man his earnings, so no government. Is true that permits land monopoly. Single Tax Paster. , "The single tax is a scheme of con fiscation." , Yes, precisely as abolition of slavery was it . confiscates the power to confiscate the fruits of oth ers' labor. WILTakcfield. ? Under date of May 5, Hon. George Fred Williams writes that he will be unable to contribute an article for the Henry George Edition, saying that he is "not an authority on the single tax question" and that his utmost ability is taxed to keep up with his professional work Under date of May 4 Mayor Tom L. Johnson of Cleveland writes that his time is so very much occupied that he finds it difiicult to give proper at tention to his mail, to say nothing of doing any writing for the paper?. He appreciate the invitation to con tribute to the, Henry George Edition, and regrets that it is not possible for him to accept , , ; All the farmer's personal property is of a nature that cannot be concealed and is usually well " known to the lo cal assessor, so that little, if any, es capes its tax. Assessors cannot esti mate the value of a manufacturing plant, a stock of goods, valuable pic tures and jewelry, etc., with any cer tainty, even if he knows of their ex istence. A man may have many thou ' sands of dollars of . interest-paying se curities in his breast pocket or his safe, but the assessor has no way of finding them or knowing their value. The total personal property tax paid toy either Morgan or-Rockefeller this year is stated to be less than their hourly incomes. In proportion to what he owns the farmer pays many times more personal property tax than any other class. W. II. T. Wakefield. GREETING To the Single Taxers of America: This issue of The Independent is evi dence of your skill in wielding that weapon said to be mightier than the sword. Aside from this item and one or two others (and the advertising) substantially every word in this is-sue-The Henry George Edition is from the pen of a single taxer. To the disciples of Henry George who have so kindly assisted in mak ing this special number the pro nounced success, which it is undoubt edly, the thanks of the editors and business manager are hereby tendered, i 1 hi '.. Independent for . nearly ' fifteen years has ' championed ' the cause cf the people's party; and it will con tinue ti; uo. so. Its editors sincerely b.lievo that tLe questions of money, land and transportation are the three of paramount importance, and that they will never be settled until they are settled right. That no permanent relief can be had so long as private corporations are permitted to exercisa the fcovereign power to "coin money and teLulate the value thereof; or so long as the avenues of transportation and transmission of intelligence jur. owned and operated by private cor porations. - How the land question should be " settled has never been clearly enun ciated in any populist platform,' and although many populists are singie taxers, they are by no means a un'.t on this question. The platform adopted at Sioux Falls, May 10, 1900, says: . "With Thomas Jefferson we de . clare the land, including all nat- ural sources of wealth, the inalien- . able hpritage of the people. Gov ernment should so act as to se cure homes for the people - and prevent land monopoly." This, it is urged by single tax pop ulists, can mean nothing else than a settlement of the land question ac cording to the philosophy of Henry George.: In any event it is a plank that, especially in the west, has been overshadowed by the questions of money and transportation. And thi3 edition of The Independent will af ford its populist readers an oppor tunity to study and decide for them selves. The suggestion of Mr. E. T. Weeks of New Iberia, La., in his article en titled VA Question of Morals," will merit careful study, especially in con nection with the suggestion of Mr. James Hartley of Amsterdam, N. Y., In his article, "Jeffersonian Clubs," The Independent of March 26, 1903, wherein he urges that the land and labor reformers of the east unite with the money and transportation reform ers of the west, and nominate Hon. Tom L. Johnson for president. It being evident that the evils of indirect taxation will not be abolished by a mere change from tweedledee protection to tweedledum for revenue only; and that the trust problem will not be solved under private ownrship of transportation and transmission of intelligence, there is food for serious thought in the suggestions of these gentlemen. The Independent bids God-speed to the disciples of Henry George. No men are inspired by loftier motives or higher ideals. If the single tax is to succeed finally it must first prove a success in the smaller taxing juris dictions, and for that reason every effort should be made to secure local option in levying taxes and thus give it a trial. The Fairlvope example means something, but a whole county should try it, or a whole state if pos sible. So many more manuscripts having been received than we could possibly use in this number, we have decided to devote page 6 each week hereafter to the single tax and thus make use of all the valuable material on hanl. T. H. TIBBLES, Editor. C. Q. De FRANCE, Associate. F. D. EAGER, Business Mgr. THE MONEY QUESTION (Written for Henry George Edition of The Independent) Government, federal and minor, should issue paper certificates, in multiples of one dollar, i. e., 25.8 grains of gold, in payment of all ser vices rendered to government, these certificates to be receivable for all taxes due to government The issue of these certificates should be limited to the taxing power of the several governments, this taxing power to be limited in turn to the volume of ground rent Ground rent would de pend on population, expanding with the growth of population and with increasing public expenditures. To in sure uniformity in the certificates the federal treasury should issue them, at cost, to the minor governments. Coins, such as are now used, would doubtless prove the most satisfactory for fractional currency. Gold and sil ver should be reduced to a commod ity, basis. Then there would be less 5 . . . ... .... S3 We Want Your Mousy 1 Hold on don't get rattled about it we want it legitimately and we want to give you more for it than you, can get of anybody else. . We're in business .to make money not for glory, and we 've found out that the easiest way toget a man to keep on trading here is to give him his money's worth. For instance, we will give you an elegant all pure wool Cassimere Suit for $7.75. We know it's, as good a suit as you can get here in our city for $10 and you '11 probably be asked even more for it where you live, but we rather $e hundreds of suits at $7.75 than dozens at $10. If .we only sold dozens we couldn't buy 'em for $7.75 and we 'd have to get $10 like our neighbors do and we would n't be a different store from the others. Bo you grasp the idea ? , ' I incentive to corner them, while the single tax applied to gold and silver mines, would add to the difficulty of cornering those metals. Assuming then that gold would fluctuate less than any other commodity, it should be used as the standard of value but not as money. A second standard would be superfluous and illogical. It is not the function of government to issue an arbitrary volume of cur rency, whether $50 per capita or, any other amount Its . function in,, the premises is to issue certificates in pay ment for services rendered and to re ceive them in payment of taxes. It is not government's concern whether the volume of currency is too great or too small. Thct is the concern of commerce. The business world is ful ly competent to meet that emergency. The bulk of exchanges are even now made with private credits checks, drafts, etc. in other words, by a highly developed system of book keeping. Instead of assuming the powers of a huge paternal machine, government should be limited to the functions of a business corporation a business corporation which would include the whole people. The application of the single tax on land values, or, more properly speaking, the public appropriation of ground rent, would simplify the solu tion of the problems of finance, trans portation, tariff, etc. It is the funda mental reform. A. FREELAND. Mt Pleasant, Tenn. TTHERE IT IS (Written for Henry George Edition of The Independent.) Most people in this country now know what the single tax is, but only a few of them yet know where it is. For some time past a knowledge of what the single tax is has been a part of the general knowledge of the time. But it is not so easy to perceive how far the doctrine has worked its way into the thought of the day, and won its way to general acceptance." When the abolitionists began their work it did not take the people of the United States long to learn what was meant by abolition. But there were few indeed who realized when the work of the abolitionists was accom plished. Indeed the vast majority of people do not yet realize when chat tel slavery really met its doom. It is the generally accepted belief that slavery died when the Proclamation of Emancipation went into effect or when the fourteenth amendment wa3 adopted. The fact is that the aboli tionists had finished their work years before the Proclamation was issued or the amendment was proposed, and slavery died when in the summer of 1858-the voters of Kansas rejected by an overwhelming majority - the Le compton constitution. The abolition movement was not far under way before the slave-holders be gan to realize where it was, and they, always recognized the stages of its progress much more clearly and correctly than did either the aboli tionists or their allies. They heard the death rattle , in the monster's throat at the very time when the earnest men who were in the fight for freedom still imagined him to be full of sturdy life and groping "in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey," and the most far-seeing of them were of. the opinion that the institu tion would endure for at least a cen- tury to come. - . :- I John Morley says that when Turgot died in 1781, the French revolution was an accomplished fact. Yt the Bastile stood until 1789. Landlord ism is, throughout the English-speaking world, as dead today as slavery was in 1858, or as the ancien regime was in France in 1781. The practical triumph of the single tax may be postponed for a few years more by the skilful tactics of its opponents, but the work of its propagandists is already accomplished. . The people who come nearest to perceiving this fact are the uphold ers of privilege and monopoly, who believe that the advent of the singla tax will be their undoing. They are sufficiently interested to study the movement and to note the evidences of its advance. Four years ago Lord Salisbury, the typical English land lord, prophesied that when next the liberal party 8ttained to unity and ac tivity, the first object of its attack would be the institution of landlord ism. But it is doubtful if even he could then have foreseen that in so short a time a single tax bill, framed on Henry George lines, would come within thirteen votes of passing in the house of commons. Arthur Withy, one of the ablest and clearest-headed of the English single taxers, in a signed article in the Westminster Review for September, 1895, predicted that the liberal party would never win another victory un til it placed the taxation of land val ues foremost in its program. The par ty has put the question in the first place, and now he predicts that it will win an overwhelming victory at the next general election which he ex pects to take place in the autumn of the present year. And he "confidently, predicts that the next liberal , minis try will pass the bill, the vote on which came so near defeating the tory government on the night of the 27th of March last. The homogeneity of the British peo ple renders it less difiicult to see where the single tax is in that coun try than where it is with us, but it is entirely safe to infer that we are not far behind. JOSEPH LEGGETT. San Francisco, Cal. The single tax Is the only just tax because it is the only one based on benefits received and the only one which cannot be shifted to others. V. H. T, .Wakefield. j