(3) To permit and encourage access to the most advantageous outside markets for the surplus products of the estate.
(4) To scrutinize the character of would-be tenants, to whom is held out the definite promise of ultimately becoming co-owners.
Almost any ordinary landlord would approve this list of duties, while a far-sighted landlord would be keenly interested in seeing that the revenue of each worthy tenant was proportionate to his effective effort, so that there might be given to him every opportunity of improving his individual holdings, the needs and potential virtues of which he knows much better than his landlord. It might be said that some of these alleged obligations go further than far-sighted self-interest; but it would depend whether the landlord were thinking of himself or the estate. In the case of democracy, on the basis of collective self-interest, we have the logical right to assume that we are dealing with an exceptional landlord, whose chief desire is the success of his tenants.[1]
Perforce, then, we are the joint-landlords of the estate, with a quick and intimate interest in the happiness and activity of our tenants (who, severally, are ourselves), and it should be fairly easy to agree that our advantageous duties are as stated, namely:
To keep order without unnecessary interference; to facilitate production and exchange; to permit no avoidable barriers to advantageous markets for our surplus products; and to scrutinize the character of those would-be tenants who ultimately are to become co-owners. Expanding these simple conceptions to the terms of statecraft, we have a definite grouping of duties which should not be hard to appreciate, even though these duties have been the subject of much contention where
- ↑ It is as individual tenants that we are mortally afraid of the single taxers as landlords. They propose to exact the full “rental-value” of land, without any impersonal method of measuring value, or any conception of a scientific unit of measurement. Value of this kind, if stripped to its ugly nakedness, instead of being the orderly relation between known supply and known demand, is the disorderly relation between power and desperation; and since democracy has of necessity less freedom to make exceptions than our autocratic predecessors, can we look for a contented tenantry when we have bureaucratic control of supply pitted against the individual’s desperate demand, as a basis of rental value?
