States, in 1861. The present revolutions in China and Mexico will almost certainly abolish some political and some economic privileges. The establishment of woman suffrage in some countries and states is abolishing one form of political privilege.
All political privilege will be abolished only when there is perfect equality of voting and legislative rights. To get these, we must have popular and democratic government, with one vote for each citizen of whatever race or of either sex. If we have a so-called representative government, it must be kept representative by the initiative, referendum and recall. The reins must always be in the hands of the people. The majority must always rule. There must be no hereditary rights and no constitution that can not be overturned, at the will of the living majority. Anything short of this is not full political equality and is inconsistent with the New Freedom.
There are two principal forms of economic privileges: (1) Restrictions on productions: (2) Restrictions on exchange of goods. Production is interfered with mainly by monopolies of the source of supply of materials or of the opportunities to produce. These monopolies are conferred by means of title deeds, franchise rights, leases, etc. We can ignore patent rights, for they are but temporary, and, theoretically, are intended to encourage improvements in machinery and thus to increase production, even during the short periods for which they run.
Probably the easiest and simplest way to abolish land and franchise monopolies, and thus to get rid of the privileges pertaining to land, is through government ownership of all franchise or public service corporations or monopolies, and by taking, for public purposes, the full economic rent of land. This can best be done by what we in this country call the Single Tax. The Single Tax simply takes for the public what the public produces—the so-called unearned increment of land—and, by taxing nothing else but land values, leaves to individual producers all that they produce. The single tax, therefore, conserves property rights to the greatest possible extent. It gives, in the most practical way, each citizen, from his birth, his full right to the use of the earth. Thomas Jefferson, Herbert Spencer and many other great statesmen and thinkers, from Moses to Henry George, agree that the earth, in usufruct, should belong to the living, and that the dead should have no control over it.
Exchange of goods is interfered with mainly through import and internal revenue taxes. Of these the import, or tariff taxes are, by far, the more important from a restrictive standpoint. They can be abolished by wiping them from our statute-books, in which case we should have trade as free and natural between countries as it is between our states and cities.
With full and equal political rights and with full and equal rights
