Single Tax

SINGLE TAX

A Henry George Advocate Makes a Good Speech

The single tax meeting held in Lyra hall was well attended and before it was over all the seats were filled. Thomas Bawden of Detroit, the speaker, was very much in earnest. He has a pleasant voice, but a somewhat peculiar pronounced on of some words. He was evidently not an atheist and thoroughly believes in temperance and total abstinence from tobacco and liquor. He defined the single tax idea to be the taxing of land according to its value, without regards to to its improvements. He said 1300 billions were paid annually in this country for rent of which 400 millions went to England and Germany. That was what the people paid for breathing the American air. Wages were what can be produced by hands upon raw products. Everything in life that is worth having comes from labor, He did not criticize the landlord or the capitalist as everybody would be one if they had the chance. The law of rent was a natural monopoly. Poverty comes from the broken laws of God, no prayer can save mens from poverty. If a man gets more rent for a store now than 10 years ago, it is because the population is more dense and land values have increased. More people today were too poor to buy 100 miles of railroad travel than 10 years ago. This was not progress, it was retrogression. Machines did not displace men but displaced land, making it more rare.

He was quite severe in his criticism on Rockafellow and the Baptist church and thought Rockafellow's religion, was really hypocracy. Mr. Bawden made some converts by his talk and was particularly pleasing to the  followers of the Henry George idea.