Locke and Franklin revisited

A great article, "Stupid Property Owners", by Gavin Putland at the Land Values Research Group site, reminds us of something John Locke said:

"It is in vain in a country whose great fund is land to hope to lay the publick charge of the Government on anything else; there at last it will terminate. The merchant (do what you can) will not bear it, the labourer cannot, and therefore the landholder must: and whether he were best to do it by laying it directly where it will at last settle, or by letting it come to him by the sinking of his rents, ... let him consider."

One of Adam Smith's canons of taxation was that the burden of taxation should be as direct as possible. Putland's article reviews the collateral costs involved in taxing anything other than the value of land.

As our own Benjamin Franklin once said, "Our legislators are all landowners, and they are not yet persuaded that all taxes are finally paid by the land ... therefore, we have been forced into the mode of indirect taxes. ...All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species, is his natural right which none may justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public.”