The Single Tax v World War One (9) January-July 1911
A "Deeper Cut" wanted
The conciliatory tone of summer 1910 did not survive the autumn. In December, Lloyd George, in a novel move, used a motor car for a three week whirlwind election tour, speaking at every stop en route to a daily major speech. His rhetoric hardened again - the majority of peers, he said, were “descended from plunderers of the poor”. And his radicalism over the land question did not wane, on the contrary, both Tories and right wing Liberals (and presumably single tax Liberals) were “shocked” to read his interview with the French socialist paper L’Humanite, which claimed:
“the Chancellor … is at heart ready to go as far as our Socialistic solution of land nationalisation [although] he did not tell me so.”
- from D.M. Cregier, ‘Bounder from Wales’, Lloyd George’s career before the First World War (1976)
“the brilliant fighting speeches of Mr Lloyd George”
A stranger death of Liberal England
“Here is a Member of the Government who tells us that we cannot cure unemployment”
The Single Tax in the U.S. - “nearer to realisation than the average man in the street imagines.”
“They risked everything to prevent the carrying out of ther Valuation, and through it the initiation of far more radical land reform”
the promised fruits of this “revolution”
“Now that the day of triumph is in sight”
Seen: the Single Tax Cat
Jerome K. Jerome, Single Taxer
Vancouver, the Single Tax in action: cures unemployment in Canada, spreads to the US
Lloyd George in Edinburgh
Henry George: “There are two forms of slavery”
Eugenics - a symptom of land monopoly
“at the botton of all material social questions lies the Land Question”
“when we have abolished the chief cause of poverty we shall have very little need for costly social reform”
LVT “will compel the landlord to seek the aid of labour and capital to enable him to pay the tax”
Single Tax principles in Parliament: “loudly cheered on the Ministerial benches”
4200 v 42000000
Lloyd George: “a twentieth century statesman who who dared to go to the root of economic questions, with justice as a guide”
“the first dreamer is always nailed to the cross”
“the land question in Great Britain is about to be solved. This will burst up the aristocratic basis of the old world.”
“In Germany 132 cities collect a greater part of their income from land values.”
Budget Debate 1910
Smear, and how to handle it
LVT - “the enjoyment by the community of its own revenue”
LVT: “There was more vitality in it from their point of view than in any other question”
Mr Neilson: “We have always urged that this should be done gradually.”
“Note well - Capitalists and Socialists alike - Vancouver is a Single Tax City.”
Sir Edward Grey: popular revolt - “the direction in which the great countries of the world are heading.”
“Poverty is the internal disorder among the nations which is the chief cause of war”
LVT for local government taxation is a policy the Liberalsemphasised around this time.
Gustav Buscher: the recasting of economics to veil the land paradigm.
“The out-and-out supporters of the Taxation of Land Values in the House have greatly strengthened their influence in Parliament and in the country during the present session”
“The very poverty which staggered faith has been turned to evidence of God’s justice.”
Josiah C Wedgwood, Single Taxer
Year three: the Liberal land campaign intensifies
Lloyd George, on his National Insurance Bill: “I don not pretend that this is a complete remedy. Before you get a complete remedy for social evils, you will have to cup deeper …”
The relationship between land (“opportunities for using it”), wages and emigration
Henry George “paraded the irony of the rich growing ever richer by the same law by which the poor become poorer.”
“No one who had once read ‘Progress and Poverty’ could remain the same man that he had been. It changed the atmosphere.”
The Georgist critique of Welfare Statism
“Yes, we must cut deeper, and into the solid earth, the natural foundation of all genuine social reconstruction.”
Land “Unionism”
“The Taxation of Land Values does not select ‘a particular kind of property’, but a particular kind of value.”
The land taxes “introduced into politics a spirit of dishonesty”
LVT: “The question is, how far will that policy prevail? Socialists and Land Taxers will reply, ‘It has prevailed’; and truly they have some grounds for confidence.”
E.G. Pretyman, devoted foe of the Single Tax
1911: Twenty five percent of MPs sign memo urging Georgist revolution
Lloyd George founds the Welfare State.
November 1910: while Asquith pressed the King for assurance over the creation of hundreds of new Liberal peers, to change the balance of power in the House of Lords, striking Welsh miners rioted in Tonypandy. Churchill, embarrassingly, responded with force. This must have been a “deeper cut” to Lloyd George. Demand for radical reform had been aroused, but the revolution was facing zealous, if not fanatical resistance. And the outbreak of industrial unrest was threatening middle class support.
Did the chancellor judge that the transition to a post-unemployment society would likely take years? Could he reasonably have argued that once arrived at, a free market post-unemployment society would gradually dissolve the Welfare State he was now founding?
Winston Churchill at “The battle of Stepney” - a gun battle in London’s East End. Is that Sir Edward Grey with him?
Fifty million LVT leaflets
“That unemployment is a necessary part of our social system has not by any means been proved.”
“The followers of Henry George are the only people who have looked under their feet to find both a cause and a remedy for unemployment.”
“If a thing were altogether preventible no man with anatom of business capacity would think of insuring against such a thing.”
“Justice is the only remedy for poverty, and men should be enabled to stand erect in their own strength and not by the aid of crutches supplied by the State.”
“the theory of land taxation advocated by the disciples of Henry George, now in substance adopted by the whole Liberal Party”
“most people thought the project midsummer madness, the wild imaginings of a visionary, the diseased offspring of an unhealthy desire.”
“a definite step towards the Single Tax”
Lords at war
