Taxers consider equal liberty is this: the former secures property, while the latter violates it.
The Anarchists say to the individual: "Occupancy and use is the only title to land in which we will protect you; if you attempt to use land which another is occupying and using, we will protect him against you; if another attempts to use land to which you lay claim, but which you are not occupying and using, we will not interfere with him; but of such land as you occupy and use you are the sole master, and we will not ourselves take from you, or allow any one else to take from you, whatever you may get out of such land."
The Single-Taxers, on the other hand, say to the individual: "You may hold all the land you have inherited or bought, or may inherit or buy, and we will protect you in such holding; but, if you produce more from your land than your neighbors produce from theirs, we will take from you the excess of your product over theirs and distribute it among them, or we will spend it in taking a free ride whenever we want to go anywhere, or we will make any use of it, wise or foolish, that may come into our heads."
The reader who compares these two positions will need no comment of mine to enable him to decide " on which side the maximum of liberty lies," and on which side property, or the individual control of product, is respected.
If Mr. Byington does not accept my view thus outlined, it is incumbent upon him to overthrow it by proving to me that man has a right to land; if he does accept it, he must see that it completely disposes of his assertion that "when another man takes a piece of land for his own and warns me off it, he exceeds the limits of equal liberty toward me with respect to that land," upon which assertion all his argument rests.
I see an excellent opportunity for some interesting and forcible remarks in comment upon Mr. Byington's concluding paragraph, but, desiring to confine the discussion to essentials for the present, I refrain.
GOING TO PIECES ON THE ROCKS.
[Liberty, March 12, 1887.]
Some of Henry George's correspondents have been pestering him a good deal lately with embarrassing questions as to what will become, under his system, of the home of a man who has
