At least I think so.  George’s is a scheme by which it is proposed to make employers compete so fiercely among one another that the workman will have it all his own way.  It works this way.  You tax the landowner until it doesn’t pay him to have unused land.  He must either throw it up or get it used somehow and the demand for labour thus created is to lift wages and put the actual workers in what George evidently considers a satisfactory position.  That’s George’s Single Tax scheme.”

“You don’t agree with it?” asked Ned.

“I am a Socialist.  Between all Socialists and all who favour competition in industry, as the Single Tax scheme does, there is a great gulf fixed.  Economically, I consider it fallacious, for the very simple reason that capitalism continues competition, not to selling at cost price but to monopoly, and I have never met an intelligent Single Taxer, and I have met many, who could logically deny the possibility of the Single Tax breaking down in an extension of this very monopoly power.  Roughly, machinery is necessary to work land most profitably, profitably enough even to get a living off it.  Suppose machine holders, that is capitalists, extend their organisation a little and ‘pool’ their interests as land users, that is refuse to compete against one another for the use of land!  Nellie was telling me that at one land sale on the Darling Downs in Queensland the selectors about arranged matters among themselves beforehand.  The land sold, owing to its situation, was only valuable to those having other land near and so was all knocked down at the upset price though worth four times as much.  It seems to me that in just the same way the capitalists, who alone can really use land remember, for the farmer, the squatter, the shopkeeper, the manufacturer, the merchant, are nowadays really only managers for banks and mortgage companies, will soon arrange a way of fixing the values of land to suit themselves.  But apart from that, I object to the Single Tax idea from the social point of view.  It is competitive.  It means that we are still to go on buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest.  It is tinged with that hideous Free Trade spirit of England, by which cotton kings became millionaires while cotton spinners were treated far worse than any chattel slaves.  There are other things to be considered besides cheapness, though unfortunately, with things as they are we seem compelled to consider cheapness first.”

They lay for some time without speaking.

CHAPTER XI.

“It only needs enough faith.”

“You think land and stock and machinery should be nationalised, then?” asked Ned, turning things over in his mind.

“I think land and machinery, the entire means and processes of the production and exchange of wealth, including stock, should be held in common by those who need them and worked cooperatively for the benefit of all.  That is the socialistic idea of industry.  The State Socialists seek to make the State the co-operative medium, the State to be the company and all citizens to be equal shareholders as it were.  State Socialism is necessarily compulsory on all.  The other great socialistic idea, that of Anarchical Communism, bases itself upon voluntaryism and opposes all organised Force, whether of governments or otherwise.”