It is impossible within our limits of space to discuss this proposal further than to indicate that:  (1) It assumes an untenable theory of property.[4] (2) It overlooks the difficulty of distinguishing the value of the land “irrespective of improvements,” from that of the land as it actually is, a difficulty especially great in the case of agricultural land.[5] The difficulty is present even in the case of urban land when the improvements of filling, draining, and leveling have become incorporated with the site.[6] (3) The plan ignores the stimulus (motivating force) which private ownership has given and still gives to the maintenance and fuller productive use of land.  Nowhere has production thriven where the state was the universal landlord.

Sec. 10. #Various reforms in land taxation.# While the single tax plan is defective in principle, its wide discussion has served to direct attention toward the need of reform in the taxation of land.  Some proposals looking toward this end are widely favored by opponents as well as by advocates of the single tax.  Such are the following: 

(a) The abandonment of the taxation of mortgages.[7]

(b) A more correct assessment, in accordance with the present laws, of lots and lands held for speculative purposes, which in practice are now greatly under-assessed.

(c) More adequate special franchise taxation upon corporations for special privileges in the public highways.

(d) Exemption, in value equal to the costs, of improvements on land, such as buildings, drains, fences, and fertilizers, for a limited time after they are made, perhaps five years.

(e) The separate assessment of urban lands used as mere building sites and of the buildings on them.

(f) Taxation of the increase ("increment”) of urban land values, periodically or on the occasion of transfer of ownership.

Sec. 11. #Difficulties in taxing corporations.#[8] Until near the second quarter of the nineteenth century, business corporations (of which there were few) were taxed just as was the general property of individuals.  This still continues to be the case in the main in most of the states.  The methods and machinery of assessment were (and still are) essentially local and simple, and have proved to be inadequate to reach or justly assess the larger and more complex corporate enterprises when their equipment and business extend beyond town, then county and, finally, state lines.  Moreover, the corporate forms of organization presented in complex and puzzling forms the dual conception of property.[9] Here was the tangible wealth of the corporation and there were the diffused rights of ownership, the capital of individual stockholders and bondholders.  Confused by this ambiguity, the men of that time believed (as many still believe) that there were here two separate and justly taxable funds of value.  The popular will declared (and still declares) that “all kinds of property ought to bear their fair share of the burdens of taxation.”  Yet to apply this principle would obviously be double taxation and result in confiscation in many cases.  Between this doubt and the practical difficulty of assessment, it turned out that corporate wealth, far from being doubly taxed, was largely escaping even its due single burden.