100 years ago in The Saratogian
Friday, Nov. 23, 1917
“How Righteousness Exalteth a Nation” is the subject at First Methodist Church tonight, but James F. Morton speaks on a purely secular subject.
Morton is the field secretary of the New York State Single Tax League. He tells the First Methodist men’s club that “there is nothing inherently immoral in economics, but only in the misapplication of the terms.” Single Taxers, influenced by the 19th century economist Henry George, claim that a righteous tax will exalt the American economy.
“The Single Tax is a means of raising revenue for public purposes, which will enable the stat to deal justly with all its citizens, and put them in a position to deal justly with one another,” Morton says, “The special plan of the Single Tax is to abolish all taxes except one on land values, gradually raising this one tax, if it is properly called a tax, until it absorbs the entire annual revenue from land values.
“Unlike all other classes of what is called property, land is not produced by man. In its economic sense, it includes all the gifts of nature, which are showered freely on all in accordance with natural law. It follows almost of itself that if any of these free gifts is exclusively used as private property by any person, such person is bound to return to the whole people an equivalent in some form of that portion of the earth which he withholds from the others.
“By taking this natural revenue for public uses, it will become possible to abolish all other taxes, which bear heavily upon industry. The present system of taxing personal property and improvements upon land encourages idleness and discourages industry.
“The Single Tax would allow a man to keep all that he fairly earns, but would prevent him from monopolizing natural resources, in order to reap what he has not sown.”
For Morton, a Single Tax system is “pure justice, furnishing the natural soil for the growth of all the social virtues…. It lifts the foot from the neck of the weak, renders involuntary poverty an almost incomprehensible nightmare of the undeveloped past, and establishes a stable and lofty civilization on the secure basis of natural social justice.”
Schuylerville wins
Saratoga County’s leading basketball team, representing Schuylerville, opens its season with a 32-29 home victory over the Rensselaer Garnets in a benefit for the soldiers of Camp Devens in Ayer MA.
“The game was close and interesting throughout and was featured by the fast work of both teams,” The Saratogian reports. It’s lowscoring by 21st century standards because basketball has no shot clock in 1917.