LAND SPECULATION AND HIGH PRICES
Land Speculation and High Prices Editor, La Follette's: WILL you kindly permit me a few words as to the contention between Herbert Quick and Professor WW Persons of Dartmouth College regarding the...
...Paul, Minn...
...Respectfully, S...
...Admit that normal rent is not an element in price...
...Not only this, but the cort of making and maintaining highways of all kinds, is enormously increased and hence cost of transportation is much higher...
...Persons quotes the well known economic law that rents are not an element of price...
...It therefore follows that labor produces far less with the same effort than it otherwise would, or, to put it the other way to—far more labor must be given for any particular product...
...and that a considerable element in present high prices is to be found in the enormous rents now prevailing...
...Quick asserts that excessively high rents show themselves in high prices...
...It seems to me, as an academic proposition, Prof...
...still, when land everywhere is boomed to unnaturally high prices—when vast areas of valuable land are held out of use—then the so-called "margin of cultivation" is forced out to much pcorer lands, and all industries are forced to be content with LuiJs of greatly inferior productive power...
...for the very land boom that forces labor to seek opportunities from centers of population, shuts away from labor entirely all these intermediate opportunities that are held idle for a use...
...By land speculation, would-be farmers are forced to leave behind them millions of acres of good land and locate far from markets on poor land...
...Quick's idea...
...C. J. Buell...
...The only remedy that I can see is to take these socially-created land values to meet public needs, and thus release labor from all the present unjust burden of tariffs and other forms of taxation and also relieve it of the enormous tribute it must now pay to land monopoly before it can produce at all...
...Land Speculation and High Prices Editor, La Follette's: WILL you kindly permit me a few words as to the contention between Herbert Quick and Professor WW Persons of Dartmouth College regarding the present ? T high prices...
...Labor, in every other industry, is enormously handicapped...
...Wages can never advance to meet this excessive cost of production...
...Persons is correct, but I also feel sure, that the Professor has failed to grasp the kernel of Mr...
...I feel morally certain that the present wages of labor are less than one-quarter what they would be if there were no land speculation...
...This excessive tribute that labor must pay to land speculation, permeates and curses American industry to-day more than ever before and more than anywhere else in the world...
Vol. 2 • May 1910 • No. 20
