[88] Cf. Marsh, "Land Value Taxation in American Cities," p. 95. [89] Municipal purchase and ownership of land have been advocated by such a conservative authority as the Rev. Heinrich Pesch, S.J. "Lehrbuch der Nationaloekonomie," I, 203. [90] As we shall see in a later chapter, the confiscation and injustice would be smaller if the State should simultaneously abolish interest. In any case, the decline in land value resulting from complete confiscation of rent should be made up to the private owner by public compensation. [91] "Principles of Political Economy," book V, ch. 2, sect. v. [92] "Progressive Taxation in Theory and Practice," 1908, p. 130. [93] Cf. Taussig, "Principles of Economics," II, 516: Seligman, "The Shifting and Incidence of Taxation," p. 223. [94] The "discrimination" objection is put in a somewhat different form by the Rev. Sydney F. Smith, S.J., in an article in _The Month_, Sept., 1909, entitled "The Theory of Unearned Increment." His argument is in substance that if the people of a city can claim the increases in land values which their presence and activity have occasioned, the purchasers of food, clothes, books, or concert tickets are equally justified in claiming that, "having added to the value of the shops and music halls, they had acquired a co-proprietary right in the increased value of the owners' stock, and the owners' premises." While this argument is specifically directed against those who maintain that the "social production" of values confers a right thereto, it affects to some extent our thesis that there is a vast difference between value-increases in land and in other goods. Father Smith seems to confuse the origination of value with the increase of value. The presence of consumers is an obvious prerequisite to the existence of any value at all in any kind of goods, but labour and financial outlay on the part of the producers of the goods are an equally indispensable prerequisite. The reason why the value is appropriated by the latter rather than the former is that this is clearly the only rational method of distribution. What we are concerned with here, however, is not this initial or cost-of-production-value of artificial goods, but the _increases_ in value above this level which are brought about by external and social influences. Theoretically, the State could as reasonably take these as the increases in the value of land; practically, such a performance is out of the question, for the simple reason that such increases are spasmodic and exceptional. If Father Smith thinks that "food or clothes, or books, or concert tickets" regularly advance above the cost-of-production-value, he is simply mistaken. Since these and other artificial goods bring to their owners as a rule no socially occasioned increments of value, they and their owners are in quite a different situation from land and the owners of land.