On the other hand, there would be certain and serious disadvantages. A considerable number of land users might permit their holdings to deteriorate through careless cultivation. To be sure, they would not find this a profitable course if they intended to remain on the land permanently; but they might prefer to exhaust the best qualities of a farm in a few years, and then retire, or go into some other business, or repeat the wearing-out process on other lands. Thus the community would suffer through the lowered productiveness of its land, and because of the lower rent that it would receive from all subsequent users of the deteriorated tracts. In the second place, the administrative machinery required to levy and collect the rent, and to apportion the different holdings among competitive bidders, would inevitably involve a vast amount of error, inequality, favouritism, and corruption. For the land tax to be levied and collected would not be, as now, a fraction of the rental value, but the full amount of the annual rent. In the third place, cultivators would not have the inducement to make improvements which arises from the hope of selling both the improvements and the land at a profit, owing to the increased demand for the land. Perhaps the greatest disadvantage of the system would be the instability of tenure, with regard to both productive and residential lands. Owing to misfortunes of various kinds, for example, one or two bad crops, many cultivators would be temporarily unable to pay the full amount of the land tax or rent. It is scarcely conceivable that the State would remit the deficiency, or refuse to turn the land over to other persons on terms more advantageous to itself. Inasmuch as the value and rent of land would be continuously adjusted by competition, the more efficient and more wealthy would frequently supplant the less efficient and the less wealthy, even though the latter had occupied their holdings or their dwellings for a great number of years. Legal security of tenure, though theoretically the same as that enjoyed by the private owner to-day, would be much less effective practically. In this respect land users would be in almost as bad a case as renters are at present.[33]