The tax that we are now considering can be condemned as unjust on only two possible grounds: first, that it would be injurious to society; and, second, that it would wrong the private landowner. If it were fairly adjusted and efficiently administered it could not prove harmful to the community. In the first place, landowners could not shift the tax to the consumer. All the authorities on the subject admit that taxes on land stay where they are put, and are paid by those upon whom they are levied in the first instance.[93] The only way in which the owners of a commodity can shift a tax to the users or consumers of it, is by limiting the supply until the price rises sufficiently to cover the tax. By the simple device of refusing to erect more buildings until those in existence have become scarce enough to command an increase in rent equivalent to the new tax, the actual and prospective owners of buildings can pass the tax on to the tenants thereof. By refusing to put their money into, say, shoe factories, investors can limit the supply of shoes until any new tax on this commodity is shifted upon the wearers of shoes in the form of higher prices. Until these rises take place in the rent of buildings and the price of shoes, investors will put their money into enterprises which are not burdened with equivalent taxes. But nothing of this sort can follow the imposition of a new tax upon land. The supply of land is fixed, and cannot be affected by any action of landowners or would-be landowners. The users of land and the consumers of its products are at present paying all that competition can compel them to pay. They would not pay more merely because they were requested to do so by landowners who were labouring under the burden of a new tax. If all landowners were to carry out an agreement to refrain from producing, and to withhold their land from others until rents and prices had gone up sufficiently to offset the tax, they could, indeed, shift the latter to the renters of land and the consumers of its products. Such a monopoly, however, is not within the range of practical achievement. In its absence, individual landowners are not likely to withhold land nor to discontinue production in sufficient numbers to raise rents or prices. Indeed, the tendency will be all the other way; for all landowners, including the proprietors of land now vacant, will be anxious to put their land to the best use in order to have the means of paying the tax. Owing to this increased production, and the increased willingness to sell and let land, rents and prices must fall. It is axiomatic that new taxes upon land always make it cheaper than it would have been otherwise, and are beneficial to the community as against the present owners.