Will Maupin's Weekly

The esteemed State Journal is worried because there seems to be a dearth of available land for farm use. Worrying, mind you, when there are 18,000,000 acres of fertile Nebraska land waiting for husbandmen. But it isn't free, you say. Well, it ought to be, and would be if we weren't such a lot of innocents in the matter of revenue laws. Not free in the sense that men could homestead it, but free in the sense that the men who own it would either have to utilize it or allow someone else to do so. Under our fool system of taxation it is more profitable to hold land for speculative purposes than it is to cultivate it. The minute a man begins to till his half-section and improve it, that minute we step in and soak him with a heavy fine in the shape of taxes. As long as he lets the sod remain unbroken and makes no improvements thereon, we let him off, and all the time his land is growing in value because other men are improving.

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ing their farms and contributing something to society-and being fined for it. Soil and "lay of the land" being equal, the unimproved half-section ought to pay just as much tax as the highly improved half-section. It is just as valuable for use and occupancy. And until it is taxed just as much, just so long will there be increasing congestion of population in the cities, an increasing shortage of food supplies and an increasing amount of human misery.