Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/782

 762 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

him against these dangers as being contrivances of the same kind with those coparcenary dikes which are constructed to protect his own and his neighbors' estates against destructive floods. He is bound to pay in due proportion for this peculiar advantage which accrues to his property above what other, less well-to-do or propertyless, members of the commonwealth enjoy.

It is strangely inconsistent for those who reject the concep- tion of a tax as an insurance premium and who, taking a "broad view of the nature of the state," regard the tax as a direct deduction from the principle of national, organic solidarity, to ask, as some of them do, what would be said of a shopkeeper who asked a different price for the same goods from different customers, according to their ability to pay. To ask this ques- tion is to assume a fundamental likeness between the services of the shopkeeper to his patrons and those of the state to its subjects — to assume that in both cases cost ought to govern price, to accept implicitly the very insurance conception which has been explicitly repudiated. Besides, while shopkeepers do not ask different prices from different patrons, it is well known that physicians, attorneys, and members of other liberal profes- sions do, to a great extent, regulate their charges by the ability of their patrons to pay. Would not the state be classed with the liberal professions by the proportionalists ? There is, in fact, no escape from progressive taxation for those who adopt the organic theory of the state. The proportional basis was a sort of crude application of the "insurance" principle, and it does not satisfy either the individualists, who want a more exact application of the cost theory of the state's functions and services, or the adher- ents of the broader views of the state, who adopt the doctrine that a tax is a payment made by members of the political community toward its expenses simply in virtue of their being members.

To declare dogmatically that there is anything in or about the "American system" which rigorously excludes progressive taxation is to offend both against fact and reason. In the first place, any tariff which taxes articles of comfort and luxury at a higher rate than articles of necessity is a clear violation of the proportional principle. The federal system of taxation is indirectly progressive. Its tariffs are not horizontal or uniform,