Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/40

 The maintenance of order also forces our attention to the question of just taxation, since the prime need of taxes is to defray the cost of maintaining order. If taxation is regarded as a means of revenue to be used for the creation of idle offices, it is no better justified than it was when required for the king’s mistress. If it is to be used for the creation of Bureaus designed to compete with the private citizen, it has no more virtue than it had when levied on the subject to bolster up the interference and tyranny of the king or his favorites. Under democracy we are interested in taxation, not for the fund created, but solely to meet the cost of maintaining order and providing general underlying improvements designed to facilitate individual enterprise. Taxation in its simplest terms should obviously be a contribution toward the cost of order in proportion to individual control of value. Control without corresponding responsibility is either tyranny or potential tyranny; and this is exactly what our fathers went to such pains to escape. It is a condition that we should be quick to resent for our own sakes; but, as a matter of fact, most of the victims of this maladjustment are unaware of it, while the beneficiaries are conspicuously silent, and probably quite unconscious of anything but what they regard as the adequate reward of their outstanding virtues.

In the so-called progressive states of our Union, whenever a telephone is used to save time, whenever a bath is taken of necessity, whenever any labor-saving device, such as truck or tractor, is employed, every addition to storage to save waste,—all these are taxed. It is now seriously proposed to penalize the exchange of all goods by a tax. Is there any limit to our economic stupidity? Our plain interest and duty is to facilitate production and exchange, and we suffer obstruction and penalty. These things are done in the name of democracy by self-styled reformers, aided by those few who think that they profit by economic confusion.

All indirect taxation—taxes on exchanges, taxes on consumption (either direct or through corporations), taxes on improvements and on the means of manufacturing or transportation,—all these are tolls levied on need and activity. Have we