Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/46

 taxing power is needed, and can do something. What? He can say: "If you will buy a dollar at one hundred and one cents, I can and will tax John over there two cents for your benefit; one to make up your loss and the other to give you a profit." Hence, on the protectionist's own doctrine, his device is not needed, and cannot come into use, when a new industry is created in the true and only reasonable sense of the words, but only when and because he is determined to drive the labor and capital of the country into a disadvantageous and wasteful employment.

39. Still further, it is obvious that the protectionist, instead of "creating a new industry," has simply taken one industry and set it as a parasite to live upon another. Industry is its own reward. A man is not to be paid a premium by his neighbors for earning his own living. A factory, an insane asylum, a school, a church, a poorhouse, and a prison cannot be put in the same economic category. We know that the community must be taxed to support insane asylums, poorhouses, and jails. When we come upon such institutions we see them with regret. They are wasting capital. We know that the industrious people all about, who are laboring and producing, must part with a portion of their earnings to supply the waste and loss of these institutions. Hence the bigger they are the sadder they are.

40. As for the schools and churches, we know that society must pay for and keep up its own conservative institutions. They cost capital and do not pay back capital directly, although they do indirectly, and in the course of time, in ways which we could trace out and verify if that were our subject. Here, then, we have a second class of institutions.

41. But the factories and farms and foundries are the productive institutions which must provide the support of these consuming institutions. If the factories, etc., put