Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/705

669 INDIRECT ENCROACHMENT ON FEDERAL AUTHORITY 669 ties should be allocated to each of the two states. It does not seem wholly equitable that, when goods are manufactured in one state and sold in another, the state of origin should receive all the benefit and the state of destination none. Once it is recognized that net income from interstate commerce is a proper subject of state taxation, lawmakers should strive to devise some method of apportionment whereby income that is earned partly in one state and partly in another shall be fairly divided between the two.^°^ Those who enjoy a market place other than the state of their domicil or of their manufacturing may reasonably be required to contribute to the governmental expenses of that market place, for some of those expenses are likely to redound to their benefit. These considerations are doubtless more pertinent for legislators than for courts. Neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor the com- merce clause prescribes a perfect system of taxation. No such system has thus far been evolved by the ingenuity of man. The courts can at best forbid only the most obvious inequities. What- ever rules of the apportionment of bi-state income may ultimately be sanctioned by the Supreme Court will operate in some particu- lars to the advantage of the state which sufifers from their other effects. Each state is a state of origin of goods sold to its neigh- bors and a state of consumption of goods made by its neighbors. If Illinois is not allowed to get any of the proceeds of goods sold to her citizens from a factory in Wisconsin, she will be recompensed by not having to make deductions from the proceeds of goods sent from her factories to dwellers in Wisconsin. We can hardly look forward to an era when double taxation shall cease to be. The same hydra-headed conceptions which have permitted the eco- nomic value represented by intangibles to be reached by one state on one theory and by another state on another theory ^°® will be likely to produce the same results in the taxation of income. The most we can aim for is the most satisfactory compromise and ad- justment possible in a mundane world peopled and managed by finite individuals. 1"* The various types of unit rule will tend to make such an apportionment when the business in the several states is manufacture and sales and each "state in which business is done is a market place for goods from other states and a place of origin for goods sent to other states. "' Compare Kirtland v. Hotchkiss, note 77, supra, with Savings & Loan Society v. Multnomah County, 169 U. S. 421, 18 Sup. Ct. Rep, 392 (1898).