Page:Is Capital Income, Earle, 1921.djvu/29

Rh there should be an adequate increase of the amount and efficiency of the capital item requisite to additional employment and production. It is obvious that this may be increased from its own slow growth and accretion in the course of industry; and that for a higher degree of prosperity there must be even additional savings from available fruits or income. People have thus already learned how pernicious excess profit taxes are, and are unanimously seeking their abandonment. They have learned, through hard experience, that excess profits necessarily result from under-capitalization, in a given industry; and that they are not only God's cure, but the only available remedy, aided by economy and thrift, for the disease itself; that they are but another of the evils that have been imposed by accepting the absurd argument that unwisdom is ever "necessary." To tax excess profits is no wiser than it would be in a siege to draw troops for the reinforcement of a weak point, from still weaker points, or to stop circulation to the least nourished part of the body. But it is astounding, with all these conditions before our eyes, that even a far greater evil is actually being contended for; that the very life blood of the economic body of the community is to be sucked from it by a construction that will make capital, and its natural and slow variation through the years, subject to a still greater and more disastrous spoliation.

Again illustrating from what we actually see about us. Assuming that by Governmental edict, and the general forgetfulness that inflation always creates illusory estimates of value, it happens that a man having an orchard, or a farm, or mill, or invested capital of any kind, suddenly is led to believe that it has increased, through misleading inflation, perhaps, to three hundred