Page:Is Capital Income, Earle, 1921.djvu/30

30 per cent. of the real value (which ultimately is sure to govern), and for any reason should desire or be forced to change his location or investment—an investment that he wishes to continue, not for enjoyment or taxes, but for the even more essential purpose of aiding that production essential to the very existence of the community. If the Government in such case could consider these gradual accretions to be "Income" and could tax them and the Capital on which they accrue under the pretense that they constituted "Income," must not an absolutely final exhaustion, not merely of the resources of the public, but of the Government itself, become inevitable? Taxation then might not merely be the power to destroy, but be destruction itself. Could anything be conceived of more completely illogical than such a governmental policy that must destroy that upon which the Government must live,—a very essential source of the income upon which it must exist.

A man has his orchard. Through long toilsome years it grows to the perfection of production; it has not only increased in real value, but this real value has apparently been multiplied by the unwise exercise of a governmental function of dishonestly depreciating the measure of value, not provided for in the Constitution. Compelled or wanting to change to another location or thing, what is asked but that, in doing so, he must sacrifice a part, the greater part, or perhaps the whole, of this effective capital to the Government, under a mere pretense that this essential requirement of all, in truth and fact, nothing but capital is but income; so that, on the reinvestment of what he has left, both he and the community discover that by legerdemain and a false use of words, not merely his income, but his