Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/615

Rh absurd than the defense of a housebreaker, who, being convicted of carrying off a merchant's money, should plead that he did him no injury, for the money would be returned to him in the purchase of the commodities in which he dealt."

"It is obvious that the services rendered by the various public functionaries who receive the proceeds of taxation form the only return made to the taxpayers. And it is undoubtedly true that these services are of the highest value, and that, when neither the number nor the salaries of those by whom they are rendered are unnecessarily large, they constitute a full and ample equivalent for the sums expended upon them. But all beyond this—all that is drawn from the people by means of taxes, to be expended in maintaining unnecessary functionaries, or in overpaying them—is wholly lost to the taxpayers, or is not in any way compensated to them."—McCulloch.

"We might as well say that it would be a good thing to put snags in the rivers, to fell trees across the roads, to dull all our tools, as to say that unnecessary taxation could work a blessing."—Prof. W. G. Sumner.

Some writers of repute have advocated the special imposition of taxes on the ground that they act as stimulants to industry. M. Gamier entertained this opinion. The late J. R. McCulloch, who wrote learnedly on the Principles of Taxation, favored such practice on the part of government, provided the taxation was "moderate." But of taxation employed for such object which was not moderate he wrote as follows:

"The effect of exorbitant taxes is not to stimulate industry, but to destroy it. The stimulus given by excessive taxation to industry has been not inaptly compared to the stimulus given by the lash to the slave—a stimulus which the experience of all ages and nations has proved to be as ineffectual as it is inhuman, when compared to that which the expectation of improving his condition gives to the productive energies of the citizen of the free state."

The direct beneficial agency, not merely of moderate but of most excessive taxation, as a stimulant to industry, is also obviously a fundamental principle in every so-called "protective tariff system."

Very curiously, the best refutation of these ideas was made by the late H. C. Carey, in a Treatise on Wealth, published in 1838. After indorsing the statement of Mr. McCulloch as to the influence of exorbitant taxation on industry, and the correctness of his analogy between the stimulus afforded thereby and that imparted by the lash, he antagonizes the proposition that the effect of even moderate taxation imposed as a stimulus to industry can be in any degree beneficial, by asserting that what is true of the influence