Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/310

294 it would be expedient to establish or stimulate the manufacture of certain commodities, no one under a free government would venture openly to justify such, action, except on the ground that public welfare would be thereby promoted, although practically such justification in the United States has long since ceased to be other than a pretense and a cover for the promotion of private interests. Suppose, for example, that the manufacture of the commodity which it is proposed to stimulate is tin plate, and it is decided that the desired result can be best attained by giving the domestic manufacturer the difference between what his product will sell for in a free market and what he can make it for say—fifteen million dollars per annum—it would seem to be only simple justice that the state should fairly and honestly pay the sum representing this difference, and raise the money, not by a tax on the consumers of the product artificially maintained, who are no more interested in the matter than all other citizens, but by a levy upon the community at large, in the same equitable manner as it raises money to defray its other expenses. In short, if any industry can not live without state aid, and it is for the public welfare that it should live, let the state directly subsidize it, and not maintain it by allowing private interest arbitrarily to exercise the great sovereign power of taxation