Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/521

Rh According to these conclusions, the greatest consumers must be the greatest taxpayers. The man also who evades a tax clearly robs his neighbors. The thief also pays taxes indirectly, for he is a consumer, and must pay the advanced price caused by his own roguery for all he consumes, although he does steal the money to pay with. Idlers and even tramps pay taxes, but the amount that they indirectly pay into the fund is much less than they take out of it. People are sometimes referred to or characterized as non-taxpayers, and in political harangues and socialistic essays measures or policies are recommended by which certain persons or classes, by reason of their extreme poverty, shall be entirely exempt from all incidence or burden of taxation. Such a person does not, however, exist in any civilized community. If one could be found he would be a greater curiosity than exists in any museum. To avoid taxation a man must go into an unsettled wilderness where he has no neighbors, for as soon as he has a companion, if that companion be only a dog,

and collected, would be diffused, and that the laborer would be the mere conduit through which the tax would pass to the public treasury. Thus he says, "While the demand for labor and the price of provisions, therefore, remain the same, a direct tax upon wages can have no other effect than to raise them somewhat higher than the tax."

The German economist Bluntschli, who has carefully studied this question of the final incidence of all just and equitable taxes, is in substantial agreement with the above conclusions, but prefers to use a different term for characterizing such finality than consumption, and expresses himself as follows: "In the end taxes fall on enjoyments. Hence the amount of each man's enjoyments and not his income is the justest measure of taxation." (Bluntschli, vol. x, p. 146.)

M. Thiers, the French statesman and economist, was also a believer and earnest advocate of the theory of the diffusion of taxes, and lays down his principles in the following words: "Taxes are shifted indefinitely, and tend to become a part of the price of commodities, to such an extent that every one bears his share, not in proportion to what he pays the state, but in proportion to what he consumes." And in his book Rights to Property he thus illustrates the method in which taxation diffuses itself: "In the same manner as our senses, deceived by appearances, tell us that it is the sun which moves and not the earth, so a particular tax appears to fall upon one class, and another tax upon another class, when in reality it is not so. The tax really best suited to the poorest member of society is that which is best suited to the general fortune of the state; a fortune which is much more for the possession and enjoyment of the poor man than it is for the rich; a fact of which we are never sufficiently convinced. But of the manner, nevertheless, in which taxes are divided among the different classes of the state, the most certain thing we can say is: That they are divided in proportion to what each man consumes, and for a reason not generally recognized or understood, namely, that taxes are reflected, as it were, to infinity, and from reflection to reflection become eventually an integral part of the prices of things. Hence the greatest purchasers and consumers are everywhere the greatest taxpayers. This is what I call diffusion of taxation, to borrow a term from physical science, which applies the expression 'diffusion of light' to those numberless reflections, in consequence of which the light which has penetrated the slightest aperture spreads itself around in every direction, and in such a manner as to reach all the objects which it renders visible. So a tax which at first sight appears to be paid directly, in reality is only advanced by the individual who is first called upon to pay it."