Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/141

 Rh the determining cause as value in its true, complete meaning, value with all the principal laws revealing themselves in price; value as following the law of margins and the cost of production; value as demanding productive imputation, rent and interest. But precisely on this ground do we hold the view that the current mode of reckoning in economy by exchange-value is not a dictum of the market, but, in spite of many peculiarities conditioned by the market, a dictum of economy itself.

The exposition I have given here has permitted but scanty recognition of these more intimate lines of thought in the Austrian school. I have not been without fear, that our special language might, in so condensed an exposition, sound strange overmuch.

VI

The guiding principle in devoting commodities to public purposes, as in consumption generally, should be the consideration of their value. The scale of state-consumption and state-mechanism, which each citizen will wish to see, must vary in proportion to his own valuation of commodities. It is only reasonable that the rich man, who retains, after covering his most pressing personal outgoings, a surplus of goods for any other purposes, should desire a more expanded public expenditure than the poor man. A just system of taxation will take account of these variations in the valuations made by different classes of people, and adjust the fiscal burdens to the citizens by covering the costs of state-administration with contributions graduated accordingly.

It would take me too far were I to show how Prof. Sax, starting from this idea, has carried out the theory of value in a system of progressive taxation. I should only like to point out a remarkable political phenomenon. The state, in taxing citizens unequally, suffers itself to be paid unequally for its equal services,—and we find this equitable. In the market every purchaser, from the richest to the poorest, pays the same price for the same service, the millionaire paying for what he buys in common with the beggar by the beggars standard,—and this we find natural. How shall we interpret these inconsistencies?

, February, 1891.