THEY DECREE TAXES AT WILL.
These batches of stocks and bonds betoken as much more again. A pretty fiction subsists that Government, the creator of the modern private corporation, is necessarily more powerful than its creature. This theoretical doctrine, so widely taught by university professors and at the same time so greatly at variance with the palpable facts, will survive to bring dismay in the near future to the very classes who would have the people believe it so. Instead of now being the superior of the corporation the Government has long since definitely surrendered to private corporations a tremendous taxing power amounting virtually to a decree authorizing enslavement. Upon every form of private corporation—railroad, industrial, mining, public utility—is conferred a peculiarly sweeping and insidious power of taxation the indirectness of which often obscures its frightful nature and effects.
Where, however, the industrial corporation has but one form of taxation the railroad has many forms. The trust in oil or any other commodity can tax the whole nation at its pleasure, but inherently only on the one product it controls. That single taxation is of itself confiscatory enough, as is seen in the $912,000,000 of profits gathered in by the Standard Oil Company since its inception. The trust tax is in the form of its selling price to the public. But the railroad puts its tax upon every product transported or every person who travels. Not a useful plant grows or an article is made but that, if shipped, a heavy tax must be paid on it. This tax comes in the guise of freight or passenger rates.
The labor of hundreds of millions of people contributes incessantly to the colossal revenues enriching the railroad owners. For their producing capacity the workers are paid the meagerest wages, and the products which they make they are compelled to buy back at exorbitant prices after they pass through the hands of the various great capitalist middlemen, such as the trusts and the railroads. How enormous the revenues of the railroads are may be seen in the fact that in the ten years from 1898 to 1908 the dividends declared by thirty-five of the leading railroads in the United States reached the sum of about $1,800,000,000. This railroad taxation is a grinding, oppressive one, from which there is no appeal. If the Government taxes too heavily the people nominally can have a say; but the people have absolutely no voice in altering the taxation of corporations. Pseudo attempts have been made to regulate railroad charges, but their futility was soon evident, for the reason that owning the instruments of business the railroads and the allied trusts are in actual possession of the governmental power viewing it as a working whole.