[740] "Notre système fiscal demande aux impôts indirects la plus grande partie de nos recettes budgétaires. Les allumettes sont lourdement taxées. Écrire une lettre est, malgré tout, moins indispensable à l'homme qu'allumer du feu. Tant que les objets de première necessité sont frappés, il n'y a pas raison décisive pour refuser de laisser prélever sur les correspondances de toutes sortes un impôt indirect, qui apparaît, dans les écritures budgétaires, comme un excédent de recettes des Postes, Télégraphes, et Téléphones sur leurs dépenses.
"Si légitimes que soient en principe les bénéfices de l'État-postier, tenons pour certain que le public, à moins de quelque catastrophe imprévue, ne permettra pas de les accroître beaucoup, et que les Ministres de Finances de demain auront beaucoup de peine à conserver le peu qui leur en reste."—Rapport portant fixation du Budget général, Chambre des Députés, Session 1909, No. 2767.
[741] "The widest division of public revenue is into (1) that obtained by the State in its various functions as a great corporation or 'juristic person,' operating under the ordinary conditions that govern individuals or private companies, and (2) that taken from the revenues of the society by the power of the sovereign."—C. F. Bastable, Public Finance, London, 1903, p. 158. Of. C. C. Plehn, Introduction to Public Finance, New York, 1909, p. 79; E. B. A. Seligman, Essays in Taxation, New York, 1913, p. 400, et seq.; see also Bastable, op. cit., p. 156.
[742] E.g. "The common mode of levying a tax on the conveyance of letters is by making the Government the sole authorized carrier of them, and demanding a monopoly price. When this price is so moderate as it is in this country under the uniform penny postage, scarcely if at all exceeding what would be charged under the freest competition by any private company, it can hardly be considered as taxation, but rather as the profits of a business; whatever excess there is above the ordinary profits of stock being a fair result of the saving of expense, caused by having only one establishment and one set of arrangements for the whole country, instead of many competing ones."—J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, London, 1871, vol. ii. p. 461.
[743] Vide note 2, opposite.
[744] "Wherever the benefit to the individual can be even approximately estimated there is a strong presumption in favour of levying the cost incurred from him and converting the tax into a 'fee.'"—C. F. Bastable, op. cit., p. 267.
"To be properly remunerative to the State, as to a private individual, the price at which a commodity is sold must be sufficient to pay interest on the capital invested in the business, that is to say, to pay for the use of the property which must be used in producing the commodity, as well as to pay the more immediate cost of its production in wages and materials. There is no ground at all for the theory sometimes put forward that the State should deliberately abstain from making a profit from the working of an institution like the Post Office. Taxpayers are indeed nearly all users of the Post Office, and users of the Post Office are nearly all taxpayers, but there is nothing to show that people are taxed in the same proportion as they use the Post Office—the largest taxpayers are not necessarily the largest users of the Post Office. Consequently it is not a matter of complete indifference whether the State, which in this case means the taxpayers, makes a profit on the business or not. The only question difficult to decide is how much interest on the capital invested the State ought to obtain, in order to make the business remunerative but not a source of taxation. When the State has no monopoly, or only a monopoly secured by driving out all competitors in fair commercial rivalry (if such a case has ever occurred), it may charge what it can get for the commodity sold without making the business a source of taxation. But when the State has conferred on itself a monopoly of a business, it is evident that to charge the price which would bring in the largest profit would often be simply equivalent to laying a tax on the commodity. In this case, the price charged should only be such as would produce a rate of interest which would satisfy private individuals or joint-stock companies, supposing there were no monopoly. The rate of interest should be reckoned in relation to the actual market value of the property used, not in relation to what it may have originally cost the State. When the State makes a bad investment the loss should be written off once for all as soon as it is discovered. If, for instance, a State has bought telegraph apparatus for far more than it is worth, there can be no reason why the senders of telegrams, and not the whole body of taxpayers, should pay for the mistake."—Edwin Cannan, Elementary Political Economy, London, 1903, pp. 130-1.
The cost which ought in strictness to be taken is the cost of the most economical private commercial undertaking which would provide an equal service if the monopoly of the Post Office were withdrawn:—
"I do not regard the greater part of the Post Office revenue as a tax at all. If all of it were earned by doing for the public on a large scale work that no private company could do as cheaply, because it would have to do it on a small scale, then I should say that none of the Post Office revenue was a tax. That part, however, of its revenue which it gets by prohibiting others from performing services for the public is a tax."—Alfred Marshall, The Times, 6th April 1891.
[745] The terms "Mixed Taxes" and "Quasi-Taxes" have been applied to charges of this character. "Mixed Taxes, or Quasi-Taxes, naturally arise when a governing body makes demands for payments, and gives something in return, but without any pretence of equivalence between individual payments and individual returns."—R. Jones, The Nature and First Principle of Taxation, London, 1914, p. 7.