To export such commodities, which, as it might be absurdly supposed, the nation is no longer able to consume,
Or,
To steal from the people the proportionable increase due to them in the price of their labour, if they should prove so complaisant as tamely to submit, out of gratitude, for the tax being laid only upon luxury.
I shall conclude this article with a reflexion which may give birth to many others.
The impost on luxury, which, after a very little time, as we have seen, proves no ways injurious to those who were able to pay for the objects upon which the tax was laid, is besides, under another point of view, really advantageous to those very men who seem the only contributors to it; because it sets entirely above the reach of the people, a number of articles in which they would indulge themselves, to the great benefit of the tax, and which, though perhaps intended by the general provider, as well for the poor as for the rich, are nevertheless, by the merciful system of taxation, exclusively reserved to the rich.—Is this the intention of the merciful taxator?—in my opinion it ought not to be that of an intelligent one.
Effects of a merciless Tax upon all the Articles of the most general Consumption.
Instead of laying a tax on men, from whom, without rushing with open eyes into the perpetration of a thousand injuries, it is impossible to require any thing more than a personal service, when it is necessary and possible withal; instead of taxing the land, from which nothing can be expected but food, and the rough materials to which industry can give from one to many hundred degrees of value; instead of taxing that imaginary monster called luxury, which procures so substantial a support to some, and such pleasing comforts to others, lay your tax solely, and without predilection, on all those products of national and foreign industry which are more generally consumed; then, in my opinion, you will have reason to flatter yourself that riches are taxed to their very source, and without inconvenience to any one, since you tax it in the hands of those who are, by the strictest justice, authorised to a benefit for all the advances made by them to the consumer.
So then, though the tax of 10 millions be fixed on certain parts of industry, nothing will prevent the whole from rising proportionably; and for this, God alone be thanked. The whole will be then 70 millions instead of 60;—upon which the least reflexion is sufficient to make us feel the necessity of the re-actions mentioned in the foregoing system, but with this difference, that the general consumption having been taxed, the two capitalists cannot, even on the very day when the impost takes place, shut their eyes against the justice of increasing the salary of the labouring man in a due proportion.—Now, the interest of the two capitalists could not, as in the preceding system, be preserved undiminished, but by an increase from 60 to 70 millions, that is to say, 16⅔ per cent.—Now, the interest of the labouring man is, as has been observed before, equal to one half of the other two classes in the general revenue, or, in other words, equal to either;—it will therefore become necessary, in order to restore the former equilibrium, to introduce a fresh increase of 8⅓ per cent. upon every thing;—in consequence of which the price of labour, being raised 25 per cent. just as its products, both in cultivation and industry, will leave also the two classes of labourers in the same situation they were in previous to the tax; each of them was then in possession of 20 millions out of 60, each will now get 25 out of 75.
I think also that then, a Minister of finance, ever so anxious about his operations, ever so zealous for the establishment of none but productive taxes, could not conceive a single article of consumption that might suffer by this arrangement; it would appear too evidently that every one would then have the very same faculty of consuming, manufacturing, or saving, under the denomination of 25, all that he had before consumed, manufactured, or saved under the denomination of 20.