It would certainly cease flowing into constructive use and would instead confine itself, to an extent at least, to municipal, state and federal tax-exempt securities. Enterprise would be seriously hampered and in some respects brought to a standstill entirely.
Many thousands of workmen would be thrown out of employment. Many businesses and shops would close.
There would ensue, as a natural consequence and without any conscious determination, a nation-wide strike of constructive activity and enterprise in commerce and finance, because men will not look upon it as a "square deal" if they are to take all the risk and responsibility, all the hard work and ceaseless strain and care of business effort, whilst the Government would needlessly take from them an unduly large share of the fruit of their labor, let alone all of it except an arbitrarily fixed sum.
I say "needlessly" because, were it really needed, business men would willingly sacrifice their entire income for the country's cause.
They would work for patriotism, without any recompense whatever, just as hard and harder than they do for gain or for ambition, if the occasion required it.
But, of course, everyone knows that nothing remotely approaching such drastic taxation is required in this country at this time.
It is absolutely right to proclaim and to enforce by legislation that no man, as far as it is possible to prevent it, shall make money out of a war in which his country is engaged, but there is all the difference in the world between that just and moral doctrine and between the doctrine that no man shall be permitted to have more than an arbitrarily fixed income during a war.
If $100,000 or any fixed sum is the limit of what may be permissible income during war time, why not by and by a lesser sum?
If the principle is once admitted, where will its application stop, even in time of peace?
Why is not the proposed plan, or anything in the nature of that plan, simply license for the materially unsuccessful to despoil the materially successful?