In what is to follow, I shall throw all consideration of capitals totally out of the question; and as to the amount of taxes, it is quite indifferent whether the money proceeding from them be in consequence of an improvement made upon those already established, or from new impositions: such combinations will come in more properly afterwards.
If the interest paid upon the national debt of England, for example, be found constantly to increase upon every new war, the consequence will be, that more money will be raised on the subject for the payment of it. The question then comes to be, 1. How far may debts extend? 2. How far may taxes be carried? And 3. What will be the consequence, supposing the one and the other carried to the greatest height possible?
I answer to the first, that abstracting from circumstances which may disturb the gradual progress of this operation, before it can arrive at the ne plus ultra, debts may be increased to the full proportion of all that can be raised for the payment of the interest. As to the second, How far taxes may be carried, I shall not here anticipate the subject of the following book, any farther than is necessary to resolve the question before us.
Taxes, we have said, either affect income, or consumption. The land-tax of England is now at 4 shillings in the pound, upon a supposed value of the property affected by it, which is all real and personal estates, the stock upon lands, and some few other particulars excepted.
This tax may be carried to the full value of all the real estates in England. As for personal estates it never can affect them proportionally; and that part of the statute of land-tax which passes every year, and imposes 4 shillings in the pound on personal estates, carries in it a vestige of our former ignorance in matters ©f taxation.
The notion of imposing (facto) 20 shillings in the pound upon the real value of all the land-rents of England, appears to us perfectly ridiculous. I admit it to be so; and could I have discovered any argument, by which I could have limited the rising of the land-tax to any precise number of shillings under twenty, I should have stated this as the maximum, rather than the other.
The second branch of taxes comprehends those upon consumptions, excises, and the like. The maximum as to this class must be determined by foreign trade; because this is affected in a certain degree by the price of domestic industry. Other taxes have not this effect, as we shall shew in its proper place.
But as foreign trade is not essential to the domestic industry, consumption, circulation, &c. of any nation, as has been proved in the second book, but only to their increasing in wealth proportionally to other nations; if foreign communications should be cut off entirely, I perceive no limit to which I can confine the extent of proportional taxes. Let me therefore suppose a term beyond which impositions of all kinds must come to a stop, and then ask, in the third place, what will the consequence be? I answer, that the state will then be in possession of all that can be raised on the land, on the consumption, industry and trade of the country; in short, of all that can be called income, which they will administer for the creditors.
When this comes to be the case, debts become extinguished of course; because they come to be consolidated with the property: a case which commonly happens when a creditor takes possession of an estate for the payment of debts equal to its value.
Then government may continue to administer for the creditors, and either retain in its hand what is necessary for the public expence of the year; or if it inclines to shew the same indulgence for this new class of proprietors as for the former, it may limit the retention to a sum only equal to the interest of the money wanted; and in that way set out upon a new system of borrowing, until the amount of taxes be transferred to a new set of creditors. This is the endless path referred to in the ninth chapter of the second book, which after a multitude of windings returns into itself.