What evil results now to this country, taken at large, from the actual
existence of the National Debt? I never could get a plain and practical
answer to that question. I do not advert to the past loss of capital,
although it is hard to see how that capital can be said to have been
unproductive, which produces, in the defence of the nation itself, the
conditions of the permanence and productivity of all other capital. As to
taxation to pay the interest, how can the country suffer by a process,
under which the money is never one minute out of the pockets of the people?
You may just as well say that a man is weakened by the circulation of his
blood. There may, certainly, be particular local evils and grievances
resulting from the mode of taxation or collection; but how can that debt be
in any proper sense a burthen to the nation, which the nation owes to
itself, and to no one but itself? It is a juggle to talk of the nation
owing the capital or the interest to the stockholders; it owes to itself
only. Suppose the interest to be owing to the Emperor of Russia, and then
you would feel the difference of a debt in the proper sense. It is really
and truly nothing more in effect than so much moneys or money's worth,
raised annually by the state for the purpose of quickening industry.[1]
I should like to see a well graduated property tax, accompanied by a large
loan.
One common objection to a property tax is, that it tends to diminish the
accumulation of capital. In my judgment, one of the chief sources of the
bad economy of the country now is the enormous aggregation of capitals.
When shall we return to a sound conception of the right to property--
namely, as being official, implying and demanding the performance of
commensurate duties! Nothing but the most horrible perversion of humanity
and moral justice, under the specious name of political economy, could have
blinded men to this truth as to the possession of land,--the law of God
having connected indissolubly the cultivation of every rood of earth with
the maintenance and watchful labour of man. But money, stock, riches by
credit, transferable and convertible at will, are under no such
obligations; and, unhappily, it is from the selfish autocratic possession
of _such_ property, that our landholders have learnt their present theory
of trading with that which was never meant to be an object of commerce.
[Footnote 1:
See the splendid essay in the Friend (vol. ii, p. 47.) on the vulgar errors
respecting taxes and taxation.
"A great statesman, lately deceased, in one of his anti-ministerial
harangues against some proposed impost, said, 'The nation has been already
bled in every vein, and is faint with loss of blood.' This blood, however,
was circulating in the mean time through the whole body of the state, and
what was received into one chamber of the heart was instantly sent out
again at the other portal. Had he wanted a metaphor to convey the possible
injuries of taxation, he might have found one less opposite to the fact, in
the known disease of aneurism, or relaxation of the coats of particular
vessels, by a disproportionate accumulation of blood in them, which
sometimes occurs when the circulation has been suddenly and violently
changed, and causes helplessness, or even mortal stagnation, though the
total quantity of blood remains the same in the system at large.
"But a fuller and fairer symbol of taxation, both in its possible good and
evil effects, is to be found in the evaporation of waters from the surface
of the earth. The sun may draw up the moisture from the river, the morass,
and the ocean, to be given back in genial showers to the garden, to the
pasture, and the corn field; but it may, likewise, force away the moisture
from the fields of tillage, to drop it on the stagnant pool, the saturated
swamp, or the unprofitable sand-waste. The gardens in the south of Europe
supply, perhaps, a not less apt illustration of a system of finance
judiciously conducted, where the tanks or reservoirs would represent the
capital of a nation, and the hundred rills, hourly varying their channels
and directions under the gardener's spade, give a pleasing image of the
dispersion of that capital through the whole population by the joint effect
of taxation and trade. For taxation itself is a part of commerce, and the
government maybe fairly considered as a great manufacturing house, carrying
on, in different places, by means of its partners and overseers, the trades
of the shipbuilder, the clothier, the iron-founder," &c. &c.--ED.]
_April_ 5. 1833.