FIFTH PERIOD.--POLICE, OR TAXATION.
In positing its principles humanity, as if in obedience to a
sovereign order, never goes backward. Like the traveller who by
oblique windings rises from the depth of the valley to the
mountain-top, it follows intrepidly its zigzag road, and marches
to its goal with confident step, without repentance and without
pause. Arriving at the angle of monopoly, the social genius
casts backward a melancholy glance, and, in a moment of profound
reflection, says to itself:
"Monopoly has stripped the poor hireling of everything,--bread,
clothing, home, education, liberty, and security. I will lay a
tax upon the monopolist; at this price I will save him his
privilege.
"Land and mines, woods and waters, the original domain of man,
are forbidden to the proletaire. I will intervene in their
exploitation, I will have my share of the products, and land
monopoly shall be respected.
"Industry has fallen into feudalism, but I am the suzerain. The
lords shall pay me tribute, and they shall keep the profit of
their capital.
"Commerce levies usurious profits on the consumer. I will strew
its road with toll-gates, I will stamp its checks and indorse its
invoices, and it shall pass.
"Capital has overcome labor by intelligence. I will open
schools, and the laborer, made intelligent himself, shall
become a capitalist in his turn.
"Products lack circulation, and social life is cramped. I will
build roads, bridges, canals, marts, theatres, and temples, and
thus furnish at one stroke work, wealth, and a market.
"The rich man lives in plenty, while the workman weeps in famine.
I will establish taxes on bread, wine, meat, salt, and honey, on
articles of necessity and on objects of value, and these shall
supply alms for my poor.
"And I will set guards over the waters, the woods, the fields,
the mines, and the roads; I will send collectors to gather the
taxes and teachers to instruct the children; I will have an army
to put down refractory subjects, courts to judge them, prisons to
punish them, and priests to curse them. All these offices shall
be given to the proletariat and paid by the monopolists.
"Such is my certain and efficacious will."
We have to prove that society could neither think better nor act
worse: this will be the subject of a review which, I hope, will
throw new light upon the social problem.
Every measure of general police, every administrative and
commercial regulation, like every law of taxation, is at bottom
but one of the innumerable articles of this ancient bargain, ever
violated and ever renewed, between the patriciate and the
proletariat. That the parties or their representatives knew
nothing of it, or even that they frequently viewed their
political constitutions from another standpoint, is of little
consequence to us: not to the man, legislator, or prince do we
look for the meaning of his acts, but to the acts themselves.
% 1.--Synthetic idea of the tax.--Point of departure and
development of this idea.
In order to render that which is to follow more intelligible, I
will explain, inverting, as it were, the method which we have
followed hitherto, the superior theory of the tax; then I will
give its genesis; finally I will show the contradiction and
results. The synthetic idea of the tax, as well as its original
conception, would furnish material for the most extensive
developments. I shall confine myself to a simple announcement of
the propositions, with a summary indication of the proofs.
The tax, in its essence and positive destiny, is the form of
distribution among that species of functionaries which Adam Smith
has designated by the word UNPRODUCTIVE, although he admits as
much as any one the utility and even the necessity of their labor
in society. By this adjective, UNPRODUCTIVE, Adam Smith, whose
genius dimly foresaw everything and left us to do everything,
meant that the product of these laborers is NEGATIVE, which is a
very different thing from null, and that consequently
distribution so far as they are concerned follows a method other
than exchange.
Let us consider, in fact, what takes place, from the point of
view of distribution, in the four great divisions of collective
labor,-- EXTRACTION,[21] MANUFACTURES, COMMERCE, AGRICULTURE.
Each producer brings to market a real product whose quantity can
be measured, whose quality can be estimated, whose price can be
debated, and, finally, whose value can be discounted, either in
other services or merchandise, or else in money. In all these
industries distribution, therefore, is nothing but the mutual
exchange of products according to the law of proportionality of
values.
[21] Hunting, fishing, mining,--in short, the gathering of all
natural products.--Translator.
Nothing like this takes place with the functionaries called
PUBLIC. These obtain their right to subsistence, not by the
production of real utilities, but by the very state of
unproductivity in which, by no fault of their own, they are kept.
For them the law of proportionality is inverted: while social
wealth is formed and increased in the direct ratio of the
quantity, variety, and proportion of the effective products
furnished by the four great industrial categories, the
development of this same wealth, the perfecting of social order,
suppose, on the contrary, so far as the personnel of police is
concerned, a progressive and indefinite reduction. State
functionaries, therefore, are very truly unproductive. On this
point J. B. Say agreed with A. Smith, and all that he has written
on this subject in correction of his master, and which has been
stupidly included among his titles to glory, arises entirely, it
is easy to see, from a misunderstanding. In a word, the wages of
the government's employees constitute a social DEFICIT; they
must be carried to the account of LOSSES, which it must be the
object of industrial organization to continually diminish: in
this view what other adjective could be used to describe the men
of power than that of Adam Smith?
Here, then, is a category of services which, furnishing no real
products, cannot be rewarded in the ordinary way; services which
do not fall under the law of exchange, which cannot become the
object of private speculation, competition, joint-stock
association, or any sort of commerce, but which, theoretically
regarded as performed gratuitously by all, but entrusted, by
virtue of the law of division of labor, to a small number of
special men who devote themselves exclusively to them, must
consequently be paid for. History confirms this general datum.
The human mind, which tries all solutions of every problem, has
tried accordingly to submit public functions to exchange; for a
long time French magistrates, like notaries, etc., lived solely
by their fees. But experience has proved that this method of
distribution applied to unproductive laborers was too expensive
and subject to too many disadvantages, and it became necessary to
abandon it.
The organization of the unproductive services contributes to the
general welfare in several ways: first, by relieving producers of
public cares, in which all must participate, and to which,
consequently, all are more or less slaves; secondly, by
establishing in society an artificial centralization, the image
and prelude of the future solidarity of industries; and, finally,
by furnishing a first attempt at balance and discipline.
So we admit, with J. B. Say, the usefulness of magistrates and
the other agents of public authority; but we hold that this
usefulness is wholly negative, and we insist, therefore, on
describing these functionaries by the adjective unproductive
which A. Smith applied to them, not to bring them into discredit,
but because they really cannot be classed in the category of
producers. "Taxation," very well says an economist of Say's
school, M. J. Garnier,--"taxation is a PRIVATION which we should
try to reduce to the furthest point of compatibility with the
needs of society." If the writer whom I quote has reflected upon
the meaning of his words, he has seen that the word PRIVATION
which he uses is synonymous with NON-PRODUCTION, and that
consequently those for whose benefit taxes are collected are very
truly UNPRODUCTIVE laborers.
I insist upon this definition, which seems to me the less
questionable from the fact that, however much they may
dispute over the word, all agree upon the thing, because it
contains the germ of the greatest revolution yet to be
accomplished in the world,--I mean the subordination of the
unproductive functions to the productive functions, in a word,
the effective submission, always asked and never obtained, of
authority to the citizens.
It is a consequence of the development of the economical
contradictions that order in society first shows itself inverted;
that that which should be above is placed below, that which
should be in relief seems sunken, and that which should receive
the light is thrown into the shadow. Thus power, which, in its
essence, is, like capital, the auxiliary and subordinate of
labor, becomes, through the antagonism of society, the spy,
judge, and tyrant of the productive functions; power, whose
original inferiority lays upon it the duty of obedience, is
prince and sovereign.
In all ages the laboring classes have pursued against the
office-holding class the solution of this antinomy, of which
economic science alone can give the key. The oscillations--that
is, the political agitations which result from this struggle of
labor against power--now lead to a depression of the central
force, which compromises the very existence of society; now,
exaggerating this same force beyond measure, give birth to
despotism. Then, the privileges of command, the infinite joy
which it gives to ambition and pride, making the unproductive
functions an object of universal lust, a new leaven of discord
penetrates society, which, divided already in one direction into
capitalists and wage-workers, and in another into producers and
non-producers, is again divided as regards power into monarchists
and democrats. The conflicts between royalty and the republic
would furnish us most marvellous and interesting material
for our episodes. The confines of this work do not permit us so
long an excursion; and after having pointed out this new branch
in the vast network of human aberrations, we shall confine
ourselves exclusively, in dealing with taxation, to the economic
question.
Such, then, in succinctest statement, is the synthetic theory of
the tax,--that is, if I may venture to use the familiar
comparison, of this fifth wheel of the coach of humanity, which
makes so much noise, and which, in governmental parlance, is
styled the State. The State, the police, or their means of
existence, the tax, is, I repeat, the official name of the class
designated in political economy as nonproducers,--in short, as
the domestics of society.
But public reason does not attain at a single bound this simple
idea, which for centuries had to remain in the state of a
transcendental conception. Before civilization can mount to such
a height, it must pass through frightful tempests and innumerable
revolutions, in each of which, one might say, it renews its
strength in a bath of blood. And when at last production,
represented by capital, seems on the point of thoroughly
subordinating the unproductive organ, the State, then society
rises in indignation, labor weeps at the prospect of its
immediate freedom, democracy shudders at the abasement of power,
justice cries out as if scandalized, and all the oracles of the
departing gods exclaim with terror that the abomination of
desolation is in the holy places and that the end of the world
has come. So true is it that humanity never desires what it
seeks, and that the slightest progress cannot be realized without
spreading panic among the peoples.
What, then, in this evolution, is the point of departure of
society, and by what circuitous route does it reach
political reform,--that is, economy in its expenditures, equality
in the assessment of its taxes, and the subordination of power to
industry? That is what we are about to state in a few words,
reserving developments for the sequel.
The original idea of the tax is that of REDEMPTION.
As, by the law of Moses, each first-born was supposed to belong
to Jehovah, and had to be redeemed by an offering, so the tax
everywhere presents itself in the form of a tithe or royal
prerogative by which the proprietor annually redeems from the
sovereign the profit of exploitation which he is supposed to hold
only by his pleasure. This theory of the tax, moreover, is but
one of the special articles of what is called the social
contract.
Ancients and moderns all agree, in terms more or less explicit,
in regarding the juridical status of societies as a reaction of
weakness against strength. This idea is uppermost in all the
works of Plato, notably in the "Gorgias," where he maintains,
with more subtlety than logic, the cause of the laws against that
of violence,--that is, legislative absolutism against
aristocratic and military absolutism. In this knotty dispute, in
which the weight of evidence is equal on both sides, Plato simply
expresses the sentiment of entire antiquity. Long before him,
Moses, in making a distribution of lands, declaring patrimony
inalienable, and ordering a general and uncompensated
cancellation of all mortgages every fiftieth year, had opposed a
barrier to the invasions of force. The whole Bible is a hymn to
JUSTICE,--that is, in the Hebrew style, to charity, to kindness
to the weak on the part of the strong, to voluntary renunciation
of the privilege of power. Solon, beginning his legislative
mission by a general abolition of debts, and creating rights and
reserves,--that is, barriers to prevent their return,--was
no less reactionary. Lycurgus went farther; he forbade
individual possession, and tried to absorb the man in the State,
annihilating liberty the better to preserve equilibrium. Hobbes,
deriving, and with great reason, legislation from the state of
war, arrived by another road at the establishment of equality
upon an exception,--despotism. His book, so much calumniated, is
only a development of this famous antithesis. The charter of
1830, consecrating the insurrection made in '89 by the plebeians
against the nobility, and decreeing the abstract equality of
persons before the law, in spite of the real inequality of powers
and talents which is the veritable basis of the social system now
in force, is also but a protest of society in favor of the poor
against the rich, of the small against the great. All the laws
of the human race regarding sale, purchase, hire, property,
loans, mortgages, prescription, inheritance, donation, wills,
wives' dowries, minority, guardianship, etc., etc., are real
barriers erected by judicial absolutism against the absolutism of
force. Respect for contracts, fidelity to promises, the religion
of the oath, are fictions, osselets,[22] as the famous Lysander
aptly said, with which society deceives the strong and brings
them under the yoke.
[22] Little bones taken from the joints of animals and serving as
playthings for children.--Translator.
The tax belongs to that great family of preventive, coercive,
repressive, and vindictive institutions which A. Smith designated
by the generic term police, and which is, as I have said, in its
original conception, only the reaction of weakness against
strength. This follows, independently of abundant historical
testimony which we will put aside to confine ourselves
exclusively to economic proof, from the distinction naturally
arising between taxes.
All taxes are divisible into two great categories: (1) taxes of
assessment, or of privilege: these are the oldest taxes; (2)
taxes of consumption, or of quotite,[23] whose tendency is, by
absorbing the former, to make public burdens weigh equally upon
all.
[23] A tax whose total product is not fixed in advance, but
depends upon the quantity of things or persons upon whom it
happens to fall.-- Translator.
The first sort of taxes--including in France the tax on land, the
tax on doors and windows, the poll-tax, the tax on personal
property, the tax on tenants, license-fees, the tax on transfers
of property, the tax on officials' fees, road-taxes, and
brevets--is the share which the sovereign reserves for himself
out of all the monopolies which he concedes or tolerates; it is,
as we have said, the indemnity of the poor, the permit granted to
property. Such was the form and spirit of the tax in all the old
monarchies: feudalism was its beau ideal. Under that regime the
tax was only a TRIBUTE paid by the holder to the universal
proprietor or sleeping-partner (commanditaire), the king.
When later, by the development of public right, royalty, the
patriarchal form of sovereignty, begins to get impregnated by the
democratic spirit, the tax becomes a quota which each voter owes
to the COMMONWEALTH, and which, instead of falling into the hand
of the prince, is received into the State treasury. In this
evolution the principle of the tax remains intact; as yet there
is no transformation of the institution; the real sovereign
simply succeeds the figurative sovereign. Whether the tax enters
into the peculium of the prince or serves to liquidate a common
debt, it is in either case only a claim of society against
privilege; otherwise, it is impossible to say why the tax is
levied in the ratio of fortunes.
Let all contribute to the public expenses: nothing more just.
But why should the rich pay more than the poor? That is just,
they say, because they possess more. I confess that such justice
is beyond my comprehension. . . . One of two things is true:
either the proportional tax guarantees a privilege to the larger
tax-payers, or else it is a wrong. Because, if property is a
natural right, as the Declaration of '93 declares, all that
belongs to me by virtue of this right is as sacred as my person;
it is my blood, my life, myself: whoever touches it offends the
apple of my eye. My income of one hundred thousand francs is as
inviolable a the grisette's daily wage of seventy-five centimes;
her attic is no more sacred than my suite of apartments. The tax
is not levied in proportion to physical strength, size, or skill:
no more should it be levied in proportion to property.--What is
Property: Chapter II.
These observations are the more just because the principle which
it was their purpose to oppose to that of proportional assessment
has had its period of application. The proportional tax is much
later in history than liege-homage, which consisted in a simple
officious demonstration without real payment.
The second sort of taxes includes in general all those
designated, by a sort of antiphrasis, by the term INDIRECT, such
as taxes on liquor, salt, and tobacco, customs duties, and, in
short, all the taxes which DIRECTLY affect the only thing which
should be taxed,--product. The principle of this tax, whose name
is an actual misnomer, is unquestionably better founded in theory
and more equitable in tendency than the preceding: accordingly,
in spite of the opinion of the mass, always deceived as to that
which serves it as well as to that which is prejudicial to it, I
do not hesitate to say that this tax is the only normal one,
barring its assessment and collection, with which it is not my
purpose now to deal.
For, if it is true, as we have just explained, that the real
nature of the tax is to pay, according to a particular form of
wages, for certain services which elude the usual form of
exchange, it follows that all producers, enjoying these services
equally as far as personal use is concerned, should contribute to
their payment in equal portions. The share for each, therefore,
would be a fraction of his exchangeable product, or, in other
words, an amount taken from the values delivered by him for
purposes of consumption. But, under the monopoly system, and
with collection upon land, the treasury strikes the product
before it has entered into exchange, even before it is
produced,--a circumstance which results in throwing back the
amount of the tax into the cost of production, and consequently
puts the burden upon the consumer and lifts it from monopoly.
Whatever the significance of the tax of assessment or the tax of
quotite, one thing is sure, and this is the thing which it is
especially important for us to know,--namely, that, in making the
tax proportional, it was the intention of the sovereign to make
citizens contribute to the public expenses, no longer, according
to the old feudal principle, by means of a poll-tax, which would
involve the idea of an assessment figured in the ratio of the
number of persons taxed, and not in the ratio of their
possessions, but so much per franc of capital, which supposes
that capital has its source in an authority superior to the
capitalists. Everybody, spontaneously and with one accord,
considers such an assessment just; everybody, therefore,
spontaneously and with one accord, looks upon the tax as a
resumption on the part of society, a sort of redemption exacted
from monopoly. This is especially striking in England, where, by
a special law, the proprietors of the soil and the manufacturers
pay, in proportion to their incomes, a tax of forty million
dollars, which is called the poor-rate.
In short, the practical and avowed object of the tax is to effect
upon the rich, for the benefit of the people, a proportional
resumption of their capital.
Now, analysis and the facts demonstrate:
That the tax of assessment, the tax upon monopoly, instead of
being paid by those who possess, is paid almost entirely by those
who do not possess;
That the tax of quotite, separating the producer from the
consumer, falls solely upon the latter, thereby taking from the
capitalist no more than he would have to pay if fortunes were
absolutely equal;
Finally, that the army, the courts, the police, the schools, the
hospitals, the almshouses, the houses of refuge and correction,
public functions, religion itself, all that society creates for
the protection, emancipation, and relief of the proletaire, paid
for in the first place and sustained by the proletaire, is then
turned against the proletaire or wasted as far as he is
concerned; so that the proletariat, which at first labored only
for the class that devours it,--that of the capitalists,--must
labor also for the class that flogs it,--that of the
nonproducers.
These facts are henceforth so well known, and the economists--I
owe them this justice--have shown them so clearly, that I shall
abstain from correcting their demonstrations, which, for the
rest, are no longer contradicted by anybody. What I propose to
bring to light, and what the economists do not seem to have
sufficiently understood, is that the condition in which the
laborer is placed by this new phase of social economy is
susceptible of no amelioration; that, unless industrial
organization, and therefore political reform, should bring about
an equality of fortunes, evil is inherent in police institutions
as in the idea of charity which gave them birth; in short, that
the STATE, whatever form it affects, aristocratic or theocratic,
monarchical or republican, until it shall have become the
obedient and submissive organ of a society of equals, will be for
the people an inevitable hell,--I had almost said a deserved
damnation.
% 2.--Antinomy of the tax.
I sometimes hear the champions of the statu quo maintain that for
the present we enjoy liberty enough, and that, in spite of the
declamation against the existing order, we are below the level of
our institutions. So far at least as taxation is concerned, I am
quite of the opinion of these optimists.
According to the theory that we have just seen, the tax is the
reaction of society against monopoly. Upon this point opinions
are unanimous: citizens and legislators, economists, journalists,
and ballad-writers, rendering, each in their own tongue, the
social thought, vie with each other in proclaiming that the tax
should fall upon the rich, strike the superfluous and articles of
luxury, and leave those of prime necessity free. In short, they
have made the tax a sort of privilege for the privileged: a bad
idea, since it involved a recognition of the legitimacy of
privilege, which in no case, whatever shape it may take, is good
for anything. The people had to be punished for this egoistic
inconsistency: Providence did not fail in its duty.
From the moment, then, of the conception of the tax as a
counter-claim, it had to be fixed proportionally to means,
whether it struck capital or affected income more especially.
Now, I will point out that the levying of the tax at so much a
franc being precisely that which should be adopted in a country
where all fortunes were equal, saving the differences in the cost
of assessment and collection, the treasury is the most liberal
feature of our society, and that on this point our morals are
really behind our institutions. But as with the wicked the best
things cannot fail to be detestable, we shall see the
equalitarian tax crush the people precisely because the people
are not up to it.
I will suppose that the gross income in France, for each family
of four persons, is 1,000 francs: this is a little above the
estimate of M. Chevalier, who places it at only 63 centimes a day
for each individual, or 919 francs 80 centimes for each
household. The tax being today more than a thousand millions, or
about an eighth of the total income, each family, earning 1,000
francs a year, is taxed 125 francs.
Accordingly, an income of 2,000 francs pays 250 francs; an income
of 3,000 francs, 375; an income of 4,000 francs, 500, etc. The
proportion is strict and mathematically irreproachable; the
treasury, by arithmetic, is sure of losing nothing.
But on the side of the taxpayers the affair totally changes its
aspect. The tax, which, in the intention of the legislator, was
to have been proportioned to fortune, is, on the contrary,
progressive in the ratio of poverty, so that, the poorer the
citizen is, the more he pays. This I shall try to make plain by
a few figures.
According to the proportional tax, there is due to the treasury:
for an income of
1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000 6,000 francs, etc. a tax of
125 250 375 500 625 750
According to this series, then, the tax seems to increase
proportionally to income.
But when it is remembered that each annual income is made up of
365 units, each of which represents the daily income of the
taxpayer, the tax will no longer be found proportional; it will
be found equal. In fact, if the State levies a tax of 125 francs
on an income of 1,000 francs, it is as if it took from the taxed
family 45 days' subsistence; likewise the assessments of 250,
375, 500, 625, and 750 francs, corresponding to incomes of 2,000,
3,000, 4,000, 5,000, and 6,000 francs, constitute in each case a
tax of 45 days' pay upon each of those who enjoy these incomes.
I say now that this equality of taxation is a monstrous
inequality, and that it is a strange illusion to imagine that,
because the daily income is larger, the tax of which it is the
base is higher. Let us change our point of view from that of
personal to that of collective income.
As an effect of monopoly social wealth abandoning the laboring
class to go to the capitalistic class, the object of taxation has
been to moderate this displacement and react against usurpation
by enforcing a proportional replevin upon each privileged person.
But proportional to what? To the excess which the privileged
person has received undoubtedly, and not to the fraction of the
social capital which his income represents. Now, the object of
taxation is missed and the law turned into derision when the
treasury, instead of taking its eighth where this eighth exists,
asks it precisely of those to whom it should be restored. A
final calculation will make this evident.
Setting the daily income of each person in France at 68 centimes,
the father of a family who, whether as wages or as income from
his capital, receives 1,000 francs a year receives four shares of
the national income; he who receives 2,000 francs has eight
shares; he who receives 4,000 francs has sixteen, etc. Hence it
follows that the workman who, on an income of 1,000 francs, pays
125 francs into the treasury renders to public order half a
share, or an eighth of his income and his family's subsistence;
whereas the capitalist who, on an income of 6,000 francs, pays
only 750 francs realizes a profit of 17 shares out of the
collective income, or, in other words, gains by the tax 425 per
cent.
Let us reproduce the same truth in another form.
The voters of France number about 200,000. I do not know the
total amount of taxes paid by these 200,000 voters, but I do not
believe that I am very far from the truth in supposing an average
of 300 francs each, or a total of 60,000,000 for the 200,000
voters, to which we will add twenty-five per cent. to represent
their share of indirect taxes, making in all 75,000,000, or 75
francs for each person (supposing the family of each voter to
consist of five persons), which the electoral class pays to the
State. The appropriations, according to the "Annuaire
Economique" for 1845, being 1,106,000,000, there remains
1,031,000,000, which makes the tax paid by each non-voting
citizen 31 francs 30 centimes,--two-fifths of the tax paid by the
wealthy class. Now, for this proportion to be equitable, the
average welfare of the non-voting class would have to be
two-fifths of the average welfare of the voting class: but such
is not the truth, as it falls short of this by more than
three-fourths.
But this disproportion will seem still more shocking when it is
remembered that the calculation which we have just made
concerning the electoral class is altogether wrong, altogether in
favor of the voters.
In fact, the only taxes which are levied for the enjoyment of the
right of suffrage are: (1) the land tax; (2) the tax on polls and
personal property; (3) the tax on doors and windows; (4)
license-fees. Now, with the exception of the tax on polls and
personal property, which varies little, the three other taxes are
thrown back on the consumers; and it is the same with all the
indirect taxes, for which the holders of capital are reimbursed
by the consumers, with the exception, however, of the taxes on
property transfers, which fall directly on the proprietor and
amount in all to 150,000,000. Now, if we estimate that in this
last amount the property of voters figures as one-sixth, which is
placing it high, the portion of direct taxes (409,000,000) being
12 francs for each person, and that of indirect taxes
(547,000,000) 16 francs, the average tax paid by each voter
having a household of five will reach a total of 265 francs,
while that paid by the laborer, who has only his arms to support
himself, his wife, and two children, will be 112 francs. In more
general terms, the average tax upon each person belonging to the
upper classes will be 53 francs; upon each belonging to the
lower, 28. Whereupon I renew my question: Is the welfare of
those below the voting standard half as great as that of those
above it?
It is with the tax as with periodical publications, which really
cost more the less frequently they appear. A daily journal costs
forty francs, a weekly ten francs, a monthly four. Supposing
other things to be equal, the subscription prices of these
journals are to each other as the numbers forty, seventy, and one
hundred and twenty, the price rising with the infrequency of
publication. Now, this exactly represents the increase of the
tax: it is a subscription paid by each citizen in exchange for
the right to labor and to live. He who uses this right in the
smallest proportion pays much; he who uses it a little more pays
less; he who uses it a great deal pays little.
The economists are generally in agreement about all this. They
have attacked the proportional tax, not only in its principle,
but in its application; they have pointed out its anomalies,
almost all of which arise from the fact that the relation of
capital to income, or of cultivated surface to rent, is never
fixed.
Given a levy of one-tenth on the income from lands, and lands of
different qualities producing, the first eight francs' worth of
grain, the second six francs' worth, the third five francs'
worth, the tax will call for one-eighth of the income from the
most fertile land, one-sixth from that a little less fertile,
and, finally, one-fifth from that less fertile still.[24] Will
not the tax thus established be just the reverse of what it
should be? Instead of land, we may suppose other instruments of
production, and compare capitals of the same value, or amounts of
labor of the same order, applied to branches of industry
differing in productivity: the conclusion will be the same.
There is injustice in requiring the same poll-tax of ten francs
from the laborer who earns one thousand francs and from the
artist or physician who has an income of sixty thousand.--J.
Garnier: Principles of Political Economy.
[24] This sentence, as it stands, is unintelligible, and probably
is not correctly quoted by Proudhon. At any rate, one of
Garnier's works contains a similar passage, which begins thus:
"Given a levy of one on the area of the land, and lands of
different qualities producing, the first eight, the second six,
the third five, the tax will call for one- eighth," etc. This is
perfectly clear, and the circumstances supposed are aptly
illustrative of Proudhon's point. I should unhesitatingly
pronounce it the correct version, except for the fact that
Proudhon, in the succeeding paragraph, interprets Garnier as
supposing income to be assessed instead of capital.--Translator.
These reflections are very sound, although they apply only to
collection or assessment, and do not touch the principle of the
tax itself. For, in supposing the assessment to be made upon
income instead of upon capital, the fact always remains that the
tax, which should be proportional to fortunes, is borne by the
consumer.
The economists have taken a resolve; they have squarely
recognized the iniquity of the proportional tax.
"The tax," says Say, "can never be levied upon the necessary."
This author, it is true, does not tell us what we are to
understand by the necessary, but we can supply the omission. The
necessary is what each individual gets out of the total product
of the country, after deducting what must be taken for taxes.
Thus, making the estimate in round numbers, the production of
France being eight thousand millions and the tax one thousand
millions, the necessary in the case of each individual amounts to
fifty-six and a half centimes a day. Whatever is in excess of
this income is alone susceptible of being taxed, according to J.
B. Say; whatever falls short of it must be regarded by the
treasury as inviolable.
The same author expresses this idea in other words when he says:
"The proportional tax is not equitable." Adam Smith had already
said before him: "It is not unreasonable that the rich man
should contribute to the public expenses, not only in proportion
to his income, but something more." "I will go further," adds
Say; "I will not fear to say that the progressive tax is the only
equitable tax." And M. J. Garnier, the latest abridger of the
economists, says: "Reforms should tend to establish a
progressional equality, if I may use the phrase, much more just,
much more equitable, than the pretended equality of taxation,
which is only a monstrous inequality."
So, according to general opinion and the testimony of the
economists, two things are acknowledged: one, that in its
principle the tax is a reaction against monopoly and directed
against the rich; the other, that in practice this same tax is
false to its object; that, in striking the poor by preference, it
commits an injustice; and that the constant effort of the
legislator must be to distribute its burden in a more equitable
fashion.
I needed to establish this double fact solidly before passing to
other considerations: now commences my criticism.
The economists, with that simplicity of honest folk which they
have inherited from their elders and which even today is all that
stands to their credit, have taken no pains to see that the
progressional theory of the tax, which they point out to
governments as the ne plus ultra of a wise and liberal
administration, was contradictory in its terms and pregnant with
a legion of impossibilities. They have attributed the oppression
of the treasury by turns to the barbarism of the time, the
ignorance of princes, the prejudices of caste, the avarice of
collectors, everything, in short, which, in their opinion,
preventing the progression of the tax, stood in the way of the
sincere practice of equality in the distribution of public
burdens; they have not for a moment suspected that what they
asked under the name of progressive taxation was the overturn of
all economic ideas.
Thus they have not seen, for instance, that the tax was
progressive from the very fact that it was proportional, the only
difference being that the progression was in the wrong direction,
the percentage being, as we have said, not directly, but
inversely proportional to fortunes. If the economists had had a
clear idea of this overturn, invariable in all countries where
taxation exists, so singular a phenomenon would not have failed
to draw their attention; they would have sought its causes, and
would have ended by discovering that what they took for an
accident of civilization, an effect of the inextricable
difficulties of human government, was the product of the
contradiction inherent in all political economy.
The progressive tax, whether applied to capital or to income, is
the very negation of monopoly, of that monopoly which is met
everywhere, according to M. Rossi, across the path of social
economy; which is the true stimulant of industry, the hope of
economy, the preserver and parent of all wealth; of which we have
been able to say, in short, that society cannot exist without it,
but that, except for it, there would be no society. Let the tax
become suddenly what it unquestionably must sometime be,--namely,
the proportional (or progressional, which is the same thing)
contribution of each producer to the public expenses, and
straightway rent and profit are confiscated everywhere for the
benefit of the State; labor is stripped of the fruits of its
toil; each individual being reduced to the proper allowance of
fifty-six and a half centimes, poverty becomes general; the
compact formed between labor and capital is dissolved, and
society, deprived of its rudder, drifts back to its original
state.
It will be said, perhaps, that it is easy to prevent the absolute
annihilation of the profits of capital by stopping the
progression at any moment.
Eclecticism, the golden mean, compromise with heaven or with
morality: is it always to be the same philosophy, then? True
science is repugnant to such arrangements. All invested capital
must return to the producer in the form of interest; all labor
must leave a surplus, all wages be equal to product. Under the
protection of these laws society continually realizes, by the
greatest variety of production, the highest possible degree of
welfare. These laws are absolute; to violate them is to wound,
to mutilate society. Capital, accordingly, which, after all, is
nothing but accumulated labor, is inviolable. But, on the other
hand, the tendency to equality is no less imperative; it is
manifested at each economic phase with increasing energy and an
invincible authority. Therefore you must satisfy labor and
justice at once; you must give to the former guarantees more
and more real, and secure the latter without concession or
ambiguity.
Instead of that, you know nothing but the continual substitution
of the good pleasure of the prince for your theories, the arrest
of the course of economic law by arbitrary power, and, under the
pretext of equity, the deception of the wage worker and the
monopolist alike! Your liberty is but a half-liberty, your
justice but a half-justice, and all your wisdom consists in those
middle terms whose iniquity is always twofold, since they justify
the pretensions of neither one party nor the other! No, such
cannot be the science which you have promised us, and which, by
unveiling for us the secrets of the production and consumption of
wealth, must unequivocally solve the social antinomies. Your
semi- liberal doctrine is the code of despotism, and shows that
you are powerless to advance as well as ashamed to retreat.
If society, pledged by its economic antecedents, can never
retrace its steps; if, until the arrival of the universal
equation, monopoly must be maintained in its possession,--no
change is possible in the laying of taxes: only there is a
contradiction here, which, like every other, must be pushed till
exhausted. Have, then, the courage of your opinions,-- respect
for wealth, and no pity for the poor, whom the God of monopoly
has condemned. The less the hireling has wherewith to live, the
more he must pay: qui minus habet, etiam quod habet auferetur ab
eo. This is necessary, this is inevitable; in it lies the safety
of society.
Let us try, nevertheless, to reverse the progression of the tax,
and so arrange it that the capitalist, instead of the laborer,
will pay the larger share.
I observe, in the first place, that with the usual method of
collection, such a reversal is impracticable.
In fact, if the tax falls on exploitable capital, this tax, in
its entirety, is included among the costs of production, and then
of two things one: either the product, in spite of the increase
in its selling value, will be bought by the consumer, and
consequently the producer will be relieved of the tax; or else
this same product will be thought too dear, and in that case the
tax, as J. B. Say has very well said, acts like a tithe levied on
seed,--it prevents production. Thus it is that too high a tax on
the transfer of titles arrests the circulation of real property,
and renders estates less productive by keeping them from changing
hands.
If, on the contrary, the tax falls on product, it is nothing but
a tax of quotite, which each pays in the ratio of his
consumption, while the capitalist, whom it is purposed to strike,
escapes.
Moreover, the supposition of a progressive tax based either on
product or on capital is perfectly absurd. How can we imagine
the same product paying a duty of ten per cent. at the store of
one dealer and a duty of but five at another's? How are estates
already encumbered with mortgages and which change owners every
day, how is a capital formed by joint investment or by the
fortune of a single individual, to be distinguished upon the
official register, and taxed, not in the ratio of their value or
rent, but in the ratio of the fortune or presumed profits of the
proprietor?
There remains, then, a last resource,--to tax the net income of
each tax-payer, whatever his method of getting it. For instance,
an income of one thousand francs would pay ten per cent.; an
income of two thousand francs, twenty per cent.; an income of
three thousand francs, thirty per cent., etc. We will set aside
the thousand difficulties and annoyances that must be met in
ascertaining these incomes, and suppose the operation as
easy as you like. Well! that is exactly the system which I
charge with hypocrisy, contradiction, and injustice.
I say in the first place that this system is hypocritical,
because, instead of taking from the rich that entire portion of
their income in excess of the average national product per
family, which is inadmissible, it does not, as is imagined,
reverse the order of progression in the direction of wealth; at
most it changes the rate of progression. Thus the present
progression of the tax, for fortunes yielding incomes of a
thousand francs and UNDER, being as that of the numbers 10, 11,
12, 13, etc., and, for fortunes yielding incomes of a thousand
francs and OVER, as that of the numbers 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, etc.,--
the tax always increasing with poverty and decreasing with
wealth,--if we should confine ourselves to lifting the indirect
tax which falls especially on the poorer class and imposing a
corresponding tax upon the incomes of the richer class, the
progression thereafter, it is true, would be, for the first, only
as that of the numbers 10, 10.25, 10.50, 10.75, 11, 11.25, etc.,
and, for the second, as 10, 9.75, 9.50, 9.25, 9, 8.75, etc. But
this progression, although less rapid on both sides, would still
take the same direction nevertheless, would still be a reversal
of justice; and it is for this reason that the so-called
progressive tax, capable at most of giving the philanthropist
something to babble about, is of no scientific value. It changes
nothing in fiscal jurisprudence; as the proverb says, it is
always the poor man who carries the pouch, always the rich man
who is the object of the solicitude of power.
I add that this system is contradictory.
In fact, ONE CANNOT BOTH GIVE AND KEEP, say the jurisconsults.
Instead, then, of consecrating monopolies from which the holders
are to derive no privilege save that of straightway losing, with
the income, all the enjoyment thereof, why not decree the
agrarian law at once? Why provide in the constitution that each
shall freely enjoy the fruit of his labor and industry, when, by
the fact or the tendency of the tax, this permission is granted
only to the extent of a dividend of fifty-six and a half centimes
a day,--a thing, it is true, which the law could not have
foreseen, but which would necessarily result from progression?
The legislator, in confirming us in our monopolies, intended to
favor production, to feed the sacred fire of industry: now, what
interest shall we have to produce, if, though not yet associated,
we are not to produce for ourselves alone? After we have been
declared free, how can we be made subject to conditions of sale,
hire, and exchange which annul our liberty?
A man possesses government securities which bring him an income
of twenty thousand francs. The tax, under the new system of
progression, will take fifty per cent. of this from him. At this
rate it is more advantageous to him to withdraw his capital and
consume the principal instead of the income. Then let him be
repaid. What! repaid! The State cannot be obliged to repay;
and, if it consents to redeem, it will do so in proportion to the
net income. Therefore a bond for twenty thousand francs will be
worth not more than ten thousand to the bondholder, because of
the tax, if he wishes to get it redeemed by the State: unless he
divides it into twenty lots, in which case it will return him
double the amount. Likewise an estate which rents for fifty
thousand francs, the tax taking two-thirds of the income, will
lose two- thirds of its value. But let the proprietor divide
this estate into a hundred lots and sell it at auction, and then,
the terror of the treasury no longer deterring purchasers, he can
get back his entire capital. So that, with the progressive
tax, real estate no longer follows the law of supply and demand
and is not valued according to the real income which it yields,
but according to the condition of the owner. The consequence
will be that large capitals will depreciate in value, and
mediocrity be brought to the front; land-owners will hasten to
sell, because it will be better for them to consume their
property than to get an insufficient rent from it; capitalists
will recall their investments, or will invest only at usurious
rates; all exploitation on a large scale will be prohibited,
every visible fortune proceeded against, and all accumulation of
capital in excess of the figure of the necessary proscribed.
Wealth, driven back, will retire within itself and never emerge
except by stealth; and labor, like a man attached to a corpse,
will embrace misery in an endless union. Does it not well become
the economists who devise such reforms to laugh at the reformers?
After having demonstrated the contradiction and delusion of the
progressive tax, must I prove its injustice also? The
progressive tax, as understood by the economists and, in their
wake, by certain radicals, is impracticable, I said just now, if
it falls on capital and product: consequently I have supposed it
to fall on incomes. But who does not see that this purely
theoretical distinction between capital, product, and income
falls so far as the treasury is concerned, and that the same
impossibilities which we have pointed out reappear here with all
their fatal character?
A manufacturer discovers a process by means of which, saving
twenty per cent. of his cost of production, he secures an income
of twenty-five thousand francs. The treasury calls on him for
fifteen thousand. He is obliged, therefore, to raise his prices,
since, by the fact of the tax, his process, instead of saving
twenty per cent., saves only eight per cent. Is not this as
if the treasury prevented cheapness? Thus, in trying to reach
the rich, the progressive tax always reaches the consumer; and it
is impossible for it not to reach him without suppressing
production altogether: what a mistake!
It is a law of social economy that all invested capital must
return continually to the capitalist in the form of interest.
With the progressive tax this law is radically violated, since,
by the effect of progression, interest on capital is so reduced
that industries are established only at a loss of a part or the
whole of the capital. To make it otherwise, interest on capital
would have to increase progressively in the same ratio as the tax
itself, which is absurd. Therefore the progressive tax stops the
creation of capital; furthermore it hinders its circulation.
Whoever, in fact, should want to buy a plant for any enterprise
or a piece of land for cultivation would have to consider, under
the system of progressive taxation, not the real value of such
plant or land, but rather the tax which it would bring upon him;
so that, if the real income were four per cent., and, by the
effect of the tax or the condition of the buyer, must go down to
three, the purchase could not be effected. After having run
counter to all interests and thrown the market into confusion by
its categories, the progressive tax arrests the development of
wealth and reduces venal value below real value; it contracts, it
petrifies society. What tyranny! What derision!
The progressive tax resolves itself, then, whatever may be done,
into a denial of justice, prohibition of production,
confiscation. It is unlimited and unbridled absolutism, given to
power over everything which, by labor, by economy, by
improvements, contributes to public wealth.
But what is the use of wandering about in chimerical hypotheses
when the truth is at hand. It is not the fault of the
proportional principle if the tax falls with such shocking
inequality upon the various classes of society; the fault is in
our prejudices and our morals. The tax, as far as is possible in
human operations, proceeds with equity, precision. Social
economy commands it to apply to product; it applies to product.
If product escapes it, it strikes capital: what more natural!
The tax, in advance of civilization, supposes the equality of
laborers and capitalists: the inflexible expression of necessity,
it seems to invite us to make ourselves equals by education and
labor, and, by balancing our functions and associating our
interests, to put ourselves in accord with it. The tax refuses
to distinguish between one man and another: and we blame its
mathematical severity for the differences in our fortunes! We
ask equality itself to comply with our injustice! Was I not
right in saying at the outset that, relatively to the tax, we are
behind our institutions?
Accordingly we always see the legislator stopping, in his fiscal
laws, before the subversive consequences of the progressive tax,
and consecrating the necessity, the immutability of the
proportional tax. For equality in well-being cannot result from
the violation of capital: the antinomy must be methodically
solved, under penalty, for society, of falling back into chaos.
Eternal justice does not accommodate itself to all the whims of
men: like a woman, whom one may outrage, but whom one does not
marry without a solemn alienation of one's self, it demands on
our part, with the abandonment of our egoism, the recognition of
all its rights, which are those of science.
The tax, whose final purpose, as we have shown, is the reward of
the non-producers, but whose original idea was a restoration of
the laborer,--the tax, under the system of monopoly, reduces
itself therefore to a pure and simple protest, a sort of
extra-judicial act, the whole effect of which is to aggravate the
situation of the wage-worker by disturbing the monopolist in his
possession. As for the idea of changing the proportional tax
into a progressive tax, or, to speak more accurately, of
reversing the order in which the tax progresses, that is a
blunder the entire responsibility for which belongs to the
economists.
But henceforth menace hovers over privilege. With the power of
modifying the proportionality of the tax, government has under
its hand an expeditious and sure means of dispossessing the
holders of capital when it will; and it is a frightful thing to
see everywhere that great institution, the basis of society, the
object of so many controversies, of so many laws, of so many
cajoleries, and of so many crimes, PROPERTY, suspended at the end
of a thread over the yawning mouth of the proletariat.
% 3.--Disastrous and inevitable consequences of the tax.
(Provisions, sumptuary laws, rural and industrial police,
patents, trade-marks, etc.)
M. Chevalier addressed to himself, in July, 1843, on the subject
of the tax, the following questions:
(1) Is it asked of all or by preference of a part of the nation?
(2) Does the tax resemble a levy on polls, or is it exactly
proportioned to the fortunes of the tax-payers? (3) Is
agriculture more or less burdened than manufactures or commerce?
(4) Is real estate more or less spared than personal property?
(5) Is he who produces more favored than he who consumes? (6)
Have our taxation laws the character of sumptuary laws?
To these various questions M. Chevalier makes the reply which I
am about to quote, and which sums up all of the most
philosophical considerations upon the subject which I have met:
(a) The tax affects the universality, applies to the mass, takes
the nation as a whole; nevertheless, as the poor are the most
numerous, it taxes them willingly, certain of collecting more.
(b) By the nature of things the tax sometimes takes the form of a
levy on polls, as in the case of the salt tax. (c, d, e) The
treasury addresses itself to labor as well as to consumption,
because in France everybody labors, to real more than to personal
property, and to agriculture more than to manufactures. (f) By
the same reasoning, our laws partake little of the character of
sumptuary laws.
What, professor! is that all that science has taught you? THE
TAX APPLIES TO THE MASS, you say; IT TAKES THE NATION AS A WHOLE.
Alas! we know it only too well; but it is this which is
iniquitous, and which we ask you to explain. The government,
when engaged in the assessment and distribution of the tax, could
not have believed, did not believe, that all fortunes were equal;
consequently it could not have wished, did not wish, the sums
paid to be equal. Why, then, is the practice of the government
always the opposite of its theory? Your opinion, if you please,
on this difficult matter? Explain; justify or condemn the
exchequer; take whatever course you will, provided you take some
course and say something. Remember that your readers are men,
and that they cannot excuse in a doctor, speaking ex cathedra,
such propositions as this: AS THE POOR ARE THE MOST NUMEROUS, IT
TAXES THEM WILLINGLY, CERTAIN OF COLLECTING MORE. No, Monsieur:
NUMBERS do not regulate the tax; the tax knows perfectly well
that millions of poor added to millions of poor do not make one
voter. You render the treasury odious by making it absurd, and I
maintain that it is neither the one nor the other. The poor man
pays more than the rich because Providence, to whom misery is
odious like vice, has so ordered things that the miserable
must always be the most ground down. The iniquity of the tax is
the celestial scourge which drives us towards equality. God! if
a professor of political economy, who was formerly an apostle,
could but understand this revelation!
BY THE NATURE OF THINGS, says m. Chevalier, THE TAX SOMETIMES
TAKES THE FORM OF A LEVY ON POLLS. Well, in what case is it just
that the tax should take the form of a levy on polls? Is it
always, or never? What is the principle of the tax? What is its
object? Speak, answer.
And what instruction, pray, can we derive from the remark,
scarcely worthy of quotation, that THE TREASURY ADDRESSES ITSELF
TO LABOR AS WELL AS TO CONSUMPTION, TO REAL MORE THAN TO PERSONAL
PROPERTY, TO AGRICULTURE MORE THAN TO MANUFACTURES? Of what
consequence to science is this interminable recital of crude
facts, if your analysis never extracts a single idea from them?
All the deductions made from consumption by taxation, rent,
interest on capital, etc., enter into the general expense account
and figure in the selling price, so that nearly always the
consumer pays the tax: that we know. And as the goods most
consumed are also those which yield the most revenue, it
necessarily follows that the poorest people are the most heavily
burdened: this consequence, like the first, is inevitable. Once
more, then, of what importance to us are your fiscal
distinctions? Whatever the classification of taxable material,
as it is impossible to tax capital beyond its income, the
capitalist will be always favored, while the proletaire will
suffer iniquity, oppression. The trouble is not in the
distribution of taxes; it is in the distribution of goods. M.
Chevalier cannot be ignorant of this: why, then, does not M.
Chevalier, whose word would carry more weight than that of a
writer suspected of not loving the existing order, say as much?
From 1806 to 1811 (this observation, as well as the following, is
M. Chevalier's) the annual consumption of wine in Paris was one
hundred and forty quarts for each individual; now it is not more
than eighty-three. Abolish the tax of seven or eight cents a
quart collected from the retailer, and the consumption of wine
will soon rise from eighty-three quarts to one hundred and
seventy-five; and the wine industry, which does not know what to
do with its products, will have a market. Thanks to the duties
laid upon the importation of cattle, the consumption of meat by
the people has diminished in a ratio similar to that of the
falling-off in the consumption of wine; and the economists have
recognized with fright that the French workman does less work
than the English workman, because he is not as well fed.
Out of sympathy for the laboring classes M. Chevalier would like
our manufacturers to feel the goad of foreign competition a
little. A reduction of the tax on woollens to the extent of
twenty cents on each pair of pantaloons would leave six million
dollars in the pockets of the consumers,--half enough to pay the
salt tax. Four cents less in the price of a shirt would effect a
saving probably sufficient to keep a force of twenty thousand men
under arms.
In the last fifteen years the consumption of sugar has risen from
one hundred and sixteen million pounds to two hundred and sixty
million, which gives at present an average of seven pounds and
three-quarters for each individual. This progress demonstrates
that sugar must be classed henceforth with bread, wine, meat,
wool, cotton, wood, and coal, among the articles of prime
necessity. To the poor man sugar is a whole medicine-chest:
would it be too much to raise the average individual consumption
of this article from seven pounds and three-quarters to fifteen
pounds? Abolish the tax, which is about four dollars and a
half on a hundred pounds, and your consumption will double.
Thus the tax on provisions agitates and tortures the poor
proletaire in a thousand ways: the high price of salt hinders the
production of cattle; the duties on meat diminish also the
rations of the laborer. To satisfy at once the tax and the need
of fermented beverages which the laboring class feels, they serve
him with mixtures unknown to the chemist as well as to the brewer
and the wine-grower. What further need have we of the dietary
prescriptions of the Church? Thanks to the tax, the whole year
is Lent to the laborer, and his Easter dinner is not as good as
Monseigneur's Good Friday lunch. It is high time to abolish
everywhere the tax on consumption, which weakens and starves the
people: this is the conclusion of the economists as well as of
the radicals.
But if the proletaire does not fast to feed Caesar, what will
Caesar eat? And if the poor man does not cut his cloak to cover
Caesar's nudity, what will Caesar wear?
That is the question, the inevitable question, the question to be
solved.
M. Chevalier, then, having asked himself as his sixth question
whether our taxation laws have the character of sumptuary laws,
has answered: No, our taxation laws have not the character of
sumptuary laws. M. Chevalier might have added--and it would have
been both new and true-- that that is the best thing about our
taxation laws. But M. Chevalier, who, whatever he may do, always
retains some of the old leaven of radicalism, has preferred to
declaim against luxury, whereby he could not compromise himself
with any party. "If in Paris," he cries, "the tax collected from
meat should be laid upon private carriages, saddle- horses and
carriage-horses, servants, and dogs, it would be a perfectly
equitable operation."
Does M. Chevalier, then, sit in the College of France to expound
the politics of Masaniello? I have seen the dogs at Basle
wearing the treasury badge upon their necks as a sign that they
had been taxed, and I looked upon the tax on dogs, in a country
where taxation is almost nothing, as rather a moral lesson and a
hygienic precaution than a source of revenue. In 1844 the dog
tax of forty-two cents a head gave a revenue of $12,600 in the
entire province of Brabant, containing 667,000 inhabitants. From
this it may be estimated that the same tax, producing in all
France $600,000, would lighten the taxes of QUOTITE LESS THAN TWO
CENTS a year for each individual. Certainly I am far from
pretending that $600,000 is a sum to be disdained, especially
with a prodigal ministry; and I regret that the Chamber should
have rejected the dog tax, which would always have served to
endow half a dozen highnesses. But I remember that a tax of this
nature is levied much less in the interest of the treasury than
as a promoter of order; that consequently it is proper to look
upon it, from the fiscal point of view, as of no importance; and
that it will even have to be abolished as an annoyance when the
mass of the people, having become a little more humanized, shall
feel a disgust for the companionship of beasts. TWO CENTS A
YEAR, what a relief for poverty!
But M. Chevalier has other resources in reserve,--horses,
carriages, servants, articles of luxury, luxury at last! How
much is contained in that one word, LUXURY!
Let us cut short this phantasmagoria by a simple calculation;
reflections will be in order later. In 1842 the duties collected
on imports amounted to $25,800,000. In this sum of $25,800,000,
sixty-one articles in common use figure for $24,800,000, and one
hundred and seventy-seven, used only by those who enjoy a high
degree of luxury, for TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. In the first
class sugar yielded a revenue of $8,600,000, coffee $2,400,000,
cotton $2,200,000, woollens $2,000,000, oils $1,600,000, coal
$800,000, linens and hemp $600,000,-- making a total of
$18,200,000 on seven articles. The amount of revenue, then, is
lower in proportion as the article of merchandise from which it
is derived is less generally used, more rarely consumed, and
found accompanying a more refined degree of luxury. And yet
articles of luxury are subject to much the highest taxes.
Therefore, even though, to obtain an appreciable reduction upon
articles of primary necessity, the duties upon articles of luxury
should be made a hundred times higher, the only result would be
the suppression of a branch of commerce by a prohibitory tax.
Now, the economists all favor the abolition of custom-houses;
doubtless they do not wish them replaced by city toll- gates?
Let us generalize this example: salt brings the treasury
$11,400,000, tobacco $16,800,000. Let them show me, figures in
hand, by what taxes upon articles of luxury, after having
abolished the taxes on salt and tobacco, this deficit will be
made up.
You wish to strike articles of luxury; you take civilization at
the wrong end. I maintain, for my part, that articles of luxury
should be free. In economic language what are luxuries? Those
products which bear the smallest ratio to the total wealth, those
which come last in the industrial series and whose creation
supposes the preexistence of all the others. From this point of
view all the products of human labor have been, and in turn have
ceased to be, articles of luxury, since we mean by luxury nothing
but a relation of succession, whether chronological or
commercial, in the elements of wealth. Luxury, in a word, is
synonymous with progress; it is, at each instant of social life,
the expression of the maximum of comfort realized by labor
and at which it is the right and destiny of all to arrive. Now,
just as the tax respects for a time the newly-built house and the
newly-cleared field, so it should freely welcome new products and
precious articles, the latter because their scarcity should be
continually combatted, the former because every invention
deserves encouragement. What! under a pretext of luxury would
you like to establish new classes of citizens? And do you take
seriously the city of Salente and the prosopopoeia of Fabricius?
Since the subject leads us to it, let us talk of morality.
Doubtless you will not deny the truth so often dwelt upon by the
Senecas of all ages,--that luxury CORRUPTS and WEAKENS morals:
which means that it humanizes, elevates, and ennobles habits, and
that the first and most effective education for the people, the
stimulant of the ideal in most men, is luxury. The Graces were
naked, according to the ancients; where has it ever been said
that they were needy? It is the taste for luxury which in our
day, in the absence of religious principles, sustains the social
movement and reveals to the lower classes their dignity. The
Academy of Moral and Political Sciences clearly understood this
when it chose luxury as the subject of one of its essays, and I
applaud its wisdom from the bottom of my heart. Luxury, in fact,
is already more than a right in our society, it is a necessity;
and he is truly to be pitied who never allows himself a little
luxury. And it is when universal effort tends to popularize
articles of luxury more and more that you would confine the
enjoyment of the people to articles which you are pleased to
describe as articles of necessity! It is when ranks approach and
blend into each other through the generalization of luxury that
you would dig the line of demarcation deeper and increase the
height of your steps! The workman sweats and sacrifices and
grinds in order to buy a set of jewelry for his sweetheart, a
necklace for his granddaughter, or a watch for his son; and you
would deprive him of this happiness, unless he pays your
tax,--that is, your fine.
But have you reflected that to tax articles of luxury is to
prohibit the luxurious arts? Do you think that the silk-workers,
whose average wages does not reach forty cents; the milliners at
ten cents; the jewellers, goldsmiths, and clockmakers, with their
interminable periods of idleness; servants at forty dollars,--do
you think that they earn too much?
Are you sure that the tax on luxuries would not be paid by the
worker in the luxurious arts, as the tax on beverages is paid by
the consumer of beverages? Do you even know whether higher
prices for articles of luxury would not be an obstacle to the
cheapness of necessary objects, and whether, in trying to favor
the most numerous class, you would not render the general
condition worse? A fine speculation, in truth! Four dollars to
be returned to the laborer on his wine and sugar, and eight to be
taken from him in the cost of his pleasures! He shall gain
fifteen cents on the leather in his boots, and, to take his
family into the country four times a year, he shall pay one
dollar and twenty cents more for carriage-hire! A small
bourgeois spends one hundred and twenty dollars for a
housekeeper, laundress, linen-tender, and errand-boys; but if,
by a wiser economy which works for the interest of all, he takes
a domestic, the exchequer, in the interest of articles of
subsistence, will punish this plan of economy! What an absurd
thing is the philanthropy of the economists, when closely
scrutinized!
Nevertheless I wish to satisfy your whim; and, since you
absolutely must have sumptuary laws, I undertake to give you
the receipt. And I guarantee that in my system collection shall
be easy: no comptrollers, assessors, tasters, assayers,
inspectors, receivers; no watching, no office expenses; not the
smallest annoyance or the slightest indiscretion; no constraint
whatever. Let it be decreed by a law that no one in future shall
receive two salaries at the same time, and that the highest fees,
in any situation, shall not exceed twelve hundred dollars in
Paris and eight hundred in the departments. What! you lower your
eyes! Confess, then, that your sumptuary laws are but hypocrisy.
To relieve the people some would apply commercial practices to
taxation. If, for instance, they say, the price of salt were
reduced one-half, if letter-postage were lightened in the same
proportion, consumption would not fail to increase, the revenue
would be more than doubled, the treasury would gain, and so would
the consumer.
Let us suppose the event to confirm this anticipation. Then I
say: If letter-postage should be reduced three-fourths, and if
salt should be given away, would the treasury still gain?
Certainly not. What, then, is the significance of what is called
the postal reform? That for every kind of product there is a
natural rate, ABOVE which profit becomes usurious and tends to
decrease consumption, but BELOW which the producer suffers loss.
This singularly resembles the determination of value which the
economists reject, and in relation to which we said: There is a
secret force that fixes the extreme limits between which value
oscillates, of which there is a mean term that expresses true
value.
Surely no one wishes the postal service to be carried on at a
loss; the opinion, therefore, is that this service should be
performed AT COST. This is so rudimentary in its simplicity
that one is astonished that it should have been necessary to
resort to a laborious investigation of the results of reducing
letter-postage in England; to pile up frightful figures and
probabilities beyond the limit of vision, to put the mind to
torture, all to find out whether a reduction in France would lead
to a surplus or a deficit, and finally to be unable to agree upon
anything! What! there was not a man to be found in the Chamber
with sense enough to say: There is no need of an ambassador's
report or examples from England; letter-postage should be
gradually reduced until receipts reach the level of
expenditures.[25] What, then, has become of our old Gallic wit?
[25] Thank heaven! the minister has settled the question, and I
tender him my very sincere compliments. By the proposed tariff
letter-postage will be reduced to 2 cents for distances under 12
1/2 miles; 4 cents, for distances between 12 1/2 and 25 miles; 6
cents, between 25 and 75 miles; 8 cents, between 75 and 225
miles; 10 cents, for longer distances.
But, it will be said, if the tax should furnish salt, tobacco,
letter-carriage, sugar, wines, meat, etc., at cost, consumption
would undoubtedly increase, and the improvement would be
enormous; but then how would the State meet its expenses? The
amount of indirect taxes is nearly one hundred and twenty million
dollars; upon what would you have the State levy this sum? If
the treasury makes nothing out of the postal service, it will
have to increase the tax on salt; if the tax on salt be lifted
also, it will have to throw the burden back upon drinks; there
would be no end to this litany. Therefore the supply of products
at cost, whether by the State or by private industry, is
impossible.
Therefore, I will reply in turn, relief of the unfortunate
classes by the State is impossible, as sumptuary laws are
impossible, as the progressive tax is impossible; and all your
irrelevancies regarding the tax are lawyer's quibbles. You
have not even the hope that the increase of population, by
dividing the assessments, may lighten the burden of each; because
with population misery increases, and with misery the work and
the personnel of the State are augmented.
The various fiscal laws voted by the Chamber of Deputies during
the session of 1845-46 are so many examples of the absolute
incapacity of power, whatever it may be and however it may go to
work, to procure the comfort of the people. From the very fact
that it is power,--that is, the representative of divine right
and of property, the organ of force,--it is necessarily sterile,
and all its acts are stamped in the corner with a fatal
deception.
I referred just now to the reform in the postage rates, which
reduces the price of letter-carriage about one-third. Surely, if
motives only are in question, I have no reason to reproach the
government which has effected this useful reduction; much less
still will I seek to diminish its merit by miserable criticisms
upon matters of detail, the vile pasturage of the daily press. A
tax, considerably burdensome, is reduced thirty per cent.; its
distribution is made more equitable and more regular; I see only
the fact, and I applaud the minister who has accomplished it.
But that is not the question.
In the first place, the advantage which the government gives us
by changing the tax on letters leaves the proportional--that is,
the unjust--character of this tax intact: that scarcely requires
demonstration. The inequality of burdens, so far as the postal
tax is concerned, stands as before, the advantage of the
reduction going principally, not to the poorest, but to the
richest. A certain business house which paid six hundred dollars
for letter-postage will pay hereafter only four hundred; it will
add, then, a net profit of two hundred dollars to the ten
thousand which its business brings it, and it will owe this to
the munificence of the treasury. On the other hand, the peasant,
the laborer, who shall write twice a year to his son in the army,
and shall receive a like number of replies, will have saved ten
cents. Is it not true that the postal reform acts in direct
opposition to the equitable distribution of the tax? that if,
according to M. Chevalier's wish, the government had desired to
strike the rich and spare the poor, the tax on letters was the
last that it would have needed to reduce? Does it not seem that
the treasury, false to the spirit of its institution, has only
been awaiting the pretext of a reduction inappreciable by poverty
in order to seize the opportunity to make a present to wealth?
That is what the critics of the bill should have said, and that
is what none of them saw. It is true that then the criticism,
instead of applying to the minister, struck power in its essence,
and with power property, which was not the design of the
opponents. Truth today has all opinions against it.
And now could it have been otherwise? No, since, if they kept
the old tax, they injured all without relieving any; and, if they
reduced it, they could not make different rates for classes of
citizens without violating the first article of the Charter,
which says: "All Frenchmen are equal before the law,"--that is,
before the tax. Now, the tax on letters is necessarily personal;
therefore it is a capitation-tax; therefore, that which is equity
in this respect being iniquity from another standpoint, an
equilibrium of burdens is impossible.