prejudices of legislators, who may not be the same in any two successive legislative assemblies.
Such a perversion of principle, furthermore, reaches its climax of absurdity in practice when its immediate beneficiaries claim to be the only proper persons by whom the incidence and amount of taxation can be intelligently determined—a claim that is practically equivalent to the assumption that privilege should take precedence of rights in the theory of government.[1] And yet there have been but very few of the revenue enactments in recent years of the Federal Government of the United States that have not only indorsed the rightfulness and desirability of such claims, but have made them the basis of most important legislation.
As this subject has hitherto received but little attention from legislators and the legal profession in the United States, the following citations from recognized American authorities are most pertinent in this connection:
"A burden laid not for the purpose of producing revenue, but in order to accomplish some ulterior object which the General Government lacks the power otherwise to accomplish, comes under no definition of the word "tax" which is recognized in public law. It demands no contributions for the service of the state; it adds and is expected to add nothing to the public revenue. It annihilates that upon which it is levied, and it differs from confiscation only in this: that confiscation seizes something of value and appropriates it to the needs of the Government, thus making it useful, while this seizes it for the purpose of destruction."—Cooley, Law of Taxation, p. 75.
"One grievous invasion of property—and of course ultimately of labor, from whose accumulations all property grows—is by Government itself, in the shape of taxation for objects not necessary for the common defense and general welfare. Men have a right not only to be well governed, but to be cheaply governed—as cheaply as is consistent with the due maintenance of that security for which society was formed and government instituted. This, the sole legitimate end and object of law, is never to be lost sight of—security to men in the free enjoyment and development
- ↑ In popular discussions of tariff revisions in the United States such a claim has actually been advanced by the representatives of interests in whose behalf certain imposts had been specially enacted, and which were not for purposes of collecting but rather for the prevention of revenue.
"It is not claimed that this statute [McKinley Tariff Act], any more than any other human ordinance, was perfect in its details, nor that all its rates of assessment of duties should have been maintained, but the modifications suggested by time and experience should have been left to the friends of the measure."—Letter of the Hon. L. P. Morton, accepting nomination for the office of Governor of New York, October 9, 1894.
