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Subject Area: Economics
Subject Area: Political Theory
Subject Area: Law
Topic: Property

SECTION IV.: ORIGINALITY. - Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 2 [1843]

Edition used:

The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-1843). 11 vols. Vol. 2.

Part of: The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols.

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SECTION IV.

ORIGINALITY.

If the proposal relative to this resource be not an original one, its want of originality may be seen to afford an objection. If not original, it has been proposed: and if it has been proposed, it has been rejected, for assuredly it has not been adopted anywhere.

A tax on successions might at first glance present itself as bearing a resemblance to the resource in question; as being a sort of modification of it—a commencement towards it—as forming in a manner a branch of it. But we have already seen how perfectly dissimilar, or rather opposite in effect, the tax is to the regulation, and how much the difference is to its disadvantage. A tax on successions lies as heavy on the individual as it falls light into the Exchequer.

Taxes on successions (not to mention the old Roman tax, the vicesima hereditatem, the 5 per cent. on collateral successions) exist already in this country: they exist in the form of a stamp-duty, in some degree proportional, on probates and letters of administration: they exist in the form of a stamp duty on receipts for legacies and distributive shares. As to the duties on legacies, in what proportion they are paid I do not know; but I am sure they are evaded, and very frequently evaded. One should be almost sorry if they were not evaded: they are evaded in proportion as confidence prevails in families. The whole mass of property goes in the first place into the hands of individuals; a course which, indeed, it could not but take, so long as the resource is left to stand upon the footing of a tax. The private executor sets out with getting everything into his hands: the public gets what this most confidential friend of the deceased thinks proper to bestow; of course he will not bestow anything at the expense of the friend of his testator, so long as he can persuade himself with any tolerable assurance that the person he is befriending will not requite his generosity with such a degree of baseness as to make him pay the legacy over again out of his own pocket.

Another circumstance concurs in diminishing the productive power of a tax upon successions. When the duty amounts to a sum which appears considerable, the levy being a tax—a tax to be levied on an individual, and levied all at once, it wears so formidable an aspect, that the man of finance himself is startled at it: he accordingly reduces the rate, and the higher the legacy amounts, the more he reduces it; so that all proportionality is destroyed. By this means, the better a man can afford to pay, the less it is he pays; and the tax has the appearance of a conspiracy of the richer against the poorer classes of mankind.

Whence comes this? Only from its being raised by a tax, and not by a regulation, as above proposed. Under the regulation, the public will pay itself; the officer of the public will have the staff in his hands; a partiality as unfriendly to the interests of finance as it is unseemly in the eyes of justice, will disappear, and wealthy successions will yield in proportion to their opulence.*

[* ]The freshest and most considerable tax upon legacies and shares in successions (that of 29 Geo. III. c. 51, anno 1789,) has freed itself so far from this objection; but the duties on probates and letters of administration remain exposed to it; as do the anterior taxes on legacies and shares in successions imposed by 20 Geo. III. c. 28 anno 1780. There reason in the instance of the duty on probates and letters of administration, seems to be that in that stage the value of the subject can only be guessed at, whereas in the other cases it has been liquidated.