chapter eight: An Incontestable Axiom - Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments [1815]
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Principles of Politics Applicable to a all Governments, trans. Dennis O’Keeffe, ed. Etienne Hofmann, Introduction by Nicholas Capaldi (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003).
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chapter eight
An Incontestable Axiom
In indicating, as we have done in this section, necessarily in a very abbreviated way, some of the rules regarding taxation, our intention was to suggest to the reader ideas he could enlarge on, rather than develop any of them. This task would have taken us well beyond the confines we have set ourselves. One incontestable axiom no sophism can obfuscate is that any tax, of any sort, always has a more or less unfortunate influence. If the use of the tax sometimes produces a benefit, its levying always produces an ill. The ill may be necessary. Like all such ills, however, it must be rendered as small as possible. The more resources are left at the disposal of individual activity, the more a State prospers. A tax, just because it takes some portion or other of these resources away from those efforts, is inevitably harmful. The more money is taken away from the various nations, says M. de Vauban in The Royal Tithe, the more it is taken away from commerce. The best-employed money in the realm is that which stays in the hands of individuals, where it is never pointless nor idle.
[267] Rousseau, who was uninformed in things financial, followed many others in saying that in monarchies the excessive surplus of the subjects must be consumed in the opulence of the prince, because it was better that this surplus be absorbed by government than dissipated by individuals. This doctrine reveals an absurd mix of monarchical prejudices and republican opinions. The prince’s opulence, far from discouraging that of individuals, gives it encouragement and example. It must not be thought that in despoiling them he is reforming them. He can plunge them into poverty; but he cannot bring them back to innocence. All that happens is that the poverty of some occurs in combination with the opulence of others, the most deplorable of all combinations.
Equally inconsequent arguments have concluded that because the most heavily taxed countries, such as England and Holland, are also the richest, they are richest because most heavily taxed. They take the effect for the cause. “People are not rich because they contribute. They contribute because they are rich.”
“Everything which goes beyond real needs,” says a writer of incontestable authority on this subject, “loses its legitimacy. The only difference between personal violations and those of the sovereign, is that the injustice of the former results from straightforward ideas which everybody can easily distinguish, while the latter are linked to mixed causes as vast as they are complicated, such that no one can judge them other than conjecturally.”
Titles (by Subject) 