Income and inheritance taxes which are in effect confiscatory destroy themselves by transferring capital in private hands, essential to private enterprise, to unproductive public funds.
Confiscation of private wealth does not make the public or even its agent, the government, rich. It does not create equality of wealth, but an equality of poverty.
They increased inheritances to the point where cash must be hoarded to pay the tax collector in case of death.
In defense of the Federal estate tax it is said that it will tend to check the growth of large fortunes. But is not such a Federal death tax a penalty on industry, thrift, and business success? The estate tax is communistic in essence; and no party except the Socialist party endorses the Federal estate tax.
They [higher estate tax and provisions for publicity of individual tax returns] are both not only stupid but malevolent expressions of the class feeling and socialist theorizing which are infecting American thought and even shaping our laws… It is astonishing that an American congress with, presumably, some sense at least of the significance of American experience and achievement and some sense of the cause and meaning of the Russian folly before it, should care or dare to experiment in confiscation.
It is not taxation. It is communism in disguise which deceives most of those who voted for these provisions.
[Estates] are valuable only for what they can produce. If seized by the government they can produce nothing, and if such seizures increase in amount beyond a reasonable limit they must prove not only valueless in themselves but must destroy the sources of production which otherwise would continue to finance the government and provide for the people.
Invested in reproductive enterprise this capital pays taxes again and again. Squandered by Government departments it is only spent once.
To the demagogue and the man of small means, who pays heavy indirect taxes where he thinks pays none, this looks like taking money from the millionaire and ‘giving it back to the people.’ To any economist it looks like eating up he seed corn, because in effect is s exactly that.
Excited persons rarely accomplish anything…No new laws are needed.
