While both we and our clients are in entire sympathy with the aims and purposes of the Tugwell Bill, we are all of one mind in our fears about such a sweeping grant of autocratic power being placed in the hands of any bureau or department of government.
You are about to lose a substantial amount of advertising revenue from food, cosmetic and drug manufacturers…You need to bring all the personal pressure you can upon your Senators and Representatives. You need to enlighten and thereby arouse your public against this bill that is calculated to greatly restrict personal rights….We would be only one of the many drug, cosmetic, and food advertisers who will be forced to liquidate in this manner.
The present law removes all responsibility from the purchaser and fosters litigation. It invites nuisance suits and spurious claims.
No corporation director is going to risk existing resources by putting his name on financing under a law that makes him personally liable for the next ten years and adopts the unprecedented principle that he is to be judged guilty unless he can be proven innocent.
No manufacturer can possibly continue in business except by the grace of the officials in Washington.
In all probability, however, compulsory unemployment insurance cannot be had without an amendment to the Constitution, probably both state and federal, as such a measure might be attacked on the grounds that it is confiscation of property without due process of law.
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.
If America had not been free to any man to make his fortune within the law and within his abilities, we would not be the great nation we are today. To destroy incentive by excessive taxation is to lessen the production and the prosperity of the country.
Death taxes are based entirely upon capital. This capital can be destroyed either by taking it from its owners and using it for maintenance of government, or what amounts to the same thing, by diminishing its value, or by checking the incentive for its production. That is actually happening.
It is proposed to take capital and to use it in the ordinary operating expenses of Government…We are thus to live, not on income, but on principal, and to that extent we exhaust our resources and prevent the industrial expansion essential to our increasing population and our high standard of living.
