CodalSearch this book — or all of Codal…⌘K
nydus/Principles of Political EconomyPublic
Page 83 of 851
Table of Contents

Chapter I. Of The Requisites Of Production.

is thus instantly repaired, but repaired by the privations and often the real misery of the laboring-class.

This leads to the vexed question to which Dr. Chalmers has very particularly adverted: whether the funds required by a government for extraordinary unproductive expenditure are best raised by loans, the interest only being provided by taxes, or whether taxes should be at once laid on to the whole amount; which is called, in the financial vocabulary, raising the whole of the supplies within the year. Dr. Chalmers is strongly for the latter method. He says the common notion is that, in calling for the whole amount in one year, you require what is either impossible, or very inconvenient; that the people can not, without great hardship, pay the whole at once out of their yearly income; and that it is much better to require of them a small payment every year in the shape of interest, than so great a sacrifice once for all. To which his answer is, that the sacrifice is made equally in either case. Whatever is spent can not but be drawn from yearly income. The whole and every part of the wealth produced in the country forms, or helps to form, the yearly income of somebody. The privation which it is supposed must result from taking the amount in the shape of taxes is not avoided by taking it in a loan. The suffering is not averted, but only thrown upon the laboring-classes, the least able, and who least ought, to bear it: while all the inconveniences, physical, moral, and political, produced by maintaining taxes for the perpetual payment of the interest, are incurred in pure loss. Whenever capital is withdrawn from production, or from the fund destined for production, to be lent to the state and expended unproductively,

83