Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE SINGLE TAX Among the projects for social and tax reform, few have been more earnestly and enthusiastically supported than the single tax. Many persons, however, have only a faint idea of what the project really is; while others have been so influenced by the alluring arguments of its advocates, that they have not troubled themselves to investigate the problem from the standpoint of modern economic science. Let us attempt, in the following pages, to explain the nature of the single tax and to consider critically the arguments that are commonly urged in its fa- or. I. Wfiat is the Single Tax? In the first place, the single tax denotes, as its name implies, the only tax, the exclusive tax, the tax on some one class of things. The idea that the wants of the state may be supplied by such a tax is not a new one. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a band of reformers in England as well as on the continent put forward the idea of a single tax on expense.1 So many of the privileged classes had succeeded in securing exemption from the various direct taxes, that it was hoped to realize a substantial universality of taxation by taxing everybody on his expenditure; and since it was supposed that this tax could be evaded by no one, it was for a time very popular. Later on in the eighteenth century there was a party in England whose motto was a single tax on houses.2 Again, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the experience of England with the income tax led a number of writers on the continent to advance the plan of a single tax on incomes.3 Toward the middle of the century, again, a single stamp tax was advocatedin France,1 and a generation later,' the project of a single tax on capital was enthusiastically advocated not by socialists, but by co...