>>17851693
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As the national debt finds its support in the public revenue, which must cover the yearly
payments for interest, &c., the modern system of taxation was the necessary complement of the
system of national loans. The loans enable the government to meet extraordinary expenses,
without the tax-payers feeling it immediately, but they necessitate, as a consequence, increased
taxes. On the other hand, the raising of taxation caused by the accumulation of debts contracted
one after another, compels the government always to have recourse to new loans for new
extraordinary expenses. Modern fiscality, whose pivot is formed by taxes on the most necessary
means of subsistence (thereby increasing their price), thus contains within itself the germ of
automatic progression. Overtaxation is not an incident, but rather a principle. In Holland,
therefore, where this system was first inaugurated, the great patriot, DeWitt, has in his “Maxims”
extolled it as the best system for making the wage labourer submissive, frugal, industrious, and
overburdened with labour. The destructive influence that it exercises on the condition of the wage
labourer concerns us less however, here, than the forcible expropriation, resulting from it, of
peasants, artisans, and in a word, all elements of the lower middle class. On this there are not two
opinions, even among the bourgeois economists. Its expropriating efficacy is still further
heightened by the system of protection, which forms one of its integral parts.