286 ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES

wealthier classes, these classes will, as consumers, bear part
of the burden of a tax on wages. If it be commodities
chiefly consumed by the wage-earning classes, these classes
may bear as consumers part of the burden which they throw
off as recipients of wages.
As in the case of interest, so also in that of wages,
taxation affecting special kinds of wages only will influence
the distribution of labour in the various industries, and be a
cause affecting the relation of the wages in taxed and untaxed
 employments to each other. As noted earlier in this
discussion, where wages represent the minimum necessary
for existence, a tax on wages would need to be balanced by
some form of dole, whether from funds provided by taxation
or from voluntary contributions. This use of such a form of
taxation would hardly be a wise course. If the proceeds of
this part of a tax on wages are handed back to the payers, as
recipients of poor-relief, waste is combined with degradation,
If the funds distributed as poor relief are provided by
voluntary contributions, from those whose incomes more than
suffice for their needs, the rendering of such contributions
necessary by taxing subsistence wages is, in effect, laying a
burden due to taxation on these contributors.
In considering the effect, produced by taxing wages, on
the efficiency of labour, it must not be left out of account
that what is contributed in taxation is not wholly lost. The
expenditure of tax-revenues, by the governments which
receive them, may contribute to the efficiency of labour as
much as, or more than, labour loses through the diminution
of the part of its earnings left free for personal and family
expenditures. Wherever such a result accrues, the consequences
 deducible from an assumed reduction of efficiency,
as a result of the tax, must be reconsidered or qualified. A
similar consideration would apply, under like circumstances,
to taxation of the revenues from capital or from land. The
case may be exemplified by a practical instance. If a tax
were levied on fire-insurance premiums, and the proceeds
expended with such efficiency, in reducing the risk of
occurrence of, or damage from, fire, that what was left to
insurance companies of the old rates of premium, after