INHERITANCE  AND  INCOME  TAXES  j51

remains  to  be  invented.  President  R.oosevelt  in  his
message  confesses  that  the  question  of  an  income  tax
is  “very  intricate,  delicate,  and  troublesome.”  It
would  seem  that  the  proposed  dissipation  of  fortunes
by  means  of  an  inheritance  tax  must  prove  awkward
and  of  questionable  justice,  besides  discouraging
enterprise  at  its  point  of  greatest  efficiency,  and  in  the
midst  of  a  beneficent  career.  It  would  discourage  the
accumulation  of  Unprivileged  fortunes,  which  are  a
blessing  in  proportion  to  their  size.
With  all  his  boasted  freedom,  the  American  citizen
cannot  invent  or  manufacture  his  own  principles.  He
can  select  them,  but  he  cannot  remould  or  ignore
them.  He  may  make  permutations  and  combinations
to  his  heart’s  content,  but  two  and  two  will  always
make  four,  and  the  square  of  the  hypotenuse  will
always  be  equal  to  the  sum  of  the  squares  of  the  other
two  sides  of  the  triangle.
So  in  economics,  certain  fundamentals  cannot  be
disregarded,  as  for  example  that  the  expenditure,
enterprise,  and  activity  of  society  express  themselves
in  economic  rent,  the  value  of  land.  Whoever  pa)'s
this  rent  pays,  as  President  Roosevelt  says,  “for  the
protection  the  State  gives  him.”  Whatever  of  this
rent  the  city  gets  in  taxes  it  has  bought  and  paid  for;
whoever  else  gets  any  considerable  part  of  it  gets
something  for  nothing.  Taxes  are  like  the  wheat
poured  into  the  public  hopper;  rent,  in  whatever  form,
may  be  described  as  the  flour  that  comes  from  the
public  mill.  The  privileged  man,  who  is  allowed  to
carry  off  the  grist,  eats  his  bread,  as  it  were,  at  the  taxpayer’s ­
  expense.  A  tax  upon  rent  subtracts  nothing
from  wages,  and  any  tax  upon  rent,  however  large,