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 tax 
payer’s expense. A tax upon rent subtracts nothing 
from wages, and any tax upon rent, however large,