200 History of Local Rates
lower in the area containing the wealthy district than
in the other, and people and property will be attracted
into it as compared with the other. There seems to be
no possible justification for this: it cannot possibly
lead to any good result, I certainly fail to see why
places should be higher taxed because they are more
largely the homes of the people for whose benefit the
faxes are raised.
(2) Inequalities of this kind tend to improper distri-
bution of total resources by causing expenditure for
the necessary purposes under discussion to be too
stinted in some places and too lavish in others. It is
not so certain, as we often think, that a high rate must
be more burdensome than a low one in any particular
case: the ultimate burden of the high rate may be
upon richer persons than that of the low one. But
this is only a chance: in the average of cases it can
scarcely be so, and therefore, as a rule, the higher rate
is more burdensome; and whether it is or not, it
always seems so to the people who are hit in the first
instance. ‘Moreover, people as a rule compare the
rates of different places with very little regard to the
different circumstances, and are apt to attribute high
rates to inefficiency or too lavish expenditure. The
inevitable consequence is a certain amount of profusion
in some places and uneconomical stinting in others.
The practical question is whether we can devise
means for reducing the tendency to wrong distribution
of people and property and to uneconomical distribu-
tion of expenditure without introdueing greater evils.
There is not, I think, much difficulty about the
principle. The ideal procedure would be to ascertain
for each rateable area the amount of the “onerous ”’