The Dividends of Prohibition 179

By this argument the Association Against the Prohibition
 Amendment is appealing to the pocketbook
of income taxpayers. Its argument is for the restoration
 of a trafhc that is generally acknowledged to be
parasitic on all productive industry.
Of course, the argument is the other way around.
All income is dependent upon the productivity of
labor and capital. Anything which impairs that productivity
 will impair the national income. If the
“loss” in Federal revenues, which the Association
Against the Prohibition Amendment places at $936,-000,000
 a year, due to cutting off the former taxes
on the outlawed traffic, is to be considered at all, it
should be in connection with the economic gains.
But this “loss” is, as a matter of fact, not a loss
in any true sense. It is a primary economic fact that
removal of a tax, while it is a surrender of revenue to
the government in a particular direction, is not at all
a surrender of income of society. To the extent that
it is a “loss” to the public treasury, it is a gain, to
the same extent, to those who formerly paid the
tax.

A tax comes out of the individual pocket and goes
into the common pocket of the nation; so it does not
get us anywhere to talk about the “loss” sustained
by the government which surrenders a tax or shifts
the form in which it is applied. This argument is on
all fours with the ridiculous assumption of “loss”
recoverable by repealing the prohibition of sales of
narcotic drugs in placing that tariff under a license