Functional socialism

74 FUNCTIONAL SOCIALISM

example, might easily be drowned in a flood of monetary inflation. If large rent payments remain outside the jurisdiction of the economic authority, they can only be dealt with as a political problem. There is the case of unoccupied land or houses evading rates yet deliberately being held for a rise. There are, in fact, dozens of borderline cases, not definitely functional and yet of real social consequence. There is a body of literature and propaganda, largely the creation of Henry George, which looks to taxation to accomplish its purpose. If Parliament creates a functional authority, endowing it with full economic rights, I am certainly not such a rigid doctrinaire as to insist upon the sanctity of fiscal canons, now a century old, in their application to the new conditions. On the contrary, no case against tendentious taxation could then be sustained.

‘Taxation clearly brings State and Function into sharp contrast. Just as it became necessary to regard classes, rather than individuals, as the units of assessment, perhaps we can now see these propertied classes disappearing and functional units taking their place in the affection of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. But we have only forged the first link in a long chain of causation. We shall discover that, whilst the Treasury has much to tax outside function, the great bulk of taxation must inevitably be found by the economic authority. That in its turn means taxation at the source of production. For it is conceivable—and indeed probable—that all capital charges will enter into cost accordingly so that there