The house of Industry : a new estate of the realm

CHAPTER VII

TAXATION A TRADITION, NOT A NECESSITY

Wry does it go against the grain to pay taxes? Particularly income-tax and other forms of personal taxation? They are as legal and apparently as binding as anything we owe to our other creditors. Yet John Smith will pay his baker, butcher, tailor, without a murmur. Then there lies upon his desk an income-tax demand for £06 16s. 6d. He looks at it with distaste. It is the final notice. ‘‘Oh, damn!”’ he exclaims and reluctantly draws a cheque. Yet for that money he gets personal and financial security, amenity, education for his children, and much else. Why is income-tax the object of music-hall ridicule, the gibe of the smoking-room, the exasperation of the counting-house ?

There is more in this than meets the eye. Welling up from our sub-consciousness is some vestigial trace of memory that taxation was originally imposed upon our unenfranchised forefathers by first a tyrant and next a tyranny: some intimation that our ancestors fought and died against unjust taxation ; that the villainous system persists.

30