of their capacities for happiness—security: nothing less, but nothing more."—Sharswood, Legal Ethics.
"To the extent that the mass of our citizens are inordinately burdened beyond any useful public purpose and for the benefit of a favored few, the Government, under pretext of an exercise of its taxing power, enters gratuitously into partnership with these favorites, to their advantage and to the misery of a vast majority of our people."—Message of Grover Cleveland, President of the United States, December, 1888.
Taxation for Revenue only. What does it mean?—It is essential to the completeness of this discussion to call attention at this point to the circumstance that a full recognition and rigid adherence in practice by a Government to the principles of taxation above shown to be fundamental, will not interfere with or impair the efficiency of its administration. The raising of revenue (money) by taxation is one thing; the determination of how the revenue collected shall be used or expended is quite another thing; and the danger line to the liberties of the people is crossed when these two functions are confounded. The exercise of the first, as already pointed out, is subject to limitations growing out of the conditions essential to the existence of a free Government. The determination of the second rests primarily in the legislative department of such Government, and is subject to no legal limitations in the United States other than what flows from the oft-repeated dicta and decisions of its highest judicial authorities, that money taken out of the pockets of the people by taxation can not be used (expended) for any other than a public purpose; but what constitutes a public purpose is so indefinite that one eminent jurist, especially versed in the subject, has declared that "there is no such thing as drawing a clear line of distinction between purposes of a public and those of a private nature."[1]
If a state, therefore, in the plenitude of the wisdom of its legislators, desires to interfere with the operation of the laws of trade, domestic or foreign, control the preferences of its citizens in respect to production or consumption, repress one form of industry and stimulate another, and discourage even to prohibition the indulgence of such tastes and passions as it may judge to be detrimental to itself or the individual, it may legitimately exercise functions entirely different from that exercised in raising revenue and governed by entirely different principles. The right to regulate trade and commerce and the power of police are entirely independent of the right to raise revenue.
If the state, in providing itself with what it regards as necessary revenue, levies its taxes in such a manner that no citizen is
- ↑ Cooley, Law of Taxation, p. 70.
