Coming Slavery," while retaining all the advantages civilization has to offer him.
Even in these ideal circumstances the citizen would be obliged to work for the community, in other words, pay taxes, but the public assessments would lose their characteristic of extortion which makes them so odious now. We make no resistance when called upon to pay for our loaves of bread, our tickets to the theatre and our subscriptions to clubs and societies, at the utmost we regret that it is not always easy to make up the sum total. Why is there no resistance in this case? Because we know that we receive the value of what we pay out; because we can not feel that we are being robbed. When a government is so simple in its construction that every citizen knows all about its purposes, can supervise its work and has a voice in the direction of its energy, then he looks upon the taxes he pays as an expenditure for which he receives a direct return. He knows what he is getting with every penny of his tax-money, and the evident equitableness of such a transaction precludes the possibility of discontent. But in the State as at present organized, the taxes are necessarily odious impositions; not only because they are everywhere far higher than they ought to be, on account of the enormous expense of running the governmental machine owing to its defective construction, but also because they are founded upon and surrounded by injustice in every form, due to the historical organization of society and its blundering laws, and principally owing to the fact that the expenditure of the public funds derived from taxation, is regulated by Fiscalism and not by rational common sense for the benefit of the State. By Fiscalism I mean the organized system of plundering the people, getting the utmost out of them, ostensibly for their own future benefit, without the slightest consideration of the
