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Whatever the significance of the tax of assessment or the tax of quotite, one thing is sure, and this is the thing which it is especially important for us to know, namely, that, in making the tax proportional, it was the intention of the sovereign to make citizens contribute to the public expenses, no longer, according to the old feudal principle, by means of a poll-tax, which would involve the idea of an assessment figured in the ratio of the number of persons taxed, and not in the ratio of their possessions, but so much per franc of capital, which supposes that capital has its source in an authority superior to the capitalists.
All taxes are divisible into two great categories: taxes of assessment, or of privilege: these are the oldest taxes; taxes of consumption, or of quotite, whose tendency is, by absorbing the former, to make public burdens weigh equally upon all. A tax whose total product is not fixed in advance, but depends upon the quantity of things or persons upon whom it happens to fall. Translator.
Thus it is that too high a tax on the transfer of titles arrests the circulation of real property, and renders estates less productive by keeping them from changing hands. If, on the contrary, the tax falls on product, it is nothing but a tax of quotite, which each pays in the ratio of his consumption, while the capitalist, whom it is purposed to strike, escapes.
Now, analysis and the facts demonstrate: That the tax of assessment, the tax upon monopoly, instead of being paid by those who possess, is paid almost entirely by those who do not possess; That the tax of quotite, separating the producer from the consumer, falls solely upon the latter, thereby taking from the capitalist no more than he would have to pay if fortunes were absolutely equal;
In 1844 the dog tax of forty-two cents a head gave a revenue of $12,600 in the entire province of Brabant, containing 667,000 inhabitants. From this it may be estimated that the same tax, producing in all France $600,000, would lighten the taxes of QUOTITE LESS THAN TWO CENTS a year for each individual.
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