Part
II: The Mechanism of the Classical Ideal
CHAPTER VI
TAXATION
AND SERVITUDE
IN a remarkable document which received some publicity some
years ago, under the title of "The Protocols of the Learned
Elders of Zion," a Machiavellian scheme for the enslavement
of the world was outlined. The authenticity of this document
is a matter of little importance; what is interesting about
it, is the fidelity with which the methods by which such enslavement
might be brought about can be seen reflected in the facts of
everyday experience.
It
was explained in that treatise that the financial system was
the agency most suitable for such a purpose; the inculcation
of a false democracy was recommended; vindictive penalties for
infringements of laws were advised; the Great War and the methods
by which it might be brought about were predicted at least twenty
years before the event; the imposition of grinding taxation,
more especially directed against Real Estate owners, was specifically
explained as essential to the furtherance of the scheme. The
methods by which the spurious democratic machinery and the journalistic
organs of "Public" opinion could be enlisted on the side of
such taxation, and an antagonism between the interests of the
town and the interests of the country could be created, were
explained with an accuracy of detail which can only be described
as Satanic.
It
is quite possible that this document is inductive rather than
deductive in origin, that is to say, that some person of great
but perverted talents, with a sufficient grasp of the existing
social mechanism, saw and exploited the automatic results of
it. If that be the case, the world owes a debt of gratitude
to that mysterious author. He was substantially accurate in
his generalised facts, and the inductive prophecies from them
are moving rapidly towards fulfilment.
Making
all due allowances for the defects in it which are only too
obvious, the Anglo-Saxon character probably remains the greatest
bulwark against tyranny that exists in the world to-day. That
is a thesis on which a large number of volumes have been written,
and it does not seem necessary to expand it further. But if
it be granted, it will be agreed that any attempt, either conscious
or unconscious, to establish an effective hegemony over the
whole of the world would be likely to concentrate on such methods
as would paralyse the Anglo-Saxon.
Now,
the British population, men, women, and children, are at the
present time (1933) taxed to the figure of sixteen pounds seven
shillings per head (or about sixty-five pounds per family),
which is nearly three times the taxation per head of any other
country in the world. Large estates are subject to succession
and legacy duties which make it impossible for them to remain
in private hands, and force them into the market in which they
are acquired by corporations having access to the methods of
creating financial credit. These two forms of taxation are concurrent,
i.e. the enormous Capital Levy imposed by Succession and
Legacy Duties, so far from reducing general taxation, has
been accompanied by a steady rise in such taxation. In the
United States the estimated value of all real and personal property
(1923) is two hundred thousand million dollars. The bonded debt,
public and private, payable in gold is one hundred and twenty
thousand million dollars, and it is estimated that the total
time for interest and taxation to reach such proportions as
will require the whole equity value of the United States to
be mortgaged to meet it, is about twenty years. It is perhaps
hardly necessary to mention that the bonded debt of the United
States is held by very much the same class of financial organisation
as that which is the chief owner of the bonded debt of Great
Britain. The banks and financial houses are our creditors; and
Capital Levies in reduction of debt are merely levies for the
benefit of these institutions and enhance the attractions of
the country paying them, as debt-contractors.
The
portion of this taxation which is represented by interest on
public debts, created more or less in the manner outlined in
the previous chapter, is onerous in proportion as its destination
is centralised. It is easy enough to see that it would not matter
very much if the Debt of Great Britain were ten times what it
is, even though the service or payment of that Debt were made
on "orthodox" principles if the ownership of the Debt was uniformly
distributed over the tax-paying population. Sixty-five pounds
per annum per family would be collected in taxes, and (disregarding
the cost of administration) the sixty-five pounds per annum
would be distributed as dividends. The operation would, in fact,
be meaningless, from which observation we may deduce the interesting
fact that present-day finance and taxation is merely an ingenious
system for concentrating financial power. No proposal to redistribute
the National Debt has ever received the slightest encouragement
from Socialist leaders.
Now
at first sight this would appear to lend colour to the simple
Labour-Socialist idea that many men are poor, because a few
are rich. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. But once again,
the matter is not quite so simple. It is perfectly true that
a few men do become very rich by this process, and very many
more have hopes of riches; that is how their co-operation is
secured. But it is also equally true that their collective riches,
in visible form, would represent a very small sum if equally
distributed amongst the general population. The main tendency
of the process is to concentrate the control of credit in a
potential form in great organisations, and notably in the hands
of the great banks and insurance companies.
It
is well worthy of notice that the proposal for a Capital Levy,
which was one of the main planks in the programme of the British
Labour-Socialist Party, was for a levy on individuals, not on
corporations or businesses.
Apart
from any more subtle explanation, even great banks hesitate
to distribute their true profits for fear of attracting too
much attention. It is an interesting and symbolical fact that
every corner site, whether in town or village, sooner or later,
falls into the hands of a bank. Comer sites are potential key
positions. It may be stressing the theory a little too far,
to use it as an explanation of the fact that a recently built
bank in Cleveland, U.S.A., has been designed with bomb-proof
walls, and has machine-guns mounted at each comer of it. A polite
intimation that his overdraft must be reduced, is a more effective
argument to the average man than a threat by a machine-gun.
But the idea is no doubt not dissimilar.
An
organisation can only grow powerful at the expense of those
involved in it, just as a tree can only grow at the expense
of its soil. Corner sites, granite and marble buildings, to
name only two of the more tangible signs of growth in the banking
organisation, represent undistributed profits. Undistributed
profits are simply cancelled credits; they are "savings" by
an institution. They are credits transformed from a visible
form represented by deposits, into a potential form such as,
for instance, the security for loans or mortgages. Every credit
cancelled in this way, whatever form the cancellation may take,
simply represents so much purchasing-power destroyed without
the destruction to an equivalent amount in book price values,
and the effect of it is that its equivalent amount in goods-values
cannot be bought in one and the same credit area. It will be
seen, therefore, that this concentration of securities in the
hands of large organisations is a matter of much greater importance,
than if even the same concentration took place in the hands
of individuals who, in one way or another, disbursed the large
sums thus received, since the disbursements would, in the nature
of things, be spread over a very wide field of activity. But
a functional organisation like a bank is only interested in
consolidating the power and importance of banking, and uses
the credit power that it obtains with the single aim of fostering
this result. That is why we are building branch banks and other
industrial buildings, instead of houses, and why such houses
as are built are mostly cheap and nasty. There is not much granite
and marble about the average post-war bungalow or cottage.
But
however that may be, one result of the process is indisputable.
It still further restricts the money and purchasing-power at
the disposal of individuals, and concentrates this money power
in financial institutions. If the process is allowed to proceed
without interruption, and it remains true that the possession
of money is the only claim to the necessaries of life, then
it is not difficult to see that within a short space of time,
that condition of universal slavery to which the writer of "The
Protocols of Zion" looked forward with such exultation, will
be an accomplished fact.
The
concentration of control over business firms, which is the accompaniment
of the increasing dependence of the business world upon banking
accommodation, is paralleled by the rapid elimination of a class
of any considerable dimensions which can maintain its customary
standard of life without commercial employment. Both commercial
employer and commercial employed are therefore coming under
an invisible control which is not subject to any criticism of
its actions in respect to the giving or withholding of this
"employment" without which civilised existence is becoming impossible. The obsolete system of chattel slavery had the vital
defect that the slave could not fail to be conscious of his
slavery, and consequently required guarding. But the more insidious
subjection with which we are threatened, promises a condition
of affairs in which servitude will only be granted as a privilege,
and starvation following on degradation will be the alternative.