property as the most trustworthy representative of general
consumption. Individual fortunes are usually revealed in France by
rentals, by the number of servants, horses, carriages, and luxuries,
the costs of which are all to the interest of the public treasury.
Houses and what they contain vary comparatively but little, and are
not liable to disappear. After pointing out the means of making a
tax-list on personal property which should be more impartial than the
existing list, Rabourdin assessed the sums to be brought into the
treasury by indirect taxation as so much per cent on each individual
share. A tax is a levy of money on things or persons under disguises
that are more or less specious. These disguises, excellent when the
object is to extort money, become ridiculous in the present day, when
the class on which the taxes weigh the heaviest knows why the State
imposes them and by what machinery they are given back. In fact the
budget is not a strong-box to hold what is put into it, but a
watering-pot; the more it takes in and the more it pours out the
better for the prosperity of the country. Therefore, supposing there
are six millions of tax-payers in easy circumstances (Rabourdin proved
their existence, including the rich) is it not better to make them pay
a duty on the consumption of wine, which would not be more offensive
than that on doors and windows and would return a hundred millions,
rather than harass them by taxing the thing itself. By this system of
taxation, each individual tax-payer pays less in reality, while the
State receives more, and consumers profit by a vast reduction in the
price of things which the State releases from its perpetual and
harassing interference. Rabourdin's scheme retained a tax on the
cultivation of vineyards, so as to protect that industry from the too
great abundance of its own products. Then, to reach the consumption of
the poorer tax-payers, the licences of retail dealers were taxed
according to the population of the neighborhoods in which they lived.