Читать книгу The Forgotten Man, and Other Essays - William Graham Sumner - Страница 21

47. “But,” he says again, “we want to raise wages and favor the poor working man.” “Do you mean to say,” I reply, “that protective taxes raise wages—that that is their regular and constant effect?” “Yes,” he replies, “that is just what they do, and that is why we favor them. We are the poor man’s friends. You free-traders want to reduce him to the level of the pauper laborers of Europe.” “But here, in the evidence offered at the last tariff discussion in Congress, the employers all said that they wanted the taxes to protect them because they had to pay such high wages.” “Well, so they do.” “Well then, if they get the taxes raised to help them out when they have high wages to pay, how are the taxes going to help them any unless the taxes lower wages? But you just said that taxes raise wages. Therefore, if the employer gets the taxes raised, he will no sooner get home from Washington than he will find that the very taxes which he has just secured have raised wages. Then he must go back to Washington to get the taxes raised to offset that advance, and when he gets home again he will find that he has only raised wages more, and so on forever. You are trying to teach the man to raise himself by his boot straps. Two of your propositions brought together eat each other.”

48. We will, however, pursue the protectionist doctrine of wages a little further. It is totally false that protective taxes raise wages. As I will show further on (§91 and following), protective taxes lower wages. Now, however, I am assuming the protectionist’s own premises and doctrines all the time. He says that his system raises wages. Let us go to see some of the wages class and get some evidence on this point. We will take three wage-workers, a boot man, a hat man, and a cloth man. First we ask the boot man, “Do you win anything by this tariff?” “Yes,” he says, “I understand that I do.” “How?” “Well, the way they explain it to me is that when anybody wants boots he goes to my boss, pays him more on account of the tax, and my boss gives me part of it.” “All right! Then your comrades here, the hat man and the cloth man, pay this tax in which you share?” “Yes, I suppose so. I never thought of that before. I supposed that rich people paid the taxes, but I suppose that when they buy boots they must do it too.” “And when you want a hat you go and pay the tax on hats, part of which (as you explain the system) goes to your friend the hat man; and when you want cloth you pay the tax which goes to benefit your friend the cloth man?” “I suppose that it must be so.” We go, then, to see the hat man and have the same conversation with him, and we go to see the cloth man and have the same conversation with him. Each of them then gets two taxes and pays two taxes. Three men illustrate the whole case. If we should take a thousand men in a thousand industries we should find that each paid nine hundred and ninety-nine taxes, and each got nine hundred and ninety-nine taxes, if the system worked as it is said to work. What is the upshot of the whole? Either they all come out even on their taxes paid and received, or some of the wage receivers are winning something out of other wage receivers to the net detriment of the whole class. If each man is creditor for nine hundred and ninety-nine taxes, and each debtor for nine hundred and ninety-nine taxes, and if the system is “universal and equal,” we can save trouble by each drawing nine hundred and ninety-nine orders on the creditors to pay to themselves their own taxes, and we can set up a clearing house to wipe off all the accounts. Then we come down to this as the net result of the system when it is “universal and equal,” that each man as a consumer pays taxes to himself as a producer. That is what is to make us all rich. We can accomplish it just as well and far more easily, when we get up in the morning, by transferring our cash from one pocket to the other.

49. One point, however, and the most important of all, remains to be noticed. How about the thousandth tax? How is it when the boot man wants boots, and the hat man hats, and the cloth man cloth? He has to go to the store on the street and buy of his own boss, at the market price (tax on), the very things which he made himself in the shop. He then pays the tax to his own employer, and the employer, according to the doctrine, “shares” it with him. Where is the offset to that part which the employer keeps? There is none. The wages class, even on the protectionist explanation, may give or take from each other, but to their own employers they give and take not. At election time the boss calls them in and tells them that they must vote for protection or he must shut up the shop, and that they ought to vote for protection, because it makes their wages high. If, then, they believe in the system, just as it is taught to them, they must believe that it causes him to pay them big wages, out of which they pay back to him big taxes, out of which he pays them a fraction back again, and that, but for this arrangement, the business could not go on at all. A little reflection shows that this just brings up the question for a wage-earner: How much can I afford to pay my boss for hiring me? or, again, which is just the same thing in other words: What is the net reduction of my wages, below the market rate under freedom, which results from this system? (See §65.)

50. Let it not be forgotten that this result is reached by accepting protectionism and reasoning forward from its doctrines and according to its principles. In truth, the employees get no share in any taxes which the boss gets out of them and others (see §91 ff. for the truth about wages). Of course, when this or any other subject is thoroughly analyzed, it makes no difference where we begin or what line we follow, we shall always reach the same result if the result is correct. If we accept the protectionist’s own explanation of the way in which protection raises wages we find that it proves that protection lowers wages.