sion and self-interest man is not indisposed to justice." And when self or group interest is strongly realised, passion is always present and confuses thinking.
The doctrines and principles that emerge from passion-laden thinking are worth some consideration in any attempt at envisaging economic government. Two 'states of mind* prevalent in all classes are obstructive to any sound understanding of the economic situation.
The first is the state of mind towards personal rights of property, well expressed in letters admitted to The Times from well-to-do persons who deplore the confiscatory taxation to which their incomes and property are subjected for expenditure in social services for the benefit of other people. The assumption, often expressed with the utmost naïveté, is that they themselves, by their own skill, knowledge, enterprise, industry, and thrift, have made the fortunes which they possess, and that the claim of a government to take a large share of them by process of taxation for public purposes is an act of legalised robbery. Or if they have not made these fortunes themselves, their relatives have made them by the use of their personal activities and have exercised the 'right' to bequeath the property to them.
In either case it belongs to them by right of personal productivity, and for a government to take any part of it, without their consent, for the benefit of other people, is only little less immoral than if a mob took it by violent plunder.
Those who write these letters are perfectly sincere
