TAXING CAPITAL.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXIV, Issue 1904, 15 June 1892, Page 6

TAXING CAPITAL.

S. M. Burroughs writes to the • Standard ' (N.Y.): " While travelling in Spain I have met some people from Switzerland who have given me some interesting particulars of the working of the income tax in the Canton of Vaud. An Englishman exercised the legal option of declining to state how much property he had inhEngland, leaving the authorities to assess mm as they liked. Not knowing how wealthy he was they found afterwards they had guessed too low a sum, when some of the Socialist journals called him very hard names, though they could not say that he had not complied striotly with the law. The Englishman had bought a place and was going to reside there permanently, but after such treatment determined to leave. When he did so all the English people at Lausanne, where there are many English residents, went to the station to see him off and express sympathy and regret, at which the Socialists were much annoyed. The wealthy people are leaving the country ; the tax is on capital whether it earns an inoome or not, The capital goeß elsewhere to assist labor, for oapital cannot earn an income otherwise udlobs by land monopolies,"