YOUR RATES

THE rates are not paid equally by everybody. The local authorities, like the Government, have to recognize the fact that some people are better able to pay than others, and make them pay accordingly. They do this by calculating the rates on the value of the house occupied by the ratepayer, and of his place of business, guessing that a person with a house or shop worth a hundred a year will be richer than one with a house or shop worth twenty, and rating him on the valuation.

Thus every rate is really a graduated income tax as well as a payment for public services. Then there are the municipal debts as well as the national debt; and as municipalities are as lazy and wasteful as central governments in the way of giving public jobs out to profiteering contractors, everything that happens with the taxes happens with the rates as well on a smaller scale.

But there are other anomalies which rating brings out.

Just consider what happens when even the quite genuine part of our national and municipal Communism, paying its way honestly by taxing and rating, is applied, as we apply it, to people of whom some are very poor and some are very rich. If a woman cannot afford to feed herself well enough to nurse her baby properly she clearly cannot afford to contribute to the maintenance of a stud of cream-colored ponies in the stables of Buckingham Palace. If she lives with her husband and children in a single room in a back-to-back dwelling in a slum, hopelessly out of reach of the public parks of the great cities, with their flowers and bands and rides and lakes and boats, it is rather hard on her to have to pay a share of the cost of these places of recreation, used largely by rich people whose horses and motor cars shew that they could easily pay a charge for admission sufficient to maintain the place without coming to her for a contribution.

In short, since communistic expenditure is compulsory expenditure, enforced on everybody alike, it cannot be kept within everybody’s means unless everybody has the same income. But the remedy is, not to abolish the parks and the cream-colored ponies, and to tell the Prince of Wales that he cannot have more than one suit of clothes until every poor woman’s son has two, all of which is not only impossible but envious and curmudgeonish, but to equalize incomes. In the meantime we must pay our rates and taxes with the best grace we can, knowing that if we tried to drag down public expenditure to the level of the worst private poverty our lives would be unendurable even by savages.

This, however, does not apply to certain ways in which the ratepayer is “exploited”. To exploit a person is to make money out of her without giving her an equivalent return. Now practically all private employers exploit the ratepayer more or less in a way that she never notices unless she has studied the subject as we are studying it at present. And the way they do it is this.

A woman who employs domestic servants gives regular employment to most of them; but to some she gives only casual employment. The housemaid and cook are in regular employment; the nurse is in temporary employment; and the charwoman is in casual employment: that is, she is taken on for a few hours or for a day, and then cast off to shift for herself as best she can until she gets another equally short job. If she is ill, none of her occasional employers need concern herself: and when rich people die and make provision for their servants in their wills, they never think of including a legacy for the charwoman.

Now no doubt it is very convenient to be able to pick up a woman like a taxi for an hour or so, and then get rid of her without any further responsibility by paying her a few shillings and turning her into the street. But it means that when the charwoman is ill or out of employment or getting so old that younger and stronger women are preferred to her, somebody has to provide for her. And that somebody is the ratepayer, who provides the outdoor relief and the workhouse, besides, as taxpayer, the old age pension and part of the dole. If the ratepayer did not do this the householder would have either to do without the charwoman or pay her more. Even regular servants could not, as at present, be discharged without pensions when they are worn out, if the ratepayers made no provision for them. Thus the householder is making the other ratepayers, many of whom do not employ charwomen, pay part of the cost of her domestic service.

But this is perhaps not the most impressive case, because you, as an experienced woman, can tell me that charwomen do not do so badly for themselves; that they are hard to get; and that steady ones often have their pick of several jobs, and make a compliment of taking one. But think of the great industrial concerns which employ huge armies of casuals. Take the dock companies for example. The men who load and unload the ships are taken on by the hour in hundreds at a time; and they never know whether there will be an hour’s work for them or eight hours, or whether they will get two days in the week or six. I can remember when they were paid twopence an hour, and how great a victory they were supposed to have gained when they struck for sixpence an hour and got it. The dock companies profit; but the men and their families are nearly always living more or less on the rates.

Take the extreme case of this. The ratepayers have to maintain a workhouse. If any man presents himself at that workhouse as a destitute person, he must be taken in and lodged and fed and clothed. It is an established practice with some men to live at the workhouse as ablebodied paupers until they feel disposed for a night of drinking and debauchery. Then they demand their discharge, and must be let out to go about their business. They unload a ship; spend all the money they earn in a reckless spree; and return to the workhouse next morning as destitute persons to resume their residence there at the ratepayers’ expense. A woman can do the same when there are casual jobs within her reach. This, I repeat, is the extreme case only: the decent respectable laborers do not do it; but casual labor does not tend to make people decent and respectable. If they were not careless, and did not keep up their spirits and keep down their prudence by drinking more than is good for them, they could not endure such worrying uncertainty.

Now, as it happens, dock labor is dangerous labor. In busy times in big docks an accident happens about every twenty minutes. But the dock company does not keep a hospital to mend its broken casuals. Why should it? There is the Poor Law Infirmary, supported by the ratepayers, near at hand, or a hospital supported by their charitable subscriptions; and nothing is simpler than to carry the victim of the accident there to be cured at the public expense without troubling the dock company. No wonder the dock company chairmen and directors are often among our most ardent advocates of public charity. With them it begins at home.

Another public institution kept by the ratepayers and taxpayers is the prison, with its police force, its courts of law, its judges, and all the rest of its very expensive retinue. An enormous proportion of the offences they deal with are caused by drink. Now the trade in drink is extremely profitable: so much so that in England it is called The Trade, which is short for The Trade of Trades. But why is it profitable? Because the trader in drink takes all the money the drunkard pays for his liquor, and when he is drunk throws him into the street, leaving the ratepayer to pay for all the mischief he may do, all the crimes he may commit, all the illness he may bring on himself and his family, and all the poverty to which he may be reduced. If the cost of these were charged against the drink trade instead of against the police rates and poor rates, the profits of the trade would vanish at once.

As it is, the trader gets all the takings; and the ratepayer stands all the losses. That is why they made the trade unlawful in America. They shut up the saloons (public houses), and found immediately that they could shut up a good many of the prisons as well. But if they had municipalized the drink traffic: that is, if the ratepayer had kept the public house as well as the prison, the greatest care would have been taken to discourage drunkenness, because drunkenness would have produced a loss in the municipal accounts instead of a profit. As it is, the ratepayer is being exploited outrageously by the drink trade, and the whole nation weakened and demoralized in order that a handful of people may become unnaturally rich. It is true that they rebuild our tumble-down cathedrals for us occasionally; but then they expect to be made peers for it. The bargain is an insanely bad one anyhow.

There is one more trick that can be played on you both by the municipality and the Government. In spite of their obligation not to profiteer, but to give you every service at cost price, they often do profiteer quite openly, and actually boast of their profits as a proof of their business efficiency. This takes place when you pay for the service, not by a tax or a rate, but by the ordinary process of paying for what you consume. Thus when you want a letter sent, you pay the Government three halfpence across the counter for the job. When you live where electric light is made and supplied by the municipality, you do not pay for it in your rates: you pay so much for every unit you consume.

I am sorry to have to add that the Postmaster-General takes advantage of this to charge you more for carrying your letter than the average cost of it to the Post Office. In this way he makes a profit which he hands over to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who uses it to keep down the income tax and supertax. You pay more that the income tax payers may pay less. A fraction of your three halfpence goes into the pockets of the millionaires. True, if you are an income tax payer you get a scrap of it back yourself; but as most people do not pay income tax and everybody buys at least a few postage stamps, the income tax payers in effect exploit the purchasers of stamps. The principle is wrong, and the practice a dangerous abuse, which is nevertheless applauded and carried to greater and greater lengths as the Government adds telegraphs to posts, telephones to telegraphs, and wireless to both.

In the case of a municipal electric lighting supply, I must tell you that in spite of the fact that the municipality, unlike a private company, has to begin paying off the cost of setting up its works from the moment it borrows it, and must clear it all off within a certain period, yet even when it does this and yet supplies electricity at a lower price than the private companies, it makes a profit in spite of itself. It applies the profit to a reduction of the rates; and the ratepayers are so pleased by this, and so accustomed to think that a business which makes profits must be a sound one, that the municipality is tempted to make a profit on purpose, and even a big one, by charging the consumer more than the supply costs. When this happens, it is clear that the overcharged people who use electric light are paying part of the rates of those who do not. Even if everybody used electric light there would still be inequalities in the consumption of current. A struggling shopkeeper, who must make his shop blaze with light to attract custom, must have a heavier bill for electric light than much richer people who have only their private houses to illuminate.

We must not spend any more time on your rates and taxes. If they were entirely abolished (how popular that would be!) and their places taken by profiteering charges for State and municipal services, the result would be, not State and municipal Socialism but State and municipal Capitalism. As it is, you can see how even in your rates, which ought to be quite free from the idler’s toll, you can be and to some extent are “exploited” just as you are in your ordinary shopping.