In this disregard of the value of money, which only goes without saying in view of the general tenor of German and Austrian legislation, there did lie, to be sure, a deliberate disadvantaging of movable capital and a deliberate preference for landowners, especially farmers. The socialistic tendencies of war-profit taxation came to light above all in their motives. War-profit taxes are supported by, the view that all entrepreneurial profit represents robbery from the community as a whole and that by rights it should be entirely taken away. This tendency comes to light in the scale of the rates, which more and more approach complete confiscation of the entire increase in property or income and doubtless finally will reach even this goal set for them. For one should indeed suffer no illusion about the fact that the unfavorable opinion of entrepreneurial income manifested in these war taxes is not attributable to wartime conditions alone and that the line of argument used for the war taxes that in this time of national distress every increase in wealth and every increase in income is indeed unethical can also be maintained in the period after the war with the same justification, even if with differences in detail.
Socialistic tendencies are also quite clear in the idea of a one-time capital levy.
The popularity that the slogan about a one-time capital levy enjoys, a popularity so great that it makes any serious discussion of its appropriateness quite impossible, can be explained only by the entire population's aversion to private property. Socialists and liberals will answer quite differently the question whether a one-time property tax is preferable to a current one. When someone operates an enterprise with a capital of his own of 100,000 marks, then it is not at all a matter of indifference to him whether he has to pay an amount of 50,000 marks at one time as a property tax or pay each year only the amount corresponding to the interest that the state has to pay on a debt of 50,000 marks. For it is to be expected that with this capital beyond the amount that the state would have to demand from him for paying interest on the 50,000 marks, he could earn a profit that he could then keep. This is not what is decisive for the liberal's position, however, but rather the social consideration that by the one-time capital levy the state would transfer capital out of the hands of entrepreneurs into the hands of capitalists and lenders.