The Coconino weekly sun., 1895-04-04
DEMOCRACY ANARcAlsrlc.
Purposes of the Vicious Income Tax
 Law.

Law.
 The lightning-change artist in pol itics appears to have arrived. His name is Richard Olney, formerly cor poration lawyer of Massachusetts, and lately, by the grace of MT. Cleveland, attorney general of the United States. His recent defense of the democratic populistic income tax measure is one of the most lugubriously funny things to which the present administration has given expression. "When this income tax law" remarks our regenerated and consecrated corporation attorney, makes a special class of business cor porations and taxes their incomes at a higher rate than that applied to the incomes of persons not incorporated, it but recognizes existing social facts and conditions which would be folly to ig- nore. It is common knowledge that corporations are so successful an agency for the accumulation of wealth that large section of the community views them with intense disfavor, as maliciously and cunningly devised in- ventions for making rich people richer and poor people poorer. Congress has adopted" he adds, "as the minimum income for purposes of taxation the limit of four thousand dollars. The limit may be said now to divide the upper from the lower middle class, financially speaking, in the larger cities; or to divide the middle class from the wealthy in the country"
 So it has been reserved for the dem- ocratic party, or the incoherent and incohesive collection of statesmen now masquerading under that name, to set up, or attempt to set up, "class" as a recognized factor or fact in American life, based on mere difference in money, after having been beaten some thirty years ago ill an attempt to up- hold the idea of "class" or "caste" based on blood or color. Is not this q piece of amazing audacity, of colossal political effrontery, worthy, indeed, only of that kind of anarchistic Titan so happily described by Virgil as a "Monstrum, horrendum, informe, in gems, cui lumen ademptum?"
 Yet there is one thing even more as- founding than MT. Olncy's moral and mental somersault, and that is Mir. James c. Carter's plea on the same sub lect before the United States supreme court. Referring to this pet measure of the just defunct and justly dis credited congress, he exclaims If in the very hour of their triumph the peo- pie find an obstacle in their way in the shape of judgment in Q lawsuit, they will find way to accomplish their ends over the constitution and the courts"
 This is the first time, we believe, that threat, yelled or bare, has been hurled in the teeth of the supreme tribunal of this nation. This is, how ever, a natural outcome from the vicious income-tax idea Let us look at this measure with candor, and strip it of it's cant. It is, as Mir. Olney acci- dentally admits, a scheme to curry fa- vor with a section of the country. It is therefore, a base encouragement of sectionalism. It is illogical, for if the profit system is just one, the attempt to tax down q mans profits is absurd. We do not maintain that the profit system is justifiable on the highest moral grounds. The ideal government, the industrial republic of the future, may be based on some kind of scientific socialism. But this democratic throw ing of sop to Cerberus in the shape of an unjust tax on incomes will not hasten the dawn of any desirable and reasonable equalization of mans mate rial comforts and educational oppor- tunities. Such legislation only tends to anarchy-anarchy pure and simple, with a man on horseback looming up through blood-red mist in the twen- tieth century.-Leslie's Weekly.