Court Opinion

ID: 9768810
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 13:51:39.685653+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:03:30.516962
License: Public Domain

ROBERTSON, Judge,
dissenting.
I must respectfully dissent. The Court’s opinion describes the critical inquiry in this case as “whether the output of the equipment is a product or a service”, and determines that “the legislature has chosen to define the thing sold as a service, not a product.” On this basis the Court reasons that the signal generated by the taxpayer’s switching equipment is not a “thing” and therefore is not a product; if it is not a product, the Court concludes, it is not manufactured.
In this conclusion the Court is mistaken. The error is a product of the Court’s assumption that “product” as used in Section 144.030.2(4), RSMo 1986, is synonymous with “tangible personal property” as used in Section 144.010(8), RSMo 1986.
Section 144.010(8) defines a “sale at retail” generally as “any transfer made ... of the ownership of ... tangible personal property, for a valuable consideration....” Precisely because the service a telephone customer receives through his equipment is not tangible personal property, Section 144.010. l(8)(c), RSMo 1986, expressly defines that service as a sale at retail. Telephone service is, therefore, taxable service. A tax is imposed on sellers “for the privilege ... of selling tangible personal property or rendering taxable service_” Section 144.020.1, RSMo 1986. These sections determine those activities upon which the *54sales/use tax is imposed; they do not speak to the exemption available for manufacturing equipment.
Equipment “purchased for and used directly for manufacturing or fabricating a product which is intended to be sold for final use or consumption” is exempt from sales and use taxation. Section 144.030.-2(4), RSMo 1986. In a manner notably contrary to the section defining “sale at retail”, Section 144.030.2(4) does not require that the thing manufactured or fabricated be tangible personal property to qualify for the exemption. The Administrative Hearing Commission properly found that the digital switching apparatus in this case is equipment, “replacing and used for the same purposes as the machinery and equipment replaced by reason of design or product changes ...” and that Section 144.030.-2(4) would be applicable if a product were manufactured.
Cases of this Court have long focused on the word “manufacture” to determine whether the device at issue met the requirements for the exemption. Those cases did not require the Court to determine the meaning of “product”; the equipment under scrutiny clearly produced tangible personal property. Thus, in West Lake Quarry & Material Co. v. Schaffner, 451 S.W.2d 140, 143 (Mo.1970), the Court found that the process of grinding and crushing rock into gravel was manufacturing. Manufacturing as defined there “takes something practically unsuitable for any common use and changes it so as to adopt it to such common use.” Id. In Heidelberg Central, Inc. v. Director of Revenue, 476 S.W.2d 502, 506 (Mo.1972), a case involving the printing of paper products, the Court described the end result of manufacturing as the production of “new and different articles from raw materials by the use of machinery, labor and skill ... which [have] an intrinsic and merchantable value, and were in forms suitable for new uses.”
Here, for the first time, we are asked to consider the meaning of the word “product” within the exemption statute. The specific inquiry is whether an intangible “thing” can be a product. Both the Administrative Hearing Commission and the Court find themselves caught in the web of the senses. For the majority, a product is a product only if it can be seen and touched. Perhaps this explains the Court’s assumption that “tangible personal property” and “product” are synonymous. But they are not.
Property is tangible if its existence can be verified by the senses. A product, however, is a product even if not tangible. It is “something produced by physical labor or by intellectual effort: the result of work or thought.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 1810 (1976). In defining “product”, the dictionary directs us to “produce”. There we find: “to make economically valuable: make or create so as to be available for satisfaction of human wants.” Id.
The pertinent question is not whether the digital signal produced by the GT-5 is a service or tangible personal property. The juxtaposition between service and tangible personal property invoked by the Court is, as has been said, not relevant to the question before us. Instead, the pertinent question is whether the GT-5 manufactures a “product which is intended to be sold ultimately for [taxable] final use or consumption.”
Even though the service provided the telephone customer is statutorily determined a service and is, therefore, subject to sales tax, it does not necessarily follow that the electronic impulses that adapt human voices for transmission to the telephone equipment of telephone customers are not products sold for final use. The fact that the process begins and ends with the human voice (or the “talk” of computers) does not change the fact that the device producing the digital signal causes “a substantial transformation in quality and adaptability and creates an end product quite different from the original.” Jackson Excavating Co. v. Administrative Hearing Commission, 646 S.W.2d 48, 51 (Mo.1983).
To assume that these digital signals have no final use is to misunderstand the ubiqui-*55tons importance of telephonic communications in the modern world. These electronic impulses have intrinsic and merchantable value and are the product of the transformation of a raw product — the human voice or the binary language of the computer— into forms suitable for new uses. They make computer networking, facsimile transmission and widespread business empires possible; they are vital to the smallest enterprise; these unseen oscillations stand ready to summon aid during the dark terror of an emergency; they are essential in ways too numerous to mention, too valuable to discount.
The Court tells us that the telephonic signal “is an incidental result of the communication service.” (Op. at 52). To the contrary, it is the product of the switching device, whether analog or digital, by which telephonic service is possible and without which a modern communication system is not possible.
In the last twenty years, we have entered an age in which value is produced by all sorts of manifestations not readily perceived by unaided senses. “The naive prejudice that physical objects are somehow more ‘real’ than ideal objects remains one of the most deeply rooted in Western cul-ture_ A consequence of this belief— which until recently was not even perceived as such — is that our logic is patterned exclusively on the structure of physical objects.” G. Rota, J. Schwartz & M. Kac, Discrete Thoughts: Essays on Mathematics, Science, and Philosophy (1986) quoted in G. Gilder, Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology 21 (1989).
In recognition of our descent into the microcosm of physics and binary language, and the value added there by the application of intellectual efforts, an understanding of “product” more broad than that permitted by our senses is required. The General Assembly, with uncharacteristic prescience, used “product” precisely because it is more broad than “tangible personal property”. The legislature apparently realized that where a device is able to make something new and economically valuable from the virtually invisible, a product is manufactured and the exemption provided under Section 144.030.2(4) is available.
Because the digital signal produced by the GT-5, though not tangible personal property, is nonetheless a product, I would reverse the decision of the Administrative Hearing Commission and permit the exemption sought by the taxpayer.