People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 July 1895 — CALAMITY HOWLERS. [ARTICLE]

CALAMITY HOWLERS.

ARE BECOMING MORE NUMEROUS EVERY DAY. Even th* Supreme Court of the United States Has * Qnartette of Them — Income Tax Decision a Gross Iniquity. If Populists had given utterance to the expressions that fell from the lips of the four dissenting justices of the supreme court in the income tax case, they would have been hooted at from Dan to Beersheba as “calamity howlers.” Listen to them. Justice Harlan says: “The practical, if not direct effect, of the decision today is to give certain kinds of property a position of favoritism and advantage that is inconsistent with the fundamental principles of our social organization, and to invest them with power and influence that is perilous to that portion of the people upon whom rests the larger part of the burdens of government, and who ought not to be subjected to the domination of aggregated wealth any more than the property of the country should be at the mercy of the lawless.” Justice Jackson is reported as follows: The decision, in his opinion, practically destroyed the power of the government to reach incomes. It takes from congress its rightful power to fix the rate of taxation ,and substitutes therefore a rule incapable of application without Imposing the most monstrous inequality on the citizens of the common country. The decision reverses the common rule of taxation by exempting those who were best able to pay and forcing the burden upon the shoulders of |he least able to pay. In conclusion, Justice Jackson said, in his opinion, the decision was the most disastrous blow ever struck at the constitutional power of congress. It struck down an important, vital and essential power of the government. It left the government, in case of necessity, without power to reach by taxation in any form the vast Incomes derived from the real and personal property of the country. Justice Brown, in conclusion, said: “The decision involves nothing less than the surrender of the taxing power to the moneyed class. While I have no doubt that congress will find some means of surmounting the present crisis, my fear is that in some moment of national peril this decision will rise up to frustrate Its will and paralyze its arm. I hope it may not be the first step towards the submergence of the liberties of the people in a sordid despotism of wealth.” Justice White, in concluding, said: “The injustice of the conclusion points to the error of adopting it. It takes the invested wealth and reads it into the constitution as a favored and protected class of property, while it leaves the occu- ( pation of the minister, the doctor, the professor, the lawyer, the inventor, the author, the merchant and all the various forms of human activity upon which the prosperity of the people must depend, subject to taxation without apportionment. The absolute inequality and injustice of taxation by reference to population and without regard to the amount of wealth taxed, are so manifest that to admit the power to tax and limit it to this mode, substantially denies the power to tax and limit it to this mode .substantially denies the power itself, since it imposes a restriction which renders its exercise impossible.” A few •extemporaneous remarks were made by Justice White after the reading of his written opinion. He spoke of the decision as a blow at the American people and said that the power of levying an income tax now left could only be exercised with such injustice that no legislative body would dare attempt to exercise it, for such an attempt would bring forward a bloody revolution. — Coming Nation.