Now, the economists all favor the abolition of custom-houses;
doubtless they do not wish them replaced by city toll- gates?
Let us generalize this example: salt brings the treasury
$11,400,000, tobacco $16,800,000. Let them show me, figures in
hand, by what taxes upon articles of luxury, after having
abolished the taxes on salt and tobacco, this deficit will be
made up.
You wish to strike articles of luxury; you take civilization at
the wrong end. I maintain, for my part, that articles of luxury
should be free. In economic language what are luxuries? Those
products which bear the smallest ratio to the total wealth, those
which come last in the industrial series and whose creation
supposes the preexistence of all the others. From this point of
view all the products of human labor have been, and in turn have
ceased to be, articles of luxury, since we mean by luxury nothing
but a relation of succession, whether chronological or
commercial, in the elements of wealth. Luxury, in a word, is
synonymous with progress; it is, at each instant of social life,
the expression of the maximum of comfort realized by labor
and at which it is the right and destiny of all to arrive.
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