Variety: The Tax on Single People
It has already been attempted, with a law, to encourage the birthrate, in lessening the load for families having a certain number of children. The law, full of good intentions, is deplorable in practice; and, before long, it will have to be abrogated. (The Chamber of Deputies has already called for this wise measure.)
It would be the same with a law establishing a tax on single people.
If the proposed goal is to augment the resources of the national treasury, it will certainly be obtained; the tax will be productive. If, conversely, it is hoped that this method will decrease the number of single people, and increase the number of legitimate unions, the result will be nothing, and so what is the point of useless vexations?
First, this law would be an attack on a privilege that should be inviolable: individual liberty. I know that public interest takes precedence over private interest, and that the latter must be sacrificed whenever the res publica demands it. But where, in this case, is the public utility? Who can admit that a tax, however high it might be, could ever convince a man to marry to avoid the charges of the tax? If he is reluctant to marry, it is because he is worried that he will not be able to find it in his pecuniary resources the means of providing for his wife and children. Such is the most general case. Furthermore, what is the annual expense, once and for all, of an expected tax, compared to the daily unexpected expenses of a household?
From another perspective, it a man does no feel in himself the sentiments strong enough to tie his life to that of a woman, to devote himself to his children, to support the calm life of a family, to sacrifice his personal pleasures, his independence for the happiness—hypothetical for him—of a conjugal home, would a law be able to develop those sentiments in him? If, as happens in many working class households, the woman, far from being the subject of expenses, instead brings money into the home, and if the man, seeing the marriage as "financially beneficial," if he only sees the union as a tax break, the number of bad marriages will go up. It is in these forced, compelled unions, where the father is linked by weakness and not by a natural feeling of attraction, that one most often finds children, whose education is not sufficiently developed by an indifferent father, who become bad subjects, and a blight on society.
Laws do not modify a social condition, they are derived from it. Thus, the number of single people will always grow because of social reasons. In the Middle Ages, for example, only a few privileged people had the option; and serfs, villagers, artisans, living off their day-to-day salary, without the option to hope for an independent situation or fortune, did not bring voluntary restrictions to the number of their children. The child lived, like his father, off of his personal labour. And the father had no inheritance to share with him. Nowadays, everyone saves; every head of a family wants to elevate his son above his own station; and, to achieve this dream, he needs to reserve his resources for a single child, and not spread them out between several. In England, where the current social organization still has much in common with Feudalism, where fortunes are monopolized in the hands of the great lords, and where the plebeians are numerous, the birthrate is high.
The poorer a people, the more children. The more public wealth is shared, the lower the number of children. It is an indisputable social fact, which now law can remedy.
To this troubling problem of depopulation in France, a solution besides a tax on single people must therefore be sought. They are not responsible for this state of affairs; they must not therefore be the only ones to suffer the consequences. Leave them to live in peace. it is perhaps to them—who do not have the same motivations for voluntary limitation as married men—that we are indebted for the fact that the birth rate has not fallen any further.
Dr. P. Vernial
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