#OT# More BS on oil supplies

All very interesting, but let's get back to the original question: Is the statement that the power to tax is the power to destroy true or not?

Daniel Webster was one of the greatest debaters of his day. Somehow, I think he would make short work of this.

Red herring. I wasn't proposing a tax on SUVs, I was supporting the contention that the power to tax is indeed the power to destroy, by giving an example.

Joe Gwinn

If you followed what Wes and I were saying, you probably noted that we long ago agreed on that. Here's what I said about it:

"I don't know where you got that aphorism, but it's a silly one. Of course it can provide the power do destroy. But without it, there would be nothing worth destroying."

It's a silly and self-evident bromide.

Read the McCulluch case, and see what he was arguing for.

That has nothing to do with what Webster was talking about. Read the case.

-- Ed Huntress

While the earlier cites appear to be correct, this also comes from a anti child labor law where products produced by child labor moving in interstate commerce were to be taxed at a punative rate in order to drive the companies out of business, in particular matches.

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The Keating-Owen Act of 1916 prohibited interstate commerce of any merchandise that had been made by children under the age of fourteen, or merchandise that had been made in factories where children between the ages of 14 and 16 worked for more than eight hours a day, worked overnight, or worked more than six days a week.

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Many children were being seriously injured and maimed making phosporous matches.

Justice William Howard Taft held that the tax threatened state sovereignty because it was for regulatory, not revenue, purposes.

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Although the Keating-Owen Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional in Hammer v. Dagenhart 247 U.S. 251 (1918) because it overstepped the purpose of the government's powers to regulate interstate commerce. In its opinion the Court delineated between the Congress's power to regulate production and commerce. A second child labor bill was passed in December of 1918 as part of the Revenue Act of 1919 (also called the Child Labor Tax Law). It also took an indirect route to regulate child labor, this time by using the government's power to levy taxes.

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Congress made a second reun at the problem through taxes:

For current [1918] NYT article see

The original quote comes from the McCulloch v. Maryland Supreme Court case,

1819. It started with Daniel Webster arguing the case for the federal government's supremacy over the states. Justice Marshall picked it up in the Court's decision.

The whole argument was NOT about taxes, but about the supremacy of the federal government. Taxes came up as one of several "powers to destroy" the institutions of the federal government, as listed by Marshall, that the states might employ to undercut federal authority. But this was the bottom line from Marshall. The "taxation" he's talking about is the taxation Maryland wanted to impose upon the notes of the 2nd Bank of the United States:

===================================== "Taxation, it is said, does not necessarily and unavoidably destroy. To carry it to the excess of destruction, would be an abuse, to presume which, would banish that confidence which is essential to all government. But is this a case of confidence? Would the people of any one state trust those of another with a power to control the most insignificant operations of their state government? We know they would not...

"If the states may tax one instrument, employed by the government in the execution of its powers, they may tax any and every other instrument. They may tax the mail; they may tax the mint; they may tax patent-rights; they may tax the papers of the custom-house; they may tax judicial process; they may tax all the means employed by the government, to an excess which would defeat all the ends of government. This was not intended by the American people. They did not design to make their government dependent on the states...

"The question is, in truth, a question of supremacy; and if the right of the states to tax the means employed by the general government be conceded, the declaration that the constitution, and the laws made in pursuance thereof, shall be the supreme law of the land, is empty and unmeaning declamation."

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To take that phrase out of context is to destroy the meaning and the argument. Neither Webster nor Marshall argued for limits to taxation by the federal government. The case was about the question of whether Maryland could effectively destroy the 2nd Bank, which, Marshall concluded, had the priviledge of the supremacy of the federal government over any individual state.

Marshall said at least a couple of times in the Court's decision that the government's limit to tax was based on judicious use of the taxing authority by the legislatures. An abusive taxation by a state might be unconstitutional; in Maryland's case, that's what the Court determined.

-- Ed Huntress