It is exactly the same thing in principle as the case of the two men singing for one loaf of bread. And the same principle applies to the expenditure of rates and taxes. A great part of this expenditure goes in empty services, not in services which add economic values to things. We must, of course, distinguish between two things which many of the older economists muddled up. A thing may be of the highest temporal use to humanity in the production of happiness, such as good singing, or of high spiritual value, such as good conduct, and yet that thing must not be confounded with economic values. When one says, for instance, that good singing, or a good picture, or a good book has no economic value, or only a very slight material economic value (the best picture ever painted has probably not a true economic value of more than 20s. outside its frame, unless the painter used expensive paints or a quite enormous canvas) one does not mean, as too many foolish people imagine, that _therefore_ one ought not to have good singing, or good pictures, or the rest of it. What _is_ meant is that the examination of any one set of things must be kept separate from the examination of another, and when you put down the money spent on these things as though it represented real economic values you are making a false calculation. Well, this is only a hint of quite a new subject in Economics, which I have put in at the end in the hope that it may be of some value to you. Meditate upon it. As societies get more and more luxurious, more and more complicated, more and more “civilised” (as we call it), so do these economic imaginaries grow out of all proportion to the real wealth of the society. If on the top of their growth you suddenly impose high taxation, based upon your assessment, you may think that you are only taking a fifth or a third or a fourth of the whole community’s real yearly wealth, when in reality you are taking a half or more than a half. And this is probably the main reason why so many highly developed societies have broken down towards the end of their brilliance through the demands of their tax-gatherers who worked on assessment inflated out of all reality by a mass of economic imaginaries. FINIS FOOTNOTES [1] From the Latin word “Fiat” = “Let it be so.” As though the Government had said: “This is not a piece of gold, only a piece of paper. But I say it is to be taken as gold. So I order. _Let it be so._” [2] It is important to keep our ideas rigidly clear on this point. You can exchange a piece of fertile land for some set of values. Yet it is not _wealth_. It is not matter transposed from a condition where it is less useful to a condition where it is more useful to man. See the definitions in the first chapter, “What is wealth?”