People grumble a great deal about the rates, because they get nothing across the counter for them; and what they do get they share with everyone else, so that they have no sense of individual property in it, as they have in their clothes and houses and furniture. But they would not possess their clothes or their furniture or their houses very long in peace but for the paved and lighted and policed streets, the water supply and drainage, and all the other services the rates pay for. The Intelligent Woman, when she begins to study these matters, soon realizes that she gets better value for her rates than for any other part of her expenditure, and that the municipal candidates who ask for her vote on the ground that they are going to abolish or reduce the rates (which they fortunately cannot do) are mostly either fools or humbugs, if not both. And she has the satisfaction of knowing that she gets these services as nearly as possible at their cost to the local authority, which not only does not profiteer at her expense, but does for nothing a great deal of directorial work that in any private business would have to be paid for, and under present circumstances ought to be paid for, in public business as well. The same advantage can be claimed for taxes. Of all the public services which you pay for in taxes to the Government it can be said that there is no direct profiteering in them: you get them for what they cost the Government: that is, for much less than you would have to pay if they were private business concerns. So far it would seem that when you pay your rates and taxes you escape the exactions which pursue you whenever you spend money in any other way. You are perhaps beginning to feel that the next time the collector calls you will hear his knock with joy, and welcome him with the beaming face of the willing giver. I am sorry to spoil it all; but the truth is that Capitalism plunders you through the Government and the municipalities and County Councils as effectually as it does through the shopkeeper. It is not only that the Government and the local authorities, in order to carry on their public services, have to buy vast quantities of goods from private profiteers who charge them more than cost price, and that this overcharge is passed on to you as a ratepayer and taxpayer. Nor is it that the Government of the country, acting for the people of the country, cannot use the land of the country without paying some private person heavily for leave to do so. There are ways of getting round these overcharges, as, for instance, when the Government buys a piece of land for its operations, but raises the money to pay for it by a tax on rent which only the landlords pay, or when it raises capital by a tax on unearned incomes. By this expedient it can, and sometimes does, give you a complete and genuine cost price service. It can even give it to you for nothing and make richer people pay for it.