But you are rated and taxed not only to pay for public services which are equally useful to all, but for other things as well; and when you come to these you may, if you are a rich woman, complain that you are being plundered by Socialists for the benefit of the poor, or, if you are a poor woman, that you are being plundered by Capitalists who throw on the rents and taxes certain expenses which they should pay out of their own pockets. Let us see what foundation there is for such complaints. Let us begin with the rich. By taxation rich people have a quarter or a third of their incomes, and very rich people more than half, taken from them by the Government, not for any specified public service, but as pure nationalization (communization) of their income to that extent without any compensation, and by simple coercion. This is now taken so completely as a matter of course that the rich never dream of asking for compensation, or refusing to pay until their goods are forcibly seized, or even of calling it Bolshevik confiscation; and so we are apt to talk as if such things never happened except in the imaginations of wicked Communists; but they happen in Great Britain regularly every January; and the Act authorizing them is brought in every April by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Though reassuringly called the Appropriation Act it is really an Expropriation Act. There is nothing in the law or the Constitution, or in any custom or tradition or parliamentary usage or any other part of our established morality, to prevent this confiscated third or half being raised to three-quarters, nine-tenths, or the whole. Besides this, when a very rich person dies, the Government confiscates the entire income of the property for the next eight years. The smallest taxable properties have to give up their incomes to the Government for ten months, and the rest for different periods between these extremes, in proportion to their amount. In addition, there are certain taxes paid by rich and poor alike, called indirect taxes. Some of them are taxes on certain articles of food, and on tobacco and spirits, which you pay in the shop when you buy them, as part of the price. Others are stamp duties: twopence if you give a receipt for £2 or more, sixpence if you make a simple written agreement, hundreds of pounds on certain other documents which propertyless people never use. None of these taxes are levied for a named service like the police rate or the water rate: they are simple transfers of income from private pockets to the national pocket, and, as such, acts of pure Communism. It may surprise you to learn that even without counting the taxes on food, which fall on all classes, the private property thus communized already amounts to nearly a million a day.