You see therefore that when you pay rates and taxes you are not safe from being charged not only the cost price of public services, but huge sums which go to private employers as unnecessary or excessive profits, to the landlords and capitalists whose land and capital these employers use, and to those property owners who hold the War Loan and the other stocks which represent the National Debt. But as you may also get back some of it as a pensioner or a recipient of public relief in some form or other, or as you may yourself be a holder of War Loan or Consols, or a shareholder in one of the commercial concerns which get contracts from the Government and the municipalities, it is impossible for me to say whether, on the whole, you gain or lose. I can only say that the chances are ten to one that you lose on balance; that is, that the rich get more out of you through the Government than you get out of them. So much for the taxes. Now for the rates. 31 YOUR RATES The rates are not paid equally by everybody. The local authorities, like the Government, have to recognize the fact that some people are better able to pay than others, and make them pay accordingly. They do this by calculating the rates on the value of the house occupied by the ratepayer, and of his place of business, guessing that a person with a house or shop worth a hundred a year will be richer than one with a house or shop worth twenty, and rating him on the valuation. Thus every rate is really a graduated income tax as well as a payment for public services. Then there are the municipal debts as well as the national debt; and as municipalities are as lazy and wasteful as central governments in the way of giving public jobs out to profiteering contractors, everything that happens with the taxes happens with the rates as well on a smaller scale. But there are other anomalies which rating brings out. Just consider what happens when even the quite genuine part of our national and municipal Communism, paying its way honestly by taxing and rating, is applied, as we apply it, to people of whom some are very poor and some are very rich. If a woman cannot afford to feed herself well enough to nurse her baby properly she clearly cannot afford to contribute to the maintenance of a stud of cream-colored ponies in the stables of Buckingham Palace. If she lives with her husband and children in a single room in a back-to-back dwelling in a slum, hopelessly out of reach of the public parks of the great cities, with their flowers and bands and rides and lakes and boats, it is rather hard on her to have to pay a share of the cost of these places of recreation, used largely by rich people whose horses and motor cars shew that they could easily pay a charge for admission sufficient to maintain the place without coming to her for a contribution.