I am sorry to have to add that the Postmaster-General takes advantage of this to charge you more for carrying your letter than the average cost of it to the Post Office. In this way he makes a profit which he hands over to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who uses it to keep down the income tax and supertax. You pay more that the income tax payers may pay less. A fraction of your three halfpence goes into the pockets of the millionaires. True, if you are an income tax payer you get a scrap of it back yourself; but as most people do not pay income tax and everybody buys at least a few postage stamps, the income tax payers in effect exploit the purchasers of stamps. The principle is wrong, and the practice a dangerous abuse, which is nevertheless applauded and carried to greater and greater lengths as the Government adds telegraphs to posts, telephones to telegraphs, and wireless to both. In the case of a municipal electric lighting supply, I must tell you that in spite of the fact that the municipality, unlike a private company, has to begin paying off the cost of setting up its works from the moment it borrows it, and must clear it all off within a certain period, yet even when it does this and yet supplies electricity at a lower price than the private companies, it makes a profit in spite of itself. It applies the profit to a reduction of the rates; and the ratepayers are so pleased by this, and so accustomed to think that a business which makes profits must be a sound one, that the municipality is tempted to make a profit on purpose, and even a big one, by charging the consumer more than the supply costs. When this happens, it is clear that the overcharged people who use electric light are paying part of the rates of those who do not. Even if everybody used electric light there would still be inequalities in the consumption of current. A struggling shopkeeper, who must make his shop blaze with light to attract custom, must have a heavier bill for electric light than much richer people who have only their private houses to illuminate. We must not spend any more time on your rates and taxes. If they were entirely abolished (how popular that would be!) and their places taken by profiteering charges for State and municipal services, the result would be, not State and municipal Socialism but State and municipal Capitalism. As it is, you can see how even in your rates, which ought to be quite free from the idler’s toll, you can be and to some extent are “exploited” just as you are in your ordinary shopping. 32 YOUR RENT