If you shew what I have just written to the sort of male who calls himself a practical business man, he will at once say that I am childishly wrong: that you _can_ eat an adding-or sewing-machine; dust the furniture with a typewriter; and wash a hundred babies with a motor car. All you have to do is to sell the sewing-machine and buy food with the price you get for it; sell the typewriter and buy a vacuum cleaner; sell the motor car and hire a few nurses after buying a bath and soap and towels. And he will be so far right that you certainly can do all these things _provided too many other people are not trying to do them at the same time_. It is because the practical business man always forgets this proviso that he is such a hopeless idiot politically. When you have sold the sewing-machine and bought food with the price, you have not really turned the sewing-machine into food. The sewing-machine remains as uneatable as ever: not even an ostrich could get a tooth into it or digest it afterwards. What has happened is that you, finding yourself with a sewing-machine which you no longer want, and being in want of food, find some other woman who has some spare food which she does not want, but who wants a sewing-machine. You have a sewing-machine for which you have no use, and an unsatisfied appetite. She has food for which she has no appetite, and wants a sewing-machine. So you two make an exchange: and there you are! Nothing could be simpler. But please remark that it takes two to make the bargain, and that the two must want opposite things. If they both want the same thing, or want to get rid of the same thing, there will be no deal. Now suppose the Chancellor of the Exchequer took it into his head as a practical business man to raise money by a tax on capital instead of on income. Suppose he were to say that as thousands of women have capital in the form of sewing-machines which they can sell for, say, £5 apiece, they can each afford to pay a tax of £3. Suppose he actually induced the House of Commons to impose such a tax under the title of a Capital Levy or some such practical business nonsense, and that every woman had to sell her sewing-machine to pay the tax! What would be the result? Each woman trying to sell her machine would find all the other women trying to sell their machines too, and nobody wanting to buy them. She could sell it as old iron for a shilling perhaps, but that would not enable her to pay the tax. The tax collector, not being paid, would distrain on her goods: that is, he would seize the sewing-machine. But as he also could not sell it, he would have to hand it over unsold to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who would find himself heaped up with thousands of unsellable sewing-machines instead of the thousands of pounds he was looking forward to. He would have no money; and the women would have no sewing-machines: all because the practical business men told him that sewing-machines could be turned into bread.