Description
For the study of first principles is a necessary preliminary to an effective discussion of practical problems, and should be helpful in providing a framework of general ideas, into which particular ideas and particular facts can be fitted, so as to appear, not as unique and isolated things, but in their true relation to a larger whole. Though I may seem occasionally to have yielded a little to temptation, it is not my object in this book to advocate any detailed practical policy, but only to indicate some of the general considerations on which any sound policy must be based. Facts, in the field of public finance, are moving so rapidly at the present time that realistic studies are soon out of date and the form, in which practical problems present themselves, is constantly changing. But there are certain general principles of which this is not true. In the course of my argument, therefore, I have occasionally turned aside to certain current opinions on questions of taxation, public expenditure and public debts, which I believe to rest upon errors of judgment and confusions of mind.
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