“The Law,” “The State,” and Other Political Writings, 1843–1850. Bastiat Frédéric
will not be subject to the duty levied under Art. 1:
1 Those wines and spirits that an owner has transported from his press or a public press to his cellars or storehouses;
2 Those that a sharecropper, farmer, or holder of a long-term lease for rent hands over to the owner or receives from him by virtue of official leases or customary use;
3 The wine, cider, or perry3 that is dispatched by an owner or farmer from the cellars or storehouses in which his harvest has been deposited, and provided that it is the produce of the said harvest, whatever place it is sent to and the standing of the person to whom it is sent.
Art. 4. The same exemption will be granted to traders, wholesalers, brokers, middlemen, agents, distillers, and retail traders, for the wines and spirits they have had moved from one to another of their cellars situated within the confines of the same département.
Art. 5. The transport of wines and spirits that are removed for dispatch abroad or to the French colonies will equally be exempt from circulation duty.
The entry duty did not allow any exceptions.
With regard to retail duty:
Art. 85. Owners who wish to sell the wines and spirits they produce at retail will be granted a discount of 25 percent on the duties they will have to pay. . . .
Art. 86. However, they will be subject to all the obligations imposed on professional retailers. Notwithstanding this, inspections by agents will not take place within their domiciles provided that the premises on which their wines and spirits will be sold at retail are separate from these.
Thus, to summarize these exceptions:
Exemption from circulation duty for the wines of their harvest that owners send from their own property to their own property elsewhere throughout the entire territory of France;
Exemption from the same duty for the wine that traders, merchants, retailers, etc., have had transported from one to another of their cellars situated in the same département;
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Exemption from the same duty for wine that is exported;
A discount of 25 percent of the retail duty for owners;
Exemption from inspection visits by agents within their own domiciles where the premises on which this sale is made are separate from these.
Now, here is the text of the draft law put forward by the minister of finance:
Article 13. Exemption from circulation duty on wines and spirits will be allowed only in the following cases:
1 For wines which the harvester has transported from his press to his cellars and storehouses or from one to another of his cellars, within the confines of the same village or a bordering one;
2 For wines and spirits that a farmer or the holder of a long lease hands over to his owner or receives from him, within the same limits of a single village, by virtue of official leases or customary use.
Article 3 of the law dated 28 April 1816 and Article 3 of the law dated 17 July 1819 are repealed.
Article 14. Wines and spirits from their harvest that owners have transported from one part of their own property to another, outside the limits laid down in the preceding article, will be exempt from circulation duty, provided the owners acquire the necessary permit and are subject at the place of destination to all the obligations imposed on wholesale merchants with the exception of the payment of a license.
Article 25. The provision of Article 85 of the law dated 28 April 1816, which allows to owners who sell at retail the wines and spirits of their own production an exceptional discount of 25 percent of the retail duty that they have to pay, is repealed.
We would greatly exceed the limits we have set ourselves if we carried out a comprehensive examination of the points raised by the draft law, and we will have to limit ourselves to a few short observations.
First, does Article 13 of the draft law repeal Articles 4 and 5 of the 1816 law? An affirmative answer appears to result from the following absolute phrase: Exemption will be allowed only if . . . , which implies the exclusion of all categories not listed in the remainder of the disposition.
However, a negative answer may be concluded from the disposition that ends Article 13, since, by repealing only Article 3 of the 1816 law, it apparently maintains Articles 4 and 5.
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In this last case we consider that there is a certain anomaly in reserving for traders and retailers within the confines of the département a right that is restricted for owners to the limits of a village.
Second, since the new measures aim to increase revenue, we should no doubt expect them to be burdensome for taxpayers. It is possible, however, for these measures to exceed their aim and lead to disadvantages out of all proportion to the advantages hoped for.
In effect, these measures deal a deathblow to large-property owners through Article 13 and to small-property owners through Article 20.
As long as exemption from circulation duty was limited to the confines of a département, it could have resulted only in exceptional evils. The ownership of vineyards in several départements is rare, and where this occurs owners will have cellars in each of these départements. However, it is very frequent for an owner to have vineyards in several neighboring villages that do not border on one another; and in general, in this situation, it is in his interest to gather his harvest into the same cellar. The new law obliges him either to increase the number of his buildings, making surveillance more difficult, or to bear the cost of circulation duty for a product that is already very heavily taxed and whose sale will perhaps take place only several years later.
And what will the exchequer gain? Very little, unless the owner, as M. de Villèle hopes, drinks all his wine to recover the duty a little earlier.
It will doubtless be said that Article 14 of the draft will counteract this disadvantage. We will wait and examine the spirit and effect of this later.
On the other hand, small owners draw a very considerable advantage from retail sales: that of keeping their wooden barrels from year to year. From now on, they will be obliged each year to make an outlay oft en in excess of their means to buy them. I will say without hesitation that this disposition contains the cause of total ruin for a great many small owners. The purchase of wooden barrels is not something that they can avoid or delay doing. When the harvest arrives, it is essential, whatever the price, to acquire the wood in which to store it; and if the owner does not have the money, he is at the mercy of the sellers. Wine producers have been seen to offer half their harvest to obtain the means to house the other half. Retail sales would avoid this extreme situation, one that will oft en recur now that this possibility will in practice be forbidden to them.
The two modifications or, as the minister puts it, the two improvements to existing legislation, which we have just been analyzing, are not the
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ones contained in the draft law dated 30 December. There are two others on which we ought to make a few comments.
Article 35 of the law dated 21 April 1832 had converted the circulation, entry, and retail duties into a single tax, levied at the entrance to towns, thus allowing free circulation within these towns and abolishing customs investigations.
According to Article 16 of the draft, this single tax will now replace only the entry and retail duties, with the circulation and license duties continuing to be levied as they were in 1829, so that one could say of it, in chorus with the singer,
That this single tax will have two sisters.
Another difficulty arises here. In order to establish the single tax (1832 law, Article 36), “The sum of all the annual yields, from all the duties to be replaced, is to be divided by the total value of annual production.”
Since