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Show MERCHANTS' LICENSE LAW 18 CONSIDERED AN IMPOSITION Unjust and Unequal Taxation Results From Operation Op-eration of Ordinance; Inconsistencies Are Pointed Out. By C. R. PEARS ALL. OUR worthy license collector has scratched his head in serious thought and decided that the merchants' mer-chants' license dragon must be given a greater field in which to ramble in search of funds to reimburse the city treasury when saloon licenses go out of style, if that contingency should arise. He names, according to an evening eve-ning paper, several lines of honest, though not overlucrative callings, that should be licensed and among them! bootblacks. j (an you beat it! There is just as much justice, how-; ever, in imposing a license on a bout-black bout-black as there is in imposing it against I a dealer in fine tapestries, and it it is : j imposed against a dealer in fine tapes- i tries it should, in all justice, be imposed; against the bootblack, but the whole sys-! tern is wrong. i The merchants ' license was born in I injustice and perpetuated for the samej reason that many unjust laws arc made! effective and perpetuated, as exigencies arise in city, county or state governments govern-ments that make it convenient or prof-1 itnble to make them operative. A bad law, created often by a narrow and ignorant legislator, is passed and printed into the statutes of a state inside in-side of sixty days, and through its oper-1 ation it may scourge the best talent of a commonwealth for a generation before a more just or more wise legislator may propose its elimination. Outsiders Escape. Few perhaps besides the merchants in this community know what a merchants mer-chants ' license really is, and as every person in our beautiful city should know who paves our streets, educates our children and beautifies our parks, I wish to explain the merchants' part in this expense. First, -we pay the regular citv, county and state tax that all owners of any sort of property are compelled to pay, and which should be the source from which all city revenues should come, and second, sec-ond, merchants only pa v a license on every vehicle used for delivery purposes, and besides this, we as merchants are forced to pay the city a large license for being a merchant instead of a "bum." As the gum-c hewing maiden says, "Now listen: " A merchant in New York, -who pays no taxes in Utah, no rent and hires no help, nor in any way adds one dollar to the wealth or maintenance of our city, can send a salesman to Salt Lake with a line of sample gowns, hats, shoes, or other merchandise, and invite oar residents to his hotel displav, and take $5000 or $10,000 or $20,000 worth of orders, as the case may be, for goods like those for sale by many Salt Lake merchants, mer-chants, who are paying taxes and licenses, and he (the New York merchant) mer-chant) pays no license for the privilege. privi-lege. Free for Vultures. Io other words, our city is free for every peddling vulture to pillage, and closed to the man born and bred on the soil if he dares to sell a strip of bacon to his neighbor without first paying the city for the privilege. The only merchants' tax that should exist in the one granting the privilege to the outMder to come and trade for a day, a week or a month, on what should be the private preserves of the taxpay-ing taxpay-ing home merchant, and that license should be so high that only the merchant of the highest purpose, offering wares of the first order, could afford to ven-' ture. i I had been told that the city could not; raise a larger revenue from 'direct tax- 1 ation than it was now collecting with-! out legislative action. 1 asked a com-1 missioner this morning "Could the city; increase its direct taxation sufficiently to eliminate all licenses and still have j so much revenue as now?" He an-; swered, "Oh, yes, we could, without any further legislative action raise more i money by direct taxation than we are! now raising from all sources, which in- chiles all licenses. ' ' j Merchants, do you get that? Our city I arbitrarily exacts a double tax from you, because they can, while the other 98,000 '. residents of our city arc exempt an : infamy against justice and a bar to the development of loyal citizenship. And now the argument why a mer-! chant should pay a license as offered by j the best talent in our city commission. ! Fiit ' ' We need the money, : ' and second ' ' You merchants have special 1 privileges." j The first reason undoubtedly is true1 from the city's standpoint of necessity,! but why not tax all the bowrlcged men" in town this year and exempt those with 1 straight lesf It's just as logical as tax-; ing a merchant and, for instance, exempting ex-empting his landlord. The "special privilege" argument is! even more silly. It snowed the other day, as you may have noticed. The snow fell on the streets owned by everybody, every-body, and early in the morning a big policeman stuck bis head in the store door and said "Get a move on you and clean off this walk.1' We cleaned it; that's one of our "special privileges." "Special Privilege." Some time ago the city, without cost, removed waste paper and garbage from all the alleys bacn. of the stores. One day they quit and a garbage hauling company (already organized) boldly quoted us a fancy price for hauling our garbage. It has since been costing us from $12. 00 to $48. U0 a year for keeping keep-ing the city 's alleys clean, another "special privilege." Now and then a uniformed individual demands entrance to our basement to examine our electric wire system and recently this individual forced us to go to great expense to rewire re-wire our basement, although the original origi-nal work was passed by the city electrical inspector when first installed. An incompetent in-competent city electrical inspector, who had a political stranglehold on a job ho was unqualified to fill, and who was drawing a salary out of the city treasury trea-sury which is replenished now and then by the merchants, allowed a rotten job of wiring to be done, but did the city, which was the employer of this incompetent incompe-tent inspector, say "we will rewire your store at our expense because it is our fault that it was not well done originally." original-ly." No, but instead wo had orders to rewire at our own expense and to do it quickly another "special privilege." Fire protection, yes, but so has the landlord, and he pays no license for occupying oc-cupying frontage on Maiu street -with bis one-story mud skyscraper, which makes the merchants ' insurance twice what it should be, and which he rents for more money every year than the building cost, so there is no "special privilege" there. Hire Watchman. Police protection, yes, along with everybody else, but as we .merchants have no special protection, we hire a watchman at our own expense besides building costly vaults to protect our wares. Now if we have no special police or fire protection, and foreign merchants are permitted to barter in our midst without paying for the privilege, and we have to clean the streets and alleys at our own expense, and pay a license for driving our delivery wagons over the streets we have helped to pave, why the merchants' license and for what? The bum who leans against my store front and asks the passerby for a dime, is "pinched," fed, warmed and slept at the city's expense. He is a vagrant, and the city gives him shelter and gets nothing noth-ing in return. A merchant lends financial aid in a thousand ways to the citv and its people through the regular and legitimate tax levied, besides the larger distribution in the way of rents, light,, heat, help, advertising, charity and general expenses, expens-es, and then is asked to pay a special license for being a merchant instead of j a " b.um. ' ' I If the city's revenues are not enough to meet the costs of operation, the commission com-mission should exercise some thought on economy instead of bending all their energies to determine how to harass another an-other class of citizens, including the bootblack. Would Contest Law. It is not my purpose to question the cost of running our city government, as I have not familiarized myself with enough of its details, but if its efficiency efficien-cy in other departments is of no higher standard than that maintained by the street cleaning department during the past two weeks of heavy snow, the waste of good money on poor talent must be excessive. I believe in charity in its proper place, but I also believe in hiring brains and brawn instead of a flock of shuffling derelicts to clean the streets of a big city in times of stress. I will pay a merchants ' license as lone as I am compelled to, but under ' protest, and I am ready now to give my I check for $250 into a fund, with twenty i other merchants who will each pay an ! equal amount, to fight this injustice to a finish, and if possible force the city, to collect all its revenues from all the people on a legitimate tax basis, according accord-ing to a man 's possessions and not according ac-cording to his calling. T am aware of the fact that our courts have decided adversely to the interests of the merchants on the legality of collecting col-lecting a merchants' license, but I am also aware of the fact that the same courts have dflngled many self-confessed murderers in the shadow of the gallows, only to reverse their judgments through the efforts nf a real lawyer who com- ntanded a real punch, and to engage such talent would be my reason for raising i fund sufficient to engage real ability to fight a real injustice. |