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WHY YOU SELDOM SEE CARRIAGES ANYMORE

March 08, 2006

Today is the 210th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's first federal tax decision, Hylton v. United States. The Court held that a federal tax on carriages was not an unconstitutional "direct" tax, which would have to be "apportioned among the states."

Part of the opinion linked below shows an aspect of the constitutional restriction on "direct" taxes that I had not known:

The provision was made in favor of the southern States. They possessed a large number of slaves; they had extensive tracts of territory, thinly settled, and not very productive. A majority of the states had but few slaves, and several of them a limited territory, well settled, and in a high state of cultivation. The southern states, if no provision had been introduced in the Constitution, would have been wholly at the mercy of the other states. Congress in such case, might tax slaves, at discretion or arbitrarily, and land in every part of the Union after the same rate or measure: so much a head in the first instance, and so much an acre in the second. To guard them against imposition in these particulars, was the reason of introducing the clause in the Constitution, which directs that representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the states, according to their respective numbers.

It is an odd twist of history that the first income tax, which was imposed to help finance the war that ended slavery, was later ruled unconstitutional due to a provision designed to protect the financial interests of slaveholders.

Link to Hylton v. U.S.

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