Note 749 — APPENDIXES
Reading edition
"On the purely financial side the gain from the service must generally be a small one; the return for capital employed is little, and the only remaining element would be the economy that results from the application of monopoly, and the consequent unity of the service. Any further charge is really a form of taxation."—C. F. Bastable, Public Finance, London, 1903, p. 209.
"When we come to look more closely into the essential character of this 'public utility' in respect of its economic and financial value, it will appear that in this case an important administrative function has attached to it, as it were involuntarily, an effective contrivance for the levying of a tax, such as to require that the Post Office be taken up in connection with the theory of taxation."—G. Cohn, Science of Finance, translated by T. B. Veblen, Chicago, 1895, p. 126.