It is a principle I laboured to establish in the pages of The Wealth of Nations that the proprietor of stock is, of all citizens, the most mobile. He carries his fortune in his judgment and his credit, and when the sovereign's demands upon him grow inconvenient, he is seldom long in finding a jurisdiction whose sovereign is more forbearing. The merchants and manufacturers of Seattle appear to have read the relevant chapters with some attention, even if their mayor has not.
The city of Seattle, situated on the north-western coast of this republic, has lately elevated to its highest municipal dignity a lady of socialist conviction, one Katie Wilson, on the strength of a programme that proposed to levy considerable new impositions upon those citizens most capable, in the estimation of her supporters, of bearing them. The reasoning is not without a certain surface plausibility: where great wealth has accumulated, there is something to be had; and the wants of the labouring poor are visible, immediate, and numerous.
Yet the difficulty, as it has ever been, lies not in the wanting but in the having. Starbucks — a great house of commerce, founded in Seattle, whose trade in roasted and prepared beverages now extends to some thirty-eight thousand establishments across the nations of the earth, and whose revenues are of an order that would have seemed fantastical to any excise officer of my own acquaintance — has lately been observed expanding its material operations in the city of Nashville, in the state of Tennessee. The company has not issued a declaration of grievance. It has issued, rather, a lease.
This is precisely the mechanism I described when writing of capitals that, feeling themselves insecure, do not protest — they withdraw. There is no pamphlet, no petition, no dramatic testimony before the aldermen. There is only the quiet arithmetic of a new building in a different jurisdiction, and the gradual discovery by those left behind that the tax base upon which they had drawn their ambitious calculations was rather more elastic than their projections had supposed.
Mayor Wilson finds herself in the position of a landlord who has raised the rent on a tenant with the means and the inclination to move. The tenant has not argued the point. He has engaged a carrier.
Whether the city will revise its ambitions, or whether it will persist in them and learn at leisure what the revision of ambitions deferred generally costs — this the events of the next several years will determine with considerably more authority than any column of mine. I note only that the question is not a new one, and that history has furnished answers, if not always welcome ones.