Harlan F. Stone

“ Property which has thus passed from either the national or a state government to private ownership becomes a part of the common mass of property and subject to its common burdens. Denial to either government of the power to tax it, or income derived from it, is order to insure some remote and indirect antecedent benefit to the other, would be an encroachment on the sovereign power to tax, not justified by the implied constitutional restriction. ”

“ The leases convey all the oil and gas in granting the right to find, produce, and appropriate all of them, in consideration of the payment of stipulated sums and also the value of a stated fraction of the oil and gas produced.'
Property sold or otherwise disposed of by the government, either state or national, in order to raise revenue for government purposes, is in a broad sense a government instrumentality, with respect to which neither the property itself before sale, nor its sale by one government, may be taxed by the other. ”

“ Theoretically, any tax imposed on the buyer with respect to the purchased property may have some effect on the price, and thus remotely and indirectly affect the selling government. We may assume that, if the property is subject to tax after sale, the governmental seller will generally receive a less favorable price than if it were known in advance that the property in the hands of later owners, or evenof t he buyer alone, could not be taxed. ”