Taxation and government policy related to it have only episodic appearance in classical Protestant ethical sources. Of the early sixteenth century reformers, Luther gave most attention to the subject, justifying taxation in general as necessary for the just service of government to the public good and calling the princes to spend tax monies for that good rather than their own luxury. Calvin made much the same claims but called more clearly for official church scrutiny of all government than (...) did Luther. Two centuries later John Wesley criticized English tax policy, appealing to standards of economic efficiency and compassion for the poor with little reference overtly to theology. The churches of colonial and post-revolutionary America developed no systematic, theologically rooted rationale for taxation ethics, either; but official Protestant denominational concern for such ethics has grown measurably in the most recent fifteen years. After a survey of these recent national church statements, and on the basis of them and the slender Protestant heritage on this issue, we end by posing four questions which we see as worthy of much serious thinking by contemporary American Protestant ethicists and church bodies. (shrink)

Lockeans regard taxation as a—perhaps sometimes permissible—infringement of moral property entitlements. This essay discusses whether, or in what form, this charge is defensible. In doing so, it will explore the truth and the limits of the conventionalist reply of Murphy and Nagel to Lockean challenges to taxation. It argues that there is a moral rationale for property conventions that is independent of the question whether and how one can acquire natural, pre-conventional property rights in the state of nature, (...) that this rationale sets a moral standard for how good property conventions are and whether they are justifiable at all, and that once property conventions are in place, people’s moral property entitlements are at least partly determined by these conventions, sometimes even by unjustifiable ones that ought to be reformed. Because taxation can be a part of property conventions, taxation as such is not an infringement of moral property entitlements. But the essay will also argue that some taxation—excessive taxation—does infringe on moral property entitlements. This is because the moral rationale for property conventions sets some standards for what owners should be entitled to, and so excessive taxation will infringe upon moral entitlements that are partly not convention-based. (shrink)

Taxation is more than one thing. Taxes can be levied in various ways on various things, with varying effects on a culture and an economy, and raising different challenges of justification.

Taxation is a vestige of feudalism and monarchy. It persists because of the mistaken belief that government is somehow entitled to a portion of our labor or assets. This article challenges that belief from a philosophical perspective and offers a different viewpoint.

I examine how reforming our international tax regime could be an important vehicle by which we can begin to realize global justice. For instance, eliminating tax havens, tax evasion, and transfer pricing schemes are all important to ensure accountability and to support democracies. I argue that the proposals concerning taxation reform are likely to be more effective in tackling global poverty than Thomas Pogge's global resources dividend because they target some of the central issues more effectively. I also discuss (...) many particular proposals for global taxes that have already been floated and implementation prospects and successes. (shrink)

This article focuses on the justification of taxation, in other words the principled rather than the technical aspect of taxation. We first show how democracy is on the one hand required for legitimate taxation, and how on the other hand democratic communities are dependent on taxation, and argue there is no vicious cirle. We then present a typology of ways of justifying taxation, according to which taxation can base its legitimacy on (1) meeting basic (...) needs, (2) financing public goods, (3) redistribution, or (4) (dis-)incentivising certain types of conduct. We then discuss the applicability of each of these types of justification on the global level, arguing that all of them do apply to the global level. The article further concludes that different normative justifications guide us towards different designs of taxation in practice, so the background justification has to be made clear, especially when designing new taxation systems. (shrink)

The consequences of taxation matter for the optimal design of the tax system. Those consequences depend on behavioral responses to taxation, as summarized by the elasticity of taxable income. Although this elasticity depends on characteristics of preferences, such as the elasticity of substitution between goods and leisure, it also depends on the avoidance technology, and on the response of government to avoidance behavior. It depends on the size of states, and the amount of tax coordination and harmonization. To (...) some degree the elasticity of response can be affected by government policies, and the government need not accept it passively, but rather should put in place policies that optimally determine it. (shrink)

Read Jus, 17 June 1887): The voluntary taxation proposal really means the dissolution of the State into its constituent atoms, and leaving them to recombine in some way or no way, just as it may happen. There would be nothing to prevent the existence of five or six "States" in England, and members of all these "States" might be living in the same house! The proposal is, it appears to me, the outcome of an idea in the minds of (...) those who propound it that the State is, or ought to be, founded on contract, just as a joint stock company is. ... The explanation of the whole matter, I believe, is that ... the State is a social organism, evolved as every other organism is evolved, and not requiring any more than other organisms to be based upon a contract ... (shrink)

Like many governments in this COVID-19 pandemic, the Nigerian government imposed a lockdown on the country. As a consequence of the lockdown, many businesses shutdown and effectively had no source of revenue. Yet, without receiving any bailout or palliatives from the government, these businesses are required to meet their tax obligations to the government. Bearing in mind that this time (COVID-19 era) is different, one wonders what is required of businesses in view of the taxation problem and the social (...) contract between the businesspersons and the government. In view of social contract obligations, in this COVID-19 pandemic should businesses pay tax to a government that seems to have delegitimised itself by its exploitative actions in terms of taxation and delinquent omission in terms of the provision of public goods and social services? The Nigerian government at all tiers (federal, state and local) seldom respect the essence of taxation. Therefore, businesses often pay tax for nothing. For many businesses, as far as taxation is concerned, to pay or not to pay? that is the question. This article is aimed at teasing out this taxation problem that may or may not be a moral dilemma. In view of certain ethical considerations, this article shows why in spite of social contract obligations, there is no consensus or canonical agreement on whether, as law-abiding citizens and juridical persons (legal entities), businesspersons and businesses ought to or ought not to pay tax to the Nigerian government in this COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Does state weakness lead to representation via taxation? A distinguished body of scholarship assumes that fiscal need forced weak states to grant rights and build institutions. The logic is traced to pre-modern Europe. However, the literature has misunderstood the link between state strength and the origins of representation. Representation emerged where the state was already strong. In pre-modern Europe, representation originally was a legal obligation, not a right. It became the organizing principle of central institutions where rulers could oblige (...) communities to send representatives authorized to commit to decisions taken at the center. Representation thus presupposed strong state capacity, especially to tax. The revision amends our understanding of the historical paradigms guiding the literature, as well as the application of these paradigms to policies in the developing world. It suggests that societal demands for accountability and better governance are more likely to emerge in response to taxation already effectively applied. (shrink)

The author defends himself against an attack by Smith and Bopp on his views on smoking and taxation. The theory that, on the grounds of equity and/or fairness, smokers should pay via taxation on tobacco for the health care costs of treating smoking-related medical conditions is discussed and shown to be defective. It is argued that the fundamental mistake that Smith and Bopp make is to confuse and conflate the separate issues of whether particular taxes are fair and (...) whether they are justifiable. The conclusion is reached that an excise duty on tobacco is a good tax. It is a non-fair or even an unfair tax but it is justified on grounds other than fairness. (shrink)

Libertarians such as Nozick have argued that any redistributive tax scheme intended to achieve and maintain an egalitarian distributive pattern will violate self‐ownership. Furthermore, since self‐ownership is a central component of the idea of freedom, instituting an egalitarian distribution makes a society less rather than more free. All this turns on the claim, accepted by both libertarians and their critics, that a redistributive tax will violate self‐ownership because it must expropriate the fruit of a person’s labour. I show here that (...) there is no reason to accept this claim. The libertarian argument works only if the fruit of one’s labour must be understood to include everything that a person produces through his labour. But there is an alternative reading of the fruit of labour which identifies it with that subset of the total product of one’s labour which is due to his choices rather than luck. I argue that this reading is plausible, that there is nothing in the concept of self‐ownership which disallows it, and that if it is adopted, a redistributive tax need not automatically expropriate the fruit of one’s labour. Consequently there is no necessary inconsistency between redistributive taxation and self‐ownership, and so egalitarians can endorse the latter idea. (shrink)

The article considers a surprisingly resilient argument, going back to Adam Smith, for the fairness of proportionate taxation: that proportionate taxation represents the fair way to divide the surplus value produced by social cooperation among all of society's members. The article considers two recent variants on that argument, one by Richard Epstein in Takings and one by David Gauthier in Morals by Agreement. It concludes that the normative and empirical assumptions that underlie these, and all other variants, of (...) the argument are so implausible as to suggest the argument cannot be taken seriously as a defense of proportionate taxation. The article concludes by considering other possible explanations for the enduring attraction of proportionate taxation for political philosophers, particularly those with libertarian and quasi-libertarian leanings. Footnotes I am grateful to participants in faculty workshops at Vanderbilt, NYU, Virginia and Stanford Law Schools and the Qunnipiac College School of Law Conference on Law and Philosophy, as well as the anonymous outside readers for this journal, for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts. (shrink)

Among the different approaches to comparative tax law the one adopted here views comparative taxation as a descriptive tool conducive to tax design, a tax policy approach grounded in an evolutionary concept of tax change. Comparative taxation should be based on the functions of tax rules, with the goal of identifying similarities and differences between domestic tax systems, and should indicate potential alternative solutions to common policy issues by looking at how the basic elements of tax law-in-action interact. (...) The Article develops a theoretical framework for comparative tax research and uses examples drawn from a comparative study on the General Anti-Avoidance Rule in Canada and China, thus endeavouring to provide a crosscultural inquiry into tax transplants across the divide of Western and non-Western legal traditions. It is claimed here that a common model of tax systems should be adopted for the purpose of comparing them, and that legal theory is needed to pursue this task. The use of legal theory as a critique of municipal tax ideas is discussed in Part I, while Parts II and III deal with how legal theory can be used to describe the structure and evolution of tax systems by relying on concepts of legal hierarchies and chains of productions of tax rules. Part IV concludes with practical applications of legal theory in comparative tax research in respect to tax transplants and tax design issues by providing an explanatory framework of General Anti-Avoidance Rules in Canada and China. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the relationship of taxation to conceptions of the state and the community. The paper contends that public finance theorists have focused little attention on what, precisely, the state is and the role of subnational and supranational communities, even though understanding the state and these communities is essential for grasping how tax revenues are really distributed. The failure of public finance to do so is explainable by the powerful faith in the expertise of theorists and (...) bureaucrats and abstract models for social welfare, whether or not they work or would be agreed upon and implemented via the political process. (shrink)

Based on original research, this book marks an important advance in our understanding not only of the fiscal resources available to the English crown but also of the broader political culture of early Tudor England. An original study of taxation under the early Tudors. Explains the significance of the parliamentary lay taxation levied on individuals at this time. Demonstrates the value of the mass of personal tax assessments from this period to social, economic and local historians. Considers the (...) critical position that parliamentary taxation occupies in constitutional history. Sheds light on the political conditions and attitudes prevalent in England under the early Tudors. (shrink)

This book poses the question of: what is an ideal tax system, in a utopian society?What is taxation? It is "government-required sacrifice for the general welfare" imposed on the members of society.1 This clear and simple definition allows the author to explore hypothetical tax systems of utopian communities based on their corresponding moral principles, viewing more broadly than just pecuniary taxes. This is an enlightening exercise, and in this sense the book successfully stimulates the reader's mind. As the functional (...) context of taxation as defined above can take the form of nonmonetary rules and legal requirement of society, the author studies such "constructive" taxes in utopian societies, as... (shrink)

What constitutes a just tax system, and what are its moral foundations? Should a society's tax regime be designed to achieve a just distribution of wealth among its citizens, or should such a regime be designed to promote economic growth, rising standards of living, and increasing levels of employment? Are these two goals compatible or incompatible? Why should justice not require, or at least lead to, an increase in general prosperity? The essays in this volume examine the history of tax (...) policies and the normative principles that have informed the selection of various types of taxes and tax regimes; economic data to discover which tax policies lead to economic growth; particular theories of justice or property rights regarding the design of tax systems; and other essays propose specific tax reforms. Still others challenge traditional theories of taxation, offering new ways of understanding the fiscal relationship between governments and their citizens. (shrink)

This is part of a symposium on conscientious objection and religious freedom inspired by the US Catholic Church's claim that being forced to pay for health insurance that covers abortions (the effect of 'Obamacare')is the equivalent of forcing pacifists to fight. This article takes issue with this claim, and shows that while it would be unjust on democratic principles to force pacifists to fight, given their willingness to serve their country in other ways, there is no democratic objection to forcing (...) those who believe abortion to be murder to pay for health insurance coverage that includes abortion. (shrink)

The digital business model emerges as a new business model and gradually penetrates global industries, and countries are putting in place various digital strategies to support their development. As one of the important tools, taxation strategies are highly expected by countries, which not only describe the economic development pattern of a country but also show the digital leadership of a country. Some countries have introduced their own unilateral digital services tax to govern their digital business models, while others have (...) looked more to the global minimum tax, resulting in the current situation of both a unilateral digital services tax and a global minimum tax. However, both of them are of great reference value for the tax governance of digital business models. This paper compares the development history of digital tax strategies, categorizes, and analyzes the design logic of existing digital tax strategies, and takes China, one of the major digital economy countries, as an example to propose China’s digital tax strategies by drawing on international experience. We set an example for the design of digital economy tax strategies for countries around the world so that they can manage digital business models more efficiently. (shrink)

This essay represents an initial attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the systems of taxation described and/or mandated in the Hebrew Bible for various periods in ancient Israel. Beyond this preliminary descriptive task, a concentration here is upon the ethical evaluation of these taxation systems-evaluations both according to voices within the Hebrew Bible and according to the general criteria of freedom, equity, and distributive justice.

Debates concerning the taxation of prostitution have occurred in taxation law and in feminist literature. This article will integrate the case of Polok v. C.E.C. [2002] E.W.H.C, 156; [2002] S.T.C. 361, within the feminist legal canon. The case is discussed in the context of the argument of the European doctrine of fiscal neutrality, which dictates that, regardless of legality as amongst member states, if an activity is levied to V.A.T. in one member state, V.A.T. should be levied on (...) it in all member states. The doctrine of sovereignty accepts the possibility that the integrity of the V.A.T. system may be compromised by the levying of tax on illegal activities, in terms of the cooperation between tax and other aspects of the U.K.’s legal system. European law, feminist law, commodification and the marketplace are all considered within the context of these principles. The article also considers the place of Polok within standard feminist texts on prostitution. Different paradigms of prostitution define different aspects of prostitution as ‘problems’, and the article considers the implications within a feminist reconstruction of Polok of this. The article suggests that the challenge for a feminist analysis of Polok is to remain within the realm of European tax and competition law, and to render the perspective of the employees of the Polok taxpayers part of the substance of the deliberations of the case. (shrink)

Against the easy presupposition that such a thing as ‘democratic taxation’ not only exists but is also practicable, this paper points to the dilemma posed by what I call ‘quantifiable action.’ The essay develops an approach to theorizing the place of taxation in political theory that counters trends in fiscal sociology, political science, and liberal theory by highlighting how taxation presumably violates the requirement that self-government includes an absence of instrumental rationality on the part of democratic citizens. (...) For this reason, taxation presents a persistent problem for any concept of self-government, and may usefully be regarded as a technology of the self, conventional with democracy but at most ambiguous in its capability to be genuinely democratic, both theoretically and practically. (shrink)

National membership in itself aggravates global inequality, and plural membership does all the more so. A key mechanism by which that occurs are double taxation agreements that have the effect of favoring the global rich at the expense of the global poor. One egalitarian solution is a levy on multiple citizenship; another is redesigning double taxation agreements along prioritarian lines. Revising the OECD Model Tax Convention could be a feasible strategy for implementing such reforms.

Contemporary fiscal theorizing largely assimilates the activities of government to that of some choosing agent. This paper explores an alternative approach where government is assimilated to an emergent process of complex interaction, as a form of complex adaptive system. Within this alternative vision, governments are treated not as objects of intervention into a market economy but as arenas of organized participation within it. While recent developments in computational modeling are starting to provide tools for probing such a vision, the roots (...) of that vision can be traced back to the spontaneous order theorists of the 18th century. After sketching some contours of this alternative vision, the remainder of the paper explores some possible implications of this change in vision for mapping the relationship among taxation, prosperity, and justice. (shrink)

Distributive justice concerns the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. Opposition to higher rates of taxation, or even existing levels of taxation, are often made on grounds that such taxes are unfair burdens. This fairness argument can be given a number of further, more specific, formulations. Libertarians like Robert Nozick, for example, argue that taxation of income is unfair because it violates individual rights. Libertarians invoke an entitlement argument which presumes that the appropriate (...) baseline of property rights is pretax income. Others take issue with specific policies that are supported by taxation, such as welfare provisions, and argue that welfare reform is necessary as tax burdens are only legitimate when they satisfy some form of reciprocity thesis. In this review article I critically assess these arguments. The recent publication of The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes, The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, and The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship help shed some light on each of these different arguments that are often invoked in defence of tax cuts. These three books are a welcome addition to debates about distributive justice as they help bridge the gap between normative theory and public policy. In addition to raising doubts about the arguments that taxation is unfair, I examine themes that raise important questions about taxation and justice- private property, welfare reform and inheritance. An examination of these themes should make it clear that the real challenge facing justice-theorists is to take scarcity seriously and thus I emphasis the shortcomings of simply endorsing a ‘cost-blind’ rights-oriented conception of justice. Such a conception of justice currently dominates debates in normative political theory. (shrink)

Without question, the libertarian vision that envisions the use of state power to control force and fraud as a proper governmental function is one piece of any comprehensive political theory. But the hard-line libertarian goes astray in finding this the sole function of government or in thinking that the maintenance of order is possible without the imposition of taxes. Rather, the case for taxation rests on the familiar view that state coercion is sometimes necessary to overcome coordination problems. The (...) justification for a minimal system of taxation therefore is that it provides more in benefits for the individuals taxed than they lose in revenue. Stressing the benefit shows the mistake in Nozick’s famous observation that taxation is “on a par” with forced labor. And the proper understanding of the logic of taxation shows the defects in the series of steps in demoktesis—or “ownership of the people, by the people, and for the people”—that Nozick offers to show how difficult it is to draw any clear line between taxation and slavery. (shrink)

Utopias of the right and the left offer different justifications for taxation and propose different tax systems. Here, utopian proposals are analysed and evaluated from two perspectives: the "ideal" form of taxation (visible, equitable, and non-avoidable), and the democratic perspective (would people willingly consent to it?). Pre-taxation, favoured by left-wing utopias, raises problems from a democratic standpoint while right-wing utopias assert that taxation must be voluntary but are over-confident that "voluntary government financing" would provide a safety-net (...) for poorer members of society. In the conclusion, I argue that there is more at stake than the left/right dispute. The different attitudes to utopian taxation are indicative of markedly different conceptions of society. (shrink)

Substantially increased wealth inequality across the developed world has prompted many philosophers, economists and legal theorists to support comprehensive taxes on all forms of wealth. Proposals include levying taxes on the basis of total wealth, or alternatively the change in the value of capital holdings measured from year-to-year. This contrasts with most existing policies that tax capital assets at the point they are transferred from one beneficiary to another through sale or gifts. Are these tax reforms likely to meet their (...) aims of greater economic and political equality? We argue that these policies are likely to fail because, following neoclassical economic theory, they are based on a conception of capital as possessing given values in what amounts to a static equilibrium. This mischaracterizes the dynamic and subjective character of market economies and the contested value of real instantiations of capital goods. This makes them very difficult, often impossible, to value apart from at the point of voluntary transfer or profit realization. This means most taxes levied on a mark-to-market basis will be arbitrary and unfair. We propose alternative policies based on an income realization approach to taxation that are more likely to curb excessive wealth holdings. This includes introducing international treaties that prohibit preferential tax treatment for individual companies and specific sectors, and broadening the income tax base to include the imputed rent of personal housing wealth. (shrink)

This article examines John Stuart Mill’s influential proposal of how to tax wealth transfers. According to Mill, every person should be free to bequeath but not to receive bequest. Mill proposed an upper limit on how much each person could receive from wealth transfers. We discuss three objections against this proposal. The nonseparability objection holds that it is not possible to separate the freedom to give from the freedom to receive. The objection from private property holds that private property includes (...) an unlimited right to dispose of one’s assets and that this right is violated under Mill’s scheme. The objection from incentives holds that Mill’s scheme would have negative effects on people’s willingness to work and save. We argue that these objections can be met and that taxing bequeathed wealth according to Mill’s scheme is more just and more efficient compared to systems that rely less on wealth transfer taxation. (shrink)

This article asks how global tax reform relates to other emerging proposals for global economic reform. Specifically, I will try to contribute to the philosophical understanding of this relationship, by comparing global tax reform with a reform seeking to end dictators’ trading privileges in their peoples’ natural resources. Through this comparison, I intend to establish two main claims. At a concrete, practical level, I hope to show that reform of dictators’ resource privilege will be easier to initiate than legal reform (...) against global tax avoidance. Yet the heart of this essay is dedicated to supporting this claim through an argument at a more abstract, methodological level, which intends to make a broader contribution. This argument focuses on a key obstacle facing global taxation reforms, in the form of collective action problems. My key conceptual contribution lies in an attempt to distinguish between two forms of collective action situations, arguing that only one of them involves moral collective action problems, while in the other these problems dissolve. I seek to show that this fortunate case obtains for reform of dictators’ resource privilege, but not for global tax reform. (shrink)

Liberal egalitarians argue that the state is justified in taxing members of a political community to achieve distributive justice and ensure political equality and regime stability. This involves an uneasy compromise between equality and efficiency, a compromise that many argue has recently been undermined by the growth of unchecked wealth and income inequality. This essay argues that there is also a trade-off between selecting fair processes for taxation and aiming for particular distributive outcomes. The way people accumulate wealth, and (...) the way states tax often matters more than distributive outcomes. Policymakers must allow for the fair assessment of tax liabilities, avoid excessive enforcement costs and prevent political actors from using tax systems to achieve their partial ends. Recognizing these considerations justifies a systematic scheme of taxation while constraining the mechanisms for collecting revenue. I justify this position using comparative analysis, which I contrast with the conceptual intuitionistic approach associated with egalitarianism. (shrink)

Libertarians frequently complain that when a government taxes some of its citizens in order to help others, it is forcing them to behave altruistically. And obviously, we are meant to think, that use of force is morally objectionable. But what exactly makes taxation objectionable? One answer that many libertarians supply is that forcing some people to benefit others is wrong because it involves forced labour. The underlying thought seems to be that there is something morally troubling about making some (...) people work for others. In this article I scrutinize this thought. After describing two different kinds of taxation, I show how the libertarian argument about taxes depends on a distinction between posing a threat to other people and failing to help them. This brings us to the moral bedrock of the argument that taxation is forced labour, namely the idea that no one has a right to force you to do something unless you pose a threat to other people. The bulk of my article is devoted to showing that this idea cannot deliver the conclusion that libertarians want because it conflicts with other things that libertarians believe; and once you give up on that idea, it turns out that taxation to benefit others is not necessarily wrong by libertarian standards.Export citation. (shrink)

Against the easy presupposition that such a thing as ‘democratic taxation’ not only exists but is also practicable, this paper points to the dilemma posed by what I call ‘quantifiable action.’ The essay develops an approach to theorizing the place of taxation in political theory that counters trends in fiscal sociology, political science, and liberal theory by highlighting how taxation presumably violates the requirement that self-government includes an absence of instrumental rationality on the part of democratic citizens. (...) For this reason, taxation presents a persistent problem for any concept of self-government, and may usefully be regarded as a technology of the self, conventional with democracy but at most ambiguous in its capability to be genuinely democratic, both theoretically and practically. (shrink)

This article provides a survey of various topics in which questions about taxation feature alongside questions about justice. It seeks to argue mainly that taxation is a rather fragmentary domain of inquiry about which it is hard to envisage the development of views about what justice requires with respect to tax policy in general. Guided by this idea, the article attempts to highlight some aspects of taxation whose connection with justice has been under-explored by philosophers, as well (...) as to acquaint the reader with a sense of the more thoroughly researched areas. (shrink)

The following essay analyzes the arguments made by the principal academic proponent of income taxation, Columbia University economist E. R. A Seligman, after it was found to be unconstitutional in 1894. Seligman thought that the prevalent theory of just taxation, that it should be based on a natural right to one’s person and property, was wrong. The principal American philosophical proponent of this natural rights-based approach to taxation was the late Brown University philosopher and economist, Francis Wayland. (...) The essay analyzes the flaws in Seligman’s contention that there are no natural rights and, therefore, no natural property rights, so that taxation could not be justified by the benefits received for the protection of such rights. Instead, he claimed taxation should rest upon a person’s financial capacity. Since that capacity would be most accurately measured by net worth, we would have expected Seligman to endorse a proportionately assessed net worth tax (which was commonly used by the states in the nineteenth century). Alternatively, he argued for an income tax progressively assessed. This essay argues that since income is only a portion of financial capacity, his argument fails. (shrink)

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 59, Issue 3, Page 362-385, September 2021.

This article provides a survey of key topics on just inheritance taxation. It does so by first presenting the main arguments in the debate. Here, I distinguish between arguments in the academic literature and the various arguments which have proven important in the public debate. Secondly, I outline four influential proposals when it comes to how inheritance should be taxed. Finally, I examine a recent controversy and point towards a number of themes that have not been sufficiently discussed.

I defend my logic against the trenchant critique offered by Ellen Meiksins Wood and I take up the pertinent question, which she raises, of Locke's general attitude to the traditional constitution. I assume in this section, but will argue further in the next, that the mass of people were taxpayers in Locke's time. I begin, as ever, from Second Treatise ?158 and with Locke's preference for �just and lasting . . . just and undeniably equal measures�. Wood entertains the idea (...) that Locke thought that equal measures between taxpayers of different locality are of much greater importance than equal measures between taxpayers in all other respects. But this idea is surely mistaken, since Locke says nothing about rights which people have simply because of their locality and says much about the rights which all people have simply because they pay tax: it is these taxpayer rights which he depends upon even in his argument about localities. On the other hand, I think it is true that just measures for localities formed, in practical terms, the essential first step towards democratic changes: they still formed the essential first step in 1832, a fact which democrats of that time had to recognize, sometimes reluctantly. (shrink)

“Towards a Theory of Taxation” is a proper theme for an Englishman to take when giving a paper in America. After all it was from the absence of such a theory that the United States derived its existence. The Colonists felt strongly that there should be no taxation without representation, and George III was unable to explain to them convincingly why they should contribute to the cost of their defense. Since that time, understanding has not advanced much. In (...) Britain we still maintain the fiction that taxes are a voluntary gift to the Crown, and taxing statutes are given the Royal Assent with the special formula, “La Reine remercie ses bons sujets, accepte leur benevolence, et ainsi le veult” instead of the simple “La Reine le veult,” and in the United States taxes have regularly been levied on residents of the District of Columbia who until recently had no representation in Congress, and by the State of New York on those who worked but did not reside in the State, and so did not have a vote. Taxes are regularly levied, in America as elsewhere, on those who have no say on whether they should be levied or how they should be spent. I am taxed by the Federal Government on my American earnings and by state governments on my American spending, but I should be hard put to it to make out that it was unjust. Florida is wondering whether to follow California in taxing multinational corporations on their world-wide earnings. (shrink)

The need to use green taxes to protect the environment is urgent, particularly because of climate change, and can be justified via sound deontological and consequence-based arguments. One very influential criticism of such taxes, however, claims that they disproportionately burden relatively poor individuals who tend to contribute to environmental problems far less than wealthier persons. Critics can also object that because of the link between economic inequality and environmental destruction it is preferable to adopt environmental measures that impede rather than (...) accelerate the growth of inequality. Defusing these criticisms, the article argues that various types of green fiscal reform can both avoid disproportionally burdening those who pollute least and reduce the economic inequalities that income taxes leave behind, and slow down the collectively self-defeating consumption arms race that currently besets so many affluent societies. Global progressive environmental taxation is also a possibility, and even easier to justify. (shrink)

We argue that for theorists with a post-institutional conception of property, e.g., Rawlsians, there is no principled reason to limit the domain of distributive justice to tax and transfer-both tax policy and the rules of the private law are constructed in service to distributive aims. Such theorists cannot maintain a commitment to a normative conception of private law independent of their overarching distributive principles. In contrast, theorists with a pre-institutional conception of property can derive the private law from sectors of (...) morality independent of distributive justice. Nevertheless, we argue, this does not entail that the private law, for pre-institutional theorists, must be sanitized of equity-oriented values. Non-libertarian pre-institutional theorists holding principled commitments to equity-oriented values are free to invoke either tax and transfer or the rules of the private law to attain them. Footnotesa We are grateful to John G. Bennett, Harry Dolan, Edward McCaffery, and Ellen Frankel Paul for written comments on a previous draft and to Eric Mack, Fred Miller, Jeffrey Paul, A. John Simmons, and the other contributors to this volume for valuable discussions. (shrink)