ESSAY CAN TAXES BE FAIR? SHOULD THEY BE? William S. Peirce W e hear references to fairness and taxation all the time. The president calls on the rich to pay their fair share. Organizations actively promote the "fair tax." If you study public finance, you will hear much about specific versions of fairness in the form of horizontal equity (that equals should be treated equally) and vertical equity (that unequals should be treated in an appropriately unequal way). Although vertical equity has some echoes of Aristotle (Ethics 5.3), the juxtaposition of the concepts of fairness and taxation is a recent phenomenon, beginning in the late eighteenth century-the intellectual climate that gave us Adam Smith, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution. That climate was, of course, the culmination of centuries of development of parliamentary control of the sovereign, as well as the evolution of Judeo-Christian concepts of natural law and individual rights. My topic is already impossibly large, but I want to sketch out an earlier view of taxation that explains why the pre-Enlightenment William S. Peirce is professor emeritus of economics at Case Western Reserve University. 37