Modern Age - Fall 2015 - 59

CAN TAXES BE FAIR? SHOULD THEY BE?

To quote Frank Chodorov, "Taxation is highwaymanry made
respectable by custom, thievery made moral by law," while the LVT
just allows the community to reclaim the value it has produced.18

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Mancur Olson, Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships
(New York: Basic Books, 2000), 3-12.
Pope Gregory (circa 600) as quoted by Charles Adams, For Good and Evil: The Impact of
Taxes on the Course of Civilization (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1993), 137. Hereafter,
citations to Adams's rich collection will be parenthetical within the text.
Guido Alfani and Roberta Frigeni, "Inequality (Un)perceived: The Emergence of a Discourse on Economic Inequality from the Middle Ages to the Age of Revolutions," Dondena Working Papers (Milan: Carlo F. Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics,
Univ. Bocconi), no. 58, July 2013.
The most famous historian of, and advocate for, the income tax was E. R. A. Seligman,
The Income Tax: A Study of the History, Theory, and Practice of Income Taxation at Home
and Abroad, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 132, 216, 353. Adams, For Good and
Evil, 347, adds detail. Joseph A. Pechman, Comparative Tax Systems: Europe, Canada, and
Japan (Arlington, VA: Tax Analysts, 1987), 298, provides international comparisons.
Alexandra Wagner Lough, "The Federal Income Tax and the Georgist Movement," lecture presented to the meeting of the Council of Georgist Organizations, Pittsburgh, PA,
August 8, 2013.
Knut Wicksell, "A New Principle of Just Taxation" (1896). Reprinted along with some of
the succeeding discussion in Richard A. Musgrave and Alan T. Peacock, Classics in the
Theory of Public Finance (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967).
This is the concept underlying the "flat tax" advocated by Robert E. Hall and Alvin
Rabushka in Low Tax, Simple Tax, Flat Tax (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983).
Lionel Robbins, The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy (London: Macmillan, 1965), supplies the evidence for this assertion.
George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (New
York: Brentano's Publishers, 1928), 470.
T. W. Hutchison, A Review of Economic Doctrines, 1870-1929 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1962), 52.
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848), 5.1.2.
The analysis was worked out by Jacob Arnold Cohen-Stuart, "On Progressive Taxation"
(1889), reprinted in Musgrave and Peacock. A gentle introduction to the whole body of
literature is Walter J. Blum and Harry Kalven Jr., The Uneasy Case for Progressive Taxation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). Richard A. Musgrave, The Theory of Public
Finance (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 98-102, clarifies the essential points.
Seligman examined various definitions of income. The most engaging treatment is by
Henry C. Simons, Federal Tax Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950).
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Modern Age - Fall 2015

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