Economics Dictionary of ArgumentsHome
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| Taxation: Taxation is the process by which governments collect money from individuals and businesses to fund public expenditures and services. Levied based on income, profits, property, or goods and services, taxes serve as a primary revenue source for governments, enabling the provision of infrastructure, healthcare, education, defense, and other public services. See also Government budget._____________Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments. | |||
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Minimal State on Taxation - Dictionary of Arguments
Gaus I 121 Taxation/Minimal state/Gaus/Mack: The market anarchist and the minimal statist share a crucial premise, namely, that the value to individuals of their receipt of protective services will motivate almost everyone to pay for those services. >Market anarchism, >Minimal state/Gaus, >Society/Minimal state, >Social googds/Minimal state, >Markets/Minimal state. Gaus I 122 Govvernment/Liberalism: Liberal tradition thesis: Government is justified largely on the grounds of market failure: although the market generally provides for both a free and a prosperous society, it is not perfect (Buchanan, 1975(1): ch. 3). Thus the classical liberal political economists of the nineteenth century (...) insisted that the market depended on a political framework that it could not itself provide; the market could not itself provide a coercive public apparatus for the enforcement of property rights and contracts (Robbins, 1961(2); Gaus, 1983(3)). Minimal stateVsLiberalism/market anarchismVsLiberalism: Market anarchists and minimal statists may challenge these widely held views. They may argue, 1) first, that coercive state provision of public goods tends to oversupply them, so that it has its own offsetting inefficiencies (Buchanan and Tullock, 1965(4)). And, 2) they may insist, market and contractual arrangements can be envisioned that will yield funding for public goods - especially rights-protective public goods - that is not significantly suboptimal (Buchanan, 1975(1); Narveson, 1988(5): 238). >Social goods/Minimal state. Minimal stateVsMarket anarchism/Gaus: Advocates of the minimal state that depict it as a natural monopoly seem better positioned to make this argument than are market anarchists. Such a minimal state will, to a considerable degree, be able to tie its clients’ purchase of non-public aspects of rights protection to their also paying for public aspects of rights protection. >Society/Minimal state, >Individuals/Minimal state, >Minimal state/Gaus. Minimal state theoryVsLiberalism: If crucial public goods would be significantly underproduced in the absence of individuals being required to contribute to their funding (and requiring such contributions would yield a satisfactory level of the production of those public goods), members of the liberty tradition are faced with a hard choice. On the one hand, they may stick with unreconstructed versions of that tradition’s basic norms at the cost of precluding the mutual benefits associated with those public goods (while no doubt insisting that the public good characteristics of law enforcement are typically overestimated, and that most of what the state should do is to provide essentially privately consumed protection services). Or, on the other hand, they may legitimate the coercive takings that are, by hypothesis, needed to fund those valuable goods at the cost of weakening at least some of those central norms. Social goods: How great will be the doctrinal cost of [a] weakening of liberty tradition norms? (>Social goods/Minmall state). We can identify three approaches to justification: (1) that coercive public goods provision is fully consistent with the basic commitments of the liberty tradition; (2) that the goods at stake justify overriding liberty; and (3) that such provision is benign paternalism. Gaus I 123 Small state: If the arguments that support the Taxing Minimal State are extended to legitimize coercive takings for the production of other sorts of public goods (for example, the public good of mosquito abatement) or to correct other types of market failure (say, the regulation of natural monopolies), then we have gone beyond the Minimal State to the Small State. The more types of goods and services that are accepted as significantly public and, hence, as justifiably financed through taxation, the larger the Small State becomes. 1. Buchanan, James M. (1975) The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2. Robbins, Lord (1961) The Theory of Economic Policy in Classical English Political Economy. London: Macmillan. 3. Gaus, Gerald F. (1983) ‘Public and private interests in liberal political economy, old and new’. In S. I. Benn and G. F. Gaus, eds, Public and Private in Social Life. New York: St Martins, 183–222. 4. Buchanan, James M. and Gordon Tullock (1965) The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. 5. Narveson, Jan (1988) The Libertarian Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mack, Eric and Gaus, Gerald F. 2004. „Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism: The Liberty Tradition.“ In: Gaus, Gerald F. & Kukathas, Chandran 2004. Handbook of Political Theory. SAGE Publications. >Tax Avoidance, >Tax Competition, >Tax Compliance, >Tax Evasion, >Tax Havens, >Tax Incidence, >Tax Loopholes, >Tax System, >Optimal tax rate._____________Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition. |
Minimal State Gaus I Gerald F. Gaus Chandran Kukathas Handbook of Political Theory London 2004 |
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