When reading a new book Political Philosophy and Taxation, I became curious about how my fellow political philosophers would approach the topic.
To test my assumptions about this I set up a poll - thanks to those who responded!
I will set out the results below.
Method
I created an anonymous poll with two questions:
- What is your own preferred approach to the issue of taxation? [Multiple choice with an optional write-in option]
- What do you think would be the dominant approach to taxation among political philosophers generally? [checkbox of the same options as the above, with a write-in option]
I thought asking these two questions was a good idea as each of these questions on their own might not have been informative and comparing the two might prove useful (it did).
On reflection, perhaps I should have asked a third question to check what sort of level the respondent was working at, since the survey was open to anyone.
I spread awareness of the poll in two ways:
- via a tweet. I didn't have that many followers (around 450), but I requested (begged) retweets from fellow political philosophers and some specialist publishers, academic centres and professional associations. I focused on accounts with a reasonable amount of followers (but not too many) who were likely to also be political philosophers.
The tweet was retweeted by 20 account and received 6,000 'impressions.' Apparently over 100 clicked on the link via twitter which is a lot fewer than took the survey. - via the PHILOS-L email list. This is an email list for philosophers with 13,000 members. Many of these will be moral and political philosophers.
The number of people taking the survey had a big rise after I posted on PHILOS-L and an even bigger rise (the most substantial) in the 24 hours after it was included in the digest.
Results
I received 79 responses in 5 days, though one was blank so it says 78 below.
Response to Q1
A third of the responses were for "Liberal Egalitarian/Contractualist (e.g. Rawls, Dworkin, Barry, Scanlon)"
Just behind was 30% who went for "Socialist/Marxist/Social democratic (e.g. Marx, Bernstein)"
15% went for Welfare-maximizing options, though they split with only 1/3 of those being on the economic right.
10% gave economically right-leaning responses (classical liberal or libertarian) with a further 2% going for Conservative.
5% went for the broad participatory communitarian or democratic common good option that I offered.
5% went for other radical options, including a write-in answer of 'anarchist' (which I assume must be left-wing anarchist given the anarcho-capitalist option offered)
Response to Q2
The response to the second question proved to be a useful check on the first, and also telling about what political philosophers think of their fellows.
69% of the responses were for "Liberal Egalitarian/Contractualist (e.g. Rawls, Dworkin, Barry, Scanlon)." This is the approach that I take, and I assumed it would be the most common one. It is clearly considered the 'mainstream' approach by members of the profession.
I didn't find any obvious patterns in comparing the way that individuals responded to q1 & q2 directly.
Overall conclusions
As mentioned I undertook this for my own curiosity, but several people contacted me to express interest in the results and I can see why!
The question is essentially 'how do political philosophers approach the topic of distributive justice.'
It is very interesting for us to check the theoretical/political leanings of the profession and find out what others in the profession think about the leanings of the profession as well.
The responses were roughly what I expected, with socialist/social democratic being more popular than I expected. There are of course many overlaps between the options. For instance, liberal egalitarianism can overlap somewhat with social democracy (particularly with regard to Rawls and Piketty).
The responses prove my thesis that free market desert theories (0%) and libertarianism (1%) are very much outside the mainstream (I would say correctly so!).
I would be happy to get your thoughts on these results in the comments below!
3 comments:
For reasons which I do not understand, I keep receiving emails from Academia, recommending your paper "Ethical Taxation: Progressivity, Efficiency and Hourly Averaging", written in 2015.
Having followed this topic for the best part of 50 years, I have yet to find a coherent moral argument for the taxation of earned wages in any shape or form.
I have also yet to find any coherent arguments against the charges that such taxation is damaging and inefficient, that these taxes ultimately come out of land rental value and that they amplify the effects of geographical disadvantage, thereby aggravating the world wide problem of regional economic imbalances to be found in most countries of the world.
Good to hear from you, Physiocrat! It has been a while.
I think you just look at everything through a particular classical economic lens in which land is a special category and that that distorts your vision. (I'm sure those with other economic lenses are distorted in different ways.)
In terms of the arguments, if you start with the premise that the government can tax what it likes then the next question is what tax base is the best. Income/consumption is the main part of GDP so taxing that provides a much greater revenue than a land tax would. People don't stop working because they are taxed on their income, so it clearly works.
All a land tax would do would be to nullify the value of land so it would be a wealth tax on land owners.
How much would the introduction of a land tax affect the share price of British Land or Taylor Wimpey vs. Google or Apple?
Land is indeed a special category. We ignore that at our peril. Nobody made it. "Land" includes natural resources such as fish in the sea, mineral deposits in the ground and radio spectrum. In the case of the latter, it is accepted that their value should not be privatised. This is why we have had auctions of exploration rights and radio spectrum.
"if you start with the premise that the government can tax what it likes..."
Why should anyone start with that premise? It could, for example, send out requests for money at random, or count people's windows. Why not?
"then the next question is what tax base is the best."
Best for whom? What are the criteria for good-ness?
"Income/consumption is the main part of GDP"
How much income consists of land rent, buried in categories such as profits, dividends and imputed income?
"so taxing that provides a much greater revenue than a land tax would."
All taxes are ultimately at the expense of land rental value. They are competing with each other for a cut from the same revenue stream.
Your comment also ignores the realities of churning (taxpayers' money paid to people to pay taxes with eg NHS workers), deadweight losses, associated welfare costs, and the costs of administration and compliance. We have an army of bureaucrats, and armies of accountants and lawyers - some of the best brains in the country waste their lives in the tax game when they could have been producing something useful.
"People don't stop working because they are taxed on their income"
That is exactly what they do, at the margin. Tax is the deal-breaker. A lot of people conclude that it isn't worth working if they already have enough to get by with.
"so it clearly works"
It doesn't. There are huge deadweight losses. The retail sector is reduced by at least 0.5% for each 1% of VAT. That was the IFS assumption.
"All a land tax would do would be to nullify the value of land so it would be a wealth tax on land owners."
Why is that a bad thing? Landowners as such produce nothing. They collect a value created by everyone else. Reducing land values means that everyone would be able to afford business premises and somewhere to live. Is that bad?
"How much would the introduction of a land tax affect the share price of British Land or Taylor Wimpey vs. Google or Apple?"
The technical giants make their fortunes from IPR monopolies given away too cheaply. This is another issue that needs to be addressed. Ultimately, though, the profits from their activities end up in land values in Silicon Value and the posh areas of Surrey.
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