Taxation: The Lost History Dwyer, Terence
The American journal of economics and sociology,
10/2014, Letnik:
73, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Regular, periodic taxation is a function of modern government, a practice that arose only because the rent of land and natural resources was transformed from the traditional source of public revenue ...in the Middle Ages to private property, starting in the 17th century. In the earlier era, taxes (special exactions on ordinary income and daily necessities) were imposed only under unusual circumstances, usually to fight wars. The French Physiocrats and their student, Adam Smith, proposed that the best form of modern taxation would be based on the same principle as the medieval system—a fee derived entirely from surpluses, not imposed as a burden on production. This was actually what Adam Smith meant by “ability to pay.” Smith's sophisticated understanding of economic rent was, however, simplified and distorted by numerous economists throughout the 19th century, who buried the concept under layers of obfuscation. In particular, the substitution of “Paretian rent” for “Ricardian rent” committed the fallacy of composition by shifting rent from a social concept to a private, unit‐level concept, which caused social surplus to simply “disappear.” Bringing this “lost history” to light permits us to re‐evaluate how modern societies might benefit from Smith's physiocratic concept of taxation. This work not only traces debates about rent—for example, whether rent arises from risk‐taking, or whether a tax on rent raises commodity prices—but also discusses the practical benefits of taxing it today.
For centuries before the Great Divergence the priorities of Eurasian states had not been with the specification and protection of property rights, the reduction of transaction costs, the extension of ...markets, the facilitation of competition or any of the other institutional prerequisites specified for Smithian growth in premodern economies. Their overwhelming concern seems to have been with their own formation in contexts of intensifying geopolitical and imperial violence, attacks from nomads, as well as internal rivalries for control over resources with warlords, local gentries, aristocratic magnates, urban oligarchies, ecclesiastical prelates, and other contenders of power within their own borders. Some comprehension of when, how, and why some states constructed the kind of autonomous, centralized, and effective governments with administrative capacities required to support and sustain institution required for long-term economic growth seems to be a precondition for the initiation of a discourse for a global history of state formation. The aims of this paper are to survey the modern secondary literature covering both historical and theoretical approaches concerned with connections between the formation and constitutions of states and the construction of institutions for the assessment and collection of taxes. For global history its conclusion is that in retrospect the extensive territorial empires in both the Orient (and the Occident?) look suboptimal as political units for the promotion of economic growth.
This essay argues for the sympathetic realism of nineteenth-century realist fiction, as evidenced in its formal design and, for present purposes, in the development of sympathetic metonymies in ...particular. In order to more fully appreciate the distinct metonymies of writers like George Eliot and Charles Dickens, the essay first distinguishes between empathy and sympathy, aligning the former with the trope of metaphor and the formal protocols of poetry (especially modernist and symbolist) and the latter with the trope of metonymy and the formal protocols of narrative, especially realist narrative. Doing so highlights the unique uses to which the nineteenth-century realists put metonymy and sympathy to work, in tandem, in order to produce sympathetic realist fiction.
Adam Smith's account of the moral sentiments resonates with modern themes in evolutionary biology. His distinction between our reasons and the reasons for these reasons recalls the evolutionary ...biologist's emphasis on different levels of causal explanation. In this view, the proximate goals of our psychological motivations are different in kind from the ultimate reasons why we have evolved these motivations. Sympathy was central to Smith's account of the moral sentiments and he discussed two principal forms of sympathy. Second-person sympathy is putting ourselves in another person's situation to see the world from their perspective. Third-person sympathy is viewing ourselves from the perspective of an impartial observer. In recent discussions of the evolution of cooperation, second-person sympathy facilitates cooperation via direct reciprocity,
I behave well by you so that you will behave well by me, whereas third-person sympathy facilitates cooperation via indirect reciprocity,
I behave well by you so that others will behave well by me.
This paper is both a response to the four reviewers in a special symposium on my book Adam Smith’s Pluralism and a substantive discussion of philosophy of education. In it, I introduce what I call ...“the educative critique,” a mode of analysis similar to Marxist, feminist, or postcolonial critiques, but focusing on the educative role of a text. I argue that choosing education as a theme is itself a solution to interpretive difficulties, not an add-on that only concerns pedagogues and policy-makers.
