Why the Legal System is Not Necessarily Less Efficient than the Income Tax In Redistributing Income

Dan Usher ()
Additional contact information
Dan Usher: Queen's University

No 1210, Working Papers from Queen's University, Department of Economics

Abstract: A common, though by no means universally-accepted doctrine among practitioners of law and economics is that redistribution is no business of the law. This efficiency-only doctrine is not that redistribution is unworthy as a social objective, but that any given benefit to the poor is attainable at a lower cost to the rich through taxation than through the choice of legal rules. The rationale for the efficiency-only doctrine is that redistributive law creates a double distortion: an initial distortion arising from redistribution pre se, through taxation or through law, and an additional distortion all its own. The efficiency-only doctrine is sometimes valid, but is far narrower than its advocates would seem to suggest, and is inapplicable to most of what is commonly thought of as redistributive law. Redistribution is best supplied by a balance of law and taxation.

Keywords: Law; Income Tax; Redistribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K10 K34 H21 H26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law, nep-pbe, nep-pke and nep-reg
Date: 2009-06

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.queensu.ca/working_papers/papers/qed_wp_1210.pdf First version 2009 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:qed:wpaper:1210

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Queen's University, Department of Economics
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Babcock ().