Legitimate Tax Structures: Lessons from the Past

Colombatto Enrico ()
Additional contact information
Colombatto Enrico: Università di Torino, Turin, Italy

Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines, 2023, vol. 29, issue 1, 1-20

Abstract: Today’s views and analyses about taxation are dominated by the social-welfare approach based on various categories of utilitarianism, most notably those developed by the optimal-tax literature. By contrast, this paper focuses on the ethical foundations of taxation and analyses a tradition that harks back to the 17th century. In particular, we emphasise the notion of legitimate taxation in the history of economic thought from the libertarian, the classical-liberal and socialist perspectives. By means of this very notion, we define the essence of a desirable tax structure and draw conclusions in regard to today’s tax policies.

Keywords: taxation; justice; fairness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/jeeh-2022-0008 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:jeehcn:v:29:y:2023:i:1:p:1-20:n:6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/jeeh/html

DOI: 10.1515/jeeh-2022-0008

Access Statistics for this article

Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines is currently edited by Pierre Garello

More articles in Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().