Inequality and Taxation in a Market Democracy

Paolo Liberati and Massimo Paradiso ()
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Massimo Paradiso: University of Bari, Department of Economics and Finance

Chapter Chapter 3 in Rebuilding Fiscal Democracy, 2025, pp 43-77 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract In contemporary public economics, equity has no independent normative value; it is subsumed under the pursuit of allocative efficiency. Likewise, questions of fairness in taxation are treated as unrelated to the purposes for which tax revenues are ultimately spent. This conceptual separation is a defining feature of market democracy, which fosters a kind of fiscal myopia: a limited view of the public sector’s role as primarily one of preserving and stabilizing the property relations intrinsic to a capitalist economy. This has shaped tax policies that tend to prioritize ex post redistribution measures—as ‘tax the rich’ manifestos—rather than intervening ex ante to influence or modify the underlying processes of income and wealth accumulation. Such a view betrays the fiscal contract and the comprehensive conception of the fiscal system, in which progressivity is not confined to the structure of taxation alone, but understood more broadly as the progressivity of public expenditures aimed at ensuring the stable provision of public goods in order to achieve equality of opportunity.

Keywords: Market democracy; Inequality; Wealth taxation; Dual income tax; Tax havens (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-032-04859-2_3

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-04859-2_3

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