Tag Archives: Progressive taxation

Marx was Right—Partly

According to René Scheu in the NZZ.

Die zehn «Massregeln» für die «fortgeschrittensten Länder», in die das «Kommunistische Manifest» mündet, lesen sich aus heutiger Sicht wie ein sozialdemokratisches Programm, dem auch viele softbürgerliche Politiker sogleich vorbehaltlos zustimmen würden. Starke Progressivsteuer, Geldmonopol der Nationalbank, Zentralisation des Transportwesens, nationale Industriepolitik, Verstaatlichung des Bauernstandes und unentgeltliche Erziehung aller Kinder gehören längst zu den Errungenschaften avancierter Wohlfahrtsstaaten – damit sind wohlgemerkt bereits sechs der zehn Punkte erfüllt….

Marxens Kritik zielt nicht auf den Unternehmer und Eigentümer als solchen, sondern auf den Bourgeois, der auf der faulen Haut liegt und auf Kosten anderer lebt. …

Der Verfasser des «Manifests» ist kein Moralist, sondern ein geradezu passionierter Ökonomist der ersten Stunde.

And according to The Economist:

  • Modern “capitalism” often reduces to rent seeking: The Economist mentions “corporate bureaucrats”, “management consultants”, “professional board members”, “retired politicians (who spend their twilight years sponging off firms they once regulated)”.
  • It is global (WEF).
  • It has a tendency towards monopoly (Google, Facebook, …).
  • It yields an army of casual workers (gig economy).
  • But Marx overestimated poverty and underestimated reform.

Isaiah Berlin: Karl Marx and his Environment.

Taxing the Rich

In Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe, Kenneth Scheme and David Stasavage

explore the intellectual and political debates surrounding the taxation of the wealthy while also providing the most detailed examination to date of when taxes have been levied against the rich and when they haven’t. Fairness in debates about taxing the rich has depended on different views of what it means to treat people as equals and whether taxing the rich advances or undermines this norm. Scheve and Stasavage argue that governments don’t tax the rich just because inequality is high or rising—they do it when people believe that such taxes compensate for the state unfairly privileging the wealthy. Progressive taxation saw its heyday in the twentieth century, when compensatory arguments for taxing the rich focused on unequal sacrifice in mass warfare. Today, as technology gives rise to wars of more limited mobilization, such arguments are no longer persuasive. [Text from the Publisher’s website.]

Summary by Bryan Caplan:

Democracies have no inherent tendency to “soak the rich.”

Instead, democracies adopt high, progressive taxation in the face of compelling “compensatory” arguments for redistribution.

Only major wars of mass mobilization make compensatory arguments compelling.

Modern military technology has made majors wars of mass mobilization obsolete.

Therefore, tax the rich policies are a thing of the past, at least for developed countries.  They won’t be coming back