The Apportionment of ‘Direct Taxes’: Are Consumption Taxes Constitutional?

In debates about reorienting the American revenue system, nearly everyone assumes the Constitution is irrelevant. With few exceptions, the tax provisions in the original Constitution - particularly the direct-tax apportionment rule and the uniformity rule - have been interpreted to be paper tigers. And in only one major case has the Sixteenth Amendment, which excepts taxes on incomes from apportionment, been held to limit congressional power. S Rejecting conventional wisdom, this Article argues that some consumption taxes would violate constitutional norms. The Article focuses on the requirement that “direct taxes” be apportioned among the states on the basis of population. From a study of founding-era debates, the Article concludes that “direct taxes” has a meaning with contemporary relevance: Direct taxes are not duties, imposts, or excises, and they are imposed by the national government on individuals rather than on the states. Along the way, the Article criticizes Hylton v. United States, in which the Supreme Court considered the meaning of “direct taxes” in 1796, and argues that the Court did better in Pollock, which struck down the 1894 income tax. Applying this historical understanding, the Article examines several proposed national consumption taxes. It concludes that a value-added or sales tax would be an indirect tax not subject to apportionment, but that the so-called “flat tax” or the unlimited savings allowance (USA) tax would be a direct tax. Moreover, the Article argues that such a direct-consumption tax should not escape apportionment as a “tax on incomes” under the Sixteenth Amendment

The Taxing Power, the Sixteenth Amendment, and the Meaning of ‘Incomes,’

This article examines the debates leading to the enactment of the 1894 income tax, which the Supreme Court struck down in 1895, and the Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, and concludes that an income tax and a tax on consumption were understood to be fundamentally different types of taxes. The author argues that the term “taxes on incomes” in the Sixteenth Amendment should be interpreted with that distinction in mind. The Amendment was intended to make a “tax on incomes,” and only a tax on incomes, possible without the apportionment that would otherwise be required for a direct tax. For a tax that is direct but is not a tax on incomes, however, a category that includes direct-consumption taxes, the apportionment rule remains in effect

Immersion Into Noise

Joseph Nechvatal's Immersion Into Noise investigates multiple aspects of cultural noise by applying our audio understanding of noise to the visual, architectual and cognative domains. The author takes the reader through phenomenal aspects of the art of noise into algorithmic and network contexts, beginning in the Abside of the Grotte de Lascaux

Immersion Into Noise

Joseph Nechvatal's Immersion Into Noise investigates multiple aspects of cultural noise by applying our audio understanding of noise to the visual, architectual and cognative domains. The author takes the reader through phenomenal aspects of the art of noise into algorithmic and network contexts, beginning in the Abside of the Grotte de Lascaux

Art, art history and systems-theory

Foreword on p.

Towards a Unified Theory of Beauty

The Pythagorean tradition dominates the understanding of beauty up until the end of the 18th Century. According to this tradition, the experience of beauty is stimulated by certain relations perceived to be between an object/construct's elements. As such, the object of the experience of beauty is indeterminate: it has neither a determinate perceptual analogue (one cannot simply identify beauty as you can a straight line or a particular shape) nor a determinate concept (there are no necessary and sufficient conditions for beauty at the semantic level). By the 13th Century in the West, the pleasure experienced in beauty is characterized as disinterested. Yet, on the basis that all cultural manifestations of the pythagorean theory of beauty recognize that judgments of beauty are genuine judgments, we would want to say that judgments of beauty are lawful. In addition, from ancient times, up until after Kant, philosophers of beauty within this tradition recognize two kinds of beauty: a universal, unchanging beauty coexisting with a relative, dynamic beauty. These two kinds of beauty and the tensions discussed above, are reconciled and dissolved respectively, according to the metaphysical/religious commitments of the particular author. As yet, however, these features of beauty have not been reconciled within a physicalist worldview. This is what I set out to do

The epistemology of St. Thomas Aquinas with special reference to Summa Theologiae 1a q84

Attempts by several commentators to map categories from contemporary epistemology onto Aquinas' theory of knowledge, and their attempts to give an account of his theory of perceptual knowledge constitute the background to this thesis. In the opening chapter we outline Aquinas' theory of knowledge, we see that it is a complex theory, dealing not only with human knowledge, but also with divine and angelic knowledge. We note Aquinas' application of the doctrine of analogy to the concept of knowledge. Despite the radical differences between the Creator's knowledge and that of His creatures there are common elements: the grasp of being as true and the assimilation of the knower to the thing known. In the case of angelic knowledge we note its innateness and immediacy. In our analysis of human knowledge we see the consequences of what Aquinas refers to as the dimness of the human intellect, both in terms of how humans know and what they can know. In particular we highlight the fragmented nature of human knowledge, noting the absence of any mention of perceptual knowledge in Aquinas' account of human knowledge. In chapter two we sketch the various contemporary epistemological categories that philosophers have sought to map onto Aquinas' epistemology. Pollock's theory of Direct Realism is sketched as an example of internalism. Foundationalism is discussed with reference to Chisholm. Two examples of externalism and reliabilism are given: Nozick's tracking and Goldman's reliabilism. We also discuss the foundationalist externalism of Plantinga. We then outline how these various labels have been applied to Aquinas' theory of knowledge. We begin with MacDonald's foundationalist and internalist interpretation, noting his description of perceptual knowledge as secondary scientia. We then consider Ross' attempt to describe perceptual knowledge in terms of faith. In contrast to these we describe Stump's externalist reading of Aquinas, noting that she finds support in the work of Norman Kretzmann