Tax uniformity as a requirement of justice

Barbara Fried takes the view that uniform taxation-that is, a single rate applicable to all income levels-cannot be defended on any grounds of justice. She goes further by saying that, of all possible rate structures, it might be "the hardest one"? to ground in "a"? theory of fairness. Using the contractarian-constitutional perspective advanced by John Rawls and James Buchanan, this article argues that tax uniformity can be seen as a requirement of justice. After modelling how the political world realistically decides to distribute tax shares (self-interested parties act under a majority constraint), I show how the uniformity principle could emerge from the constitutional contract. In other words, rational individuals would choose uniformity as a procedural constraint under a "veil of uncertainty"?; that is, with limited knowledge regarding their positions under the future application of the rule. Moreover, I elucidate how the uniformity requirement integrates generalized criteria of fairness and efficiency into fiscal politics as it precludes fiscal exploitation and constrains majorities, and their most influential subgroups, to opt for policies in the direction of the Pareto frontier, and as such promotes outcomes acceptable to all participants

The Case against Tax Subsidies in Innovation Policy

Until recently, intellectual property (IP) scholars agreed that patents were the prime innovation tool to aggregate decentralized information. This case for the property approach, which argues patents are appropriate when information about possible inventions and the social value of inventions are hidden, is now also under pressure in the literature. IP scholars argue that tax subsidies for firms that invest in research and development (R&D) replicate many of the merits of the patent system under conditions of asymmetric information. Based on developments in institutional economics, this Article shows that tax subsidies are not market-set incentives and are not optimal tools for aggregating decentralized information. Tax subsidies target specific investments ex ante in relation to the market process when there is little information on the costs of specific projects or their social value. Governments lack the knowledge required to decide which projects to support and to calibrate the subsidies according to their social value. Comparatively, a patent system is better equipped for the decentralized nature of information. Moreover, it relies on entrepreneurs and inventors to decide which new projects to pursue and on consumers within the marketplace to evaluate the value of these innovations. Based on public choice theory, the Article also argues tax subsidies for innovation are particularly vulnerable to rent-seeking, leading tax dollars to be captured by the politically powerful-not by disruptive newcomers. From an institutional perspective, a more sensible innovation policy lies in simplifying, stabilizing, and generalizing the rules of property and contract that set the market process in motion

Ostrom, Floods, and Mismatched Property Rights

How societies can cope with flood risk along coasts and riverbanks is a critical theoretical and empirical problem – particularly in the wake of anthropogenic climate change and the increased severity of floods. An example of this challenge is the growing costs of publicly-funded flood defense in Britain and popular outcries during the regular occasions that the British government fails to protect property and land during heavy rains. Traditional approaches to institutional analysis suggest that flood management is either a public good that only the government is competent to provide or a private good to which individual landowners are ultimately responsible for supplying. We argue that an important cause of failure in flood management is mismatched property rights. This is where the scale of natural events and resources fail to align with the scale of human activities, responsibility and ownership. Moreover, the spatial dimensions of floods mean that their management is often appropriately conceptualized as a common pool resource problem. As a result, commons institutions as conceptualized and observed by Elinor Ostrom are likely to be major contributors to effective flood management. What governance process should decide the size and scope of these institutions? We argue that bottom-up responses to problems of mismatched property rights are facilitated within larger societies that are characterized by market processes. Moreover, the wider presence of price signals delivers to local communities essential knowledge about the cost of maintaining private property and the relative scarcity of the communal goods. We discuss how our theoretical positions align with experience in Britain and what the implications of our theoretical approach are for facilitating the development of better institutions

The mirage of mark-to-market taxation : distributive justice and alternatives to capital taxation

Substantially increased wealth inequality across the developed world has prompted many philosophers, economists and legal theorists to support comprehensive taxes on all forms of wealth. Proposals include levying taxes on the basis of total wealth, or alternatively the change in the value of capital holdings measured from year-to-year. This contrasts with most existing policies that tax capital assets at the point they are transferred from one beneficiary to another through sale or gifts. Are these tax reforms likely to meet their aims of greater economic and political equality? We argue that these policies are likely to fail because, following neoclassical economic theory, they are based on a conception of capital as possessing given values in what amounts to a static equilibrium. This mischaracterizes the dynamic and subjective character of market economies and the contested value of real instantiations of capital goods. This makes them very difficult, often impossible, to value apart from at the point of voluntary transfer or profit realization. This means most taxes levied on a mark-to-market basis will be arbitrary and unfair. We propose alternative policies based on an income realization approach to taxation that are more likely to curb excessive wealth holdings. This includes introducing international treaties that prohibit preferential tax treatment for individual companies and specific sectors, and broadening the income tax base to include the imputed rent of personal housing wealth

Control of the attosecond synchronization of XUV radiation with phase-optimized mirrors

International audienceWe report on the advanced amplitude and phase control of attosecond radiation allowed by specifically-designed multilayer XUV mirrors. We first demonstrate that such mirrors can compensate for the intrinsic chirp of the attosecond emission over a large bandwidth of more than 20 eV. We then show that their combination with metallic foils introduces a third-order dispersion that is adjustable through the mirror's incidence angle. This results in a controllable beating allowing the radiation to be shaped from a single to a series of sub-100 as pulses