Quote of the Day: The Arbitrariness of Taxation

the very existence of taxation – any taxation – opens the door wider to those who wish to use the state to butt further into other people’s business. It’s true that we can marshall theories and arguments about the analytical primacy of the private; the analytical (and in some cases also temporal) primacy of private property; and the analytical (and also sometimes temporal) primacy of social order. That is, we can (in the tradition dating back at least to the Scottish Enlightenment and running up through recent scholars such as Mises, Hayek, Bruno Leoni, Milton Friedman, Vernon Smith, Harold Demsetz, Robert Ellickson, Deirdre McCloskey, Anthony de Jasay, and Bruce Benson) offer evidence and argument that the state is not the prime mover of society and, therefore, that the state does not deserve the widespread modern presumption that bestows upon it an open-ended claim – one bounded only by its own choices – on society’s wealth and resources.

But the fact remains that there is no method of taxation that avoids significant arbitrariness in its application and consequences. (“If X is taxed, why not tax Y, too?!”) It’s this arbitrariness – which is practically inseparable from the fiat that is legislation – that opens the door wider to those who claim, in one breath, not to wish to mind other people’s private business but, in a second breath, insist that much of what looks to non-”Progressives” as private is, alas, really public and, therefore, the business of us all.

That’s from Professor Donald J. Boudreaux.