Public Goods, Equal Sacrifice, and the Burden of Taxation

Date
-
Event Sponsor
The Munro Lectureship Fund and The Lane Center
Speaker

Joe Mazor, Postdoctoral Scholar, Center for Ethics in Society

 

Abstract

A key debate in contemporary politics concerns the distribution of the financial burden of paying for public goods.  This paper begins with a typology of public goods that distinguishes those goods whose provision is fundamentally justified by efficiency considerations (efficiency goods) from those goods whose provision is fundamentally justified on the basis of justice claims (entitlements).   I argue that the costs of paying for efficiency goods should be distributed on the basis of the fair market price of the goods.  I then argue that (most of) the costs of entitlements should be shared on the basis of the principle of equal sacrifice.  Asking each person for an equal amount of labor time is, I contend, the right way to implement the requirements of equal sacrifice in practice.   However, due to ability of the high-income workers to shift the incidence of taxation to other parties, progressive income taxation may well be justified as a way of obtaining an appropriately equal sacrifice from each taxpayer.

 

Biography

Joe Mazor is a postdoctoral scholar in the Center for Ethics in Society.  He completed his Ph.D. in the interdisciplinary Political Economy and Government Program at Harvard University.  In his dissertation (which was awarded the 2010 Leo Strauss Prize) he develops a liberal theory of natural resource property rights.  In addition to a book manuscript based on his dissertation, Joe is currently working on projects on public goods and the limits of luck egalitarianism.  His broader research interests include distributive justice, environmental political theory, and deliberative democracy.