Law Commons^™

Curb Your Enthusiasm For Pigovian Taxes, Victor Fleischer

Faculty Scholarship

Pigovian (or “corrective”) taxes have been proposed or enacted on dozens of harmful products and activities: carbon, gasoline, fat, sugar, guns, cigarettes, alcohol, traffic, zoning, executive pay, and financial transactions, among others. Academics of all political stripes are mystified by the public’s inability to see the merits of using Pigovian taxes more frequently to address serious social harms, some even calling for the creation of a “Pigovian state.”

This academic enthusiasm for Pigovian taxes should be tempered. A Pigovian tax is easy to design—as a uniform excise tax—if one assumes that each individual causes the same amount of harm with …

Libertarianism And The Charitable Tax Subsidies, Miranda Perry Fleischer

Faculty Scholarship

Tax scholarship is largely silent about the interaction between libertarian principles and the structure of our tax system. If all taxation is indeed slavery, as Nozick suggested, why bother analyzing libertarianism for insights into our tax system? This dismissal, however, ignores the diversity of libertarian thought. To that end, this Article mines the nuances of libertarian theory for insights into one feature of our tax system: the charitable tax subsidies. One strand of libertarianism suggests that the charitable tax subsidies are in and of themselves illegitimate. Yet several other understandings of libertarianism see a role for the state to engage …