Contribuições de Murray N. Rothbard para a Economia (1)

The Myth of Neutral Taxation

Documento com 108 páginas que, provando como não existem impostos neutros, é um pouco fútil, repudiar/favorecer uma forma de imposto a favor de outra. E por aí justifico também a minha proposta de Taxa de Impostos Única (20% para IRS, IRC, IVA).

Aqui fica como conclui:

"(...) The view that income taxes are "better" than excise taxes; the call for proportional or degressive income taxation; the Friedman negative income tax; the Buchanan-Tullock Unanimity Principle ; and the collective-goods, external-benefits, and transaction costs arguments for government and taxation, have all served to place the imprimatur of economics on the status quo or on extensions of government rather than to limit or roll back State power. All this has followed the course traced by Bertrand de Jouvenel three decades ago: From the idea of divine right down to modern times concepts originally meant to limit State power have been turned by the State and its advocates into rationales for its
further extension. (...)

The idea that taxation, and therefore government's fiscal operation, should be neutral to the market—should not disturb
the operations of the market nor divert it from its free course—is a noble but impossible one. As we have seen here, taxation can never be neutral to the market, and the impossibility of this dream is rooted in the very nature of taxation and government. Neutral taxation is merely a chimera. It is perhaps because of this impossibility that this concept, in the hands of the modern public-choice theorists and others, has so quickly become yet another device for ratifying the
status quo of State power. We are forced, then, to the realization of crucial points from which free-market economists seem to have been fleeing as from the very plague. That neutral taxation is an oxymoron; that the free market and taxation are inherently incompatible; and therefore either the goal of neutrality must be forsaken, or else we must abandon the institution of taxation itself."