Basic income and the justice of taxation Citation for published version (APA): Roos, N. H. M. (1998). Basic income and the justice of taxation. Paper presented at 7th International Congress on Basic Income, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Document status and date: Published: 01/01/1998 Document Version: Accepted author manuscript (Peer reviewed / editorial board version) Please check the document version of this publication: • A submitted manuscript is the version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. 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If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the “Taverne” license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement: www.umlib.nl/taverne-license Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us at: [email protected] providing details and we will investigate your claim. Download date: 28 Sep. 2021 1 Nikolas H.M. Roos Law Faculty - Maastricht University Basic Income and the Justice of Taxation Revised paper of the 7th International Congress on Basic Income, Amsterdam, 10-12 September 1998.1 A basic income system (BIS), Philippe van Parijs once wrote, is "a disarmingly simple proposition"2. In this paper I would like to link it with another disarmingly simple proposition, a tax system that has value added tax (VAT) as its main source. Joining two such simple propositions suggests boundless naivety. However, if social security can be reduced to such simplicity, why not taxation also? After all, a basic income is a negative form of taxation and one cannot simply overlook the question of its relation to positive taxation3. 1 I thank my colleagues Hans Crombag and Frank van Dun for the comments they have made to an earlier draft of this paper. P. Carson has been so awfully kind to confront me once more with my handicaps when writing in English. 2 Philippe van Parijs, Een reëel-liberale rechtvaardiging van het basisinkomen, in: J.W. de Beus & Percy B. Lehning, Beleid voor een vrije samenleving, Amsterdam-Meppel 1990 (Boom), p. 130. 3 The combination of BIS and VAT was an idea which I had played with in 1995 when the basic income discussion was at a peak in The Netherlands. I had written a paper on the subject which was discussed in a seminar by my colleague in fiscal law, who, I had the impression, must have thought that he had just read a fiscal version of Alice in Wonderland. I was very surprised to discover, rather recently, that there already exists a Belgian political party, "Vivant", which has the combination of BIS and VAT as its main programmatic issue. I have no connection whatsoever with this party, whose advocacy for these ideas is based, as far as I can see, on purely pragmatical grounds, the importance of which I do not deny. I do not think, however, that a more principled approach can be missed. Not only can a more principled appraoch can put these social-economic issues in a wider context, it can also have consequences which are in conflict with a purely pragmatic approach. Thus, Vivant rejects submitting labour to VAT. It discriminates between consuming capital and labour in produc- tion believing that this will stimulate employment. The latter is debatable, but such a discrimination is certainly unprinci- pled. 2 Starting with a methodological section, the first question to be considered is why lawyers and legal philosophers as such have shown little interest in BIS so far. This is regrettable since it has hardly occurred to the proponents of BIS have to deal with it within a systematic treatment of the principles of taxation. The next question will be whether BIS is exceptional as a negative form of taxation. Our discussion will show that all forms of positive taxation have an equivalent in negative forms. The suggestion that BIS might be exceptional, is created because it would seem to violate the fundamental principle of equal fiscal charges. It enables people to enjoy free time without any obligation to produce taxable income if they are capable of doing so. This objection cannot simply be bypassed even if it were true, as some proponents of BIS have sug- gested, that it provides the most efficient solution of the present problems of unemployment. The second section is about the justification of BIS as an individual right. Although the subject is more than sufficient for an independent paper, it is too essential to be left out when dealing with the justice of taxation. Both BIS and the justice of taxation are directly linked to the political philosophy one takes as one's starting point. Van Parijs' theory is at present the most elaborated philosophy of BIS. It represents what I propose to call the "fairness-approach". One of the virtues of Van Parijs' theory is that it deals with forms of taxation in so far, at least, as the financing of BIS is concerned. The criticism that Van Parijs' theory has already met, has demonstrated that it is much too artificial, complex and debatable as a foundation of BIS. However, its main defect, it has been argued, would seem to be that it contains no convinc- ing grounds to reject the principle of self-provision (the PSP) for everybody able to do so. I will suggest how Van Parijs' theory can be protected against this criticism to a certain extent. However, that protection is of a doubtful nature in so far as one will have to give up the ahistorical- modernist frame of reference of the fairness-approach. Govaert Den Hartogh, who does not reject PSP, has suggested a convention-theoretical approach to BIS4. He nevertheless 4 Govaert den Hartog, 'Het basisinkomen als grondrecht', in: Robert J. van der Veen en Dick Pels (red.), Het Basisinko- men. Sluitstuk van de verzorgingsstaat?, Amsterdam 1995 (Van Gennep), pp. 125-155. Regretfully, his article is only availa- 3 assumes that fairness is the solution for dealing with the problem that natural sources have no "natural" owners. I will argue that this is a serious mistake, because the theory of conventions is about processes in time and must have both logical and empirical support. Having reverted to fairness, Den Hartogh uses two idealist assumptions to circumvent PSP, both of which are unconvincing. In a third approach, a republican-democratic one, PSP is also not rejected. It argues for BIS as a citizen's compensation for fulfilling republican duties. It will be argued that this approach cannot justify overriding PSP in cases where people fail to fulfil those duties or where they can do so and re- spect PSP nevertheless. My own approach is also of a political-theoretical nature, but it relies on convention-theory. It is based on a theory of "law as second-order morality" (LSOM). In that theory law is seen as a device for people who prefer to live in peace with all those who are willing, for whatever reason, to accept a position of moral relativism. Following this approach, BIS can be explained as a pay-off for rights of political domination, however democratic the latter may be. The recognition of exclusive property rights in natural resources will be shown to be just an aspect of these political rights. The third section of this paper contains an analysis of the incoherence of the prevailing systems of direct taxation. The outcome of that analysis will be that consumption-tax, and more in particular, VAT is the right and only justifiable form of (pure) taxation. The fourth section is about the coherence between BIS and a VAT-system (hence: VATS) within LSOM. The fifth and final section is concerned with the administra- tive advantages and problems of VATS. I. Basic income and basic questions 1. Legal scholarship and BIS Law is divided into an ever increasing number of branches. Specialisation in the study of law has grown accordingly. ble in Dutch. However, the argument has been developed very much in a dissertation written under his and Robert van der Veen's supervision by Gijs van Donselaar, The Benefits of Another's Pains. Parasitism, Scarcity, Basic Income, Amsterdam 1997 (Leopold/Elzinga). 4 Moreover, the philosophy of law has failed to compensate for this process of differentiation by developing integrating theories. This failure is not a recent phenomenon. As I have argued in a recent article5, the philosophy of the criminal law, for instance, has been struggling with its separation from political philosophy for more than two hundred years. The philosophy of tax law, is another case in point.