Taxes and distributive justice
an evaluation of Murphy and Nagel's tax justice proposal
Keywords:
Justice in Taxation, Fairness, Negative Income TaxAbstract
Recently, Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel have presented an interesting and controversial proposal to evaluate normatively a tax system (Murphy y Nagel 2001, 2002; Murphy 2005a, 2005b). Basically, they argue that a tax scheme will be just only if it finds its place in a just set of economic and legal institutions. In this work I analyze their proposal. Firstly, I review and present their main ideas. Secondly, I examine some institutional consequences that would suppose the application of their proposal in order to choose a specific tax system. Fundamentally, in this section I evaluate the proposal of Negative Income Tax (NIT) as an institutional arrangement that can be adequate to the normative requirements presented by Murphy and Nagel.
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