theory. One, superseded by production modes themselves, was the Physiocratic idea of a single tax on land.
Another approach, which was never discussed seriously, was the single tax on capital. The brilliant French economist Maurice Allais, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Economics, formulated this idea during the post-war period. Later, however, Monsieur Allais himself, without renouncing his tax on capital, expressly recommends that the European Union use a fiscal tripod that would also include moderate income and consumption taxes using value-added criteria, therefore abandoning the myth of the single tax.
Single tax utopias would perhaps contain a regressive psychological trait – the desire to escape the complexities of social life and return to the simplicity of pastoral living, a dream life without the entanglements of fiscal constraints. Opposing this utopian wish is the patriarchal, repressive dogma that demands complex tax systems, capable of dismembering all possible forms of economic wealth.
According to one perspective of tax psychology, the magnetic force of the single tax idea does not reside exclusively in its attractiveness as a single solution, which seduces a small number of intellectual speculators fascinated by unified theories, absolute systems, and closed architectures. Although this seduction takes root naturally in the human spirit, the truth is that the post-modern age has celebrated the triumph of the multiple, the diverse, the fragmentary, the open, and the relative. Complexity, diversification, and fragmentation of modern tax systems only mirror identical features within modern societies.
Rather, the magnetic force of the single tax idea stems primarily from libertarian pulsations deeply rooted in the hearts of mankind, a disposition toward anarchy, an aversion to oppression, all of which are consistent with the extreme individualism that typifies our times.
There is a heightened sense of discomfort over the State’s power of fiscal intervention in the lives of private citizens. The growing complexity of fiscal systems only multiplies the instances of control. Information networks squeeze more tightly. The rituals of civic exercise proliferate, draining increasing amounts of time and energy from taxpaying citizens, suffocating them and fueling (beyond mere aversion to taxes) rancor against the bureaucratic enforcement apparatus. This fiscal malaise stems from the powerlessness individuals feel when facing the coercive power of the State. Fiscal stress is aggravated by fiscal obligations that keep multiplying and fiscal regimes that keep diversifying. This in turn leads to increasing competition among economic agents, who search for situations that offer the greatest fiscal advantage. The individual feels caught in a trap, forced to run a fiscal gauntlet of permits and prohibitions. From one side they are pressed by enforcement agents and, from the other, by the need to survive and not lose ground to competitors.
This loss of taxpayer’s energy, which happens against their will as they tend to petty activities that only partly service the fiscal apparatus, is wasted on piles of paper, documents, proofs, checking and re-checking, deadlines, tricks, calculations,
planning, and meeting with advisers, accountants, lawyers, and consultants. This creates significant discomfort to the taxpayer, and keeps him or her on the brink of fiscal non-compliance, tax evasion, delinquency, disobedience, and fiscal revolt.
The idea of a single tax has always harkened from afar, with the promise of significant relief of this discomfort, because of its simplicity and homogeneity. The other side of the coin, however, is that those who have achieved positions of obscure privilege and advantage – working within chaotic tax systems – namely, those who are most savvy at fiscal competition, the unseen partners of fiscal chaos, tend to resist such transparency, which is at the very heart of the single tax.
The simplicity and transparency of a single tax are weapons in the hands of citizens, to be used against antisocial types who, forever on a quest for fiscal privileges, are parasites and looters of the community for selfish ends. Chaotic fiscal systems are incubators of parasitic behavior.
If it is true that mankind cannot coexist without abiding by a “Social Contract”, then each of us should genuinely desire that any necessary contribution to the Common Good be as painless as possible, that it require of us little or no effort, that it not incite competition with our peers, and that it protect us from the anxieties associated with investigative and prosecutorial actions of the State. Thus, one can see clearly that the call for a light tax system that is simple, automatic, universal, paperless, non-declaratory, moderate, equitable, difficult to defraud, rests on solid foundations of tax psychology. These are the good foundations of the tax’s legitimacy, which ensure consent, a subjective presupposition that is indispensable to effective fiscal institutions.
To complete the list of requirements, tax scholars often identify in a “good tax” two others characteristics that remain to be discussed: progressiveness and allocative neutrality. Both are worthy of closer examination.