Geoffrey Brennan: The Power to Tax, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

Commenting on his collaboration with Geoffrey Brennan on The Power to Tax , James M. Buchanan says that the book is "demonstrable proof of the value of genuine research collaboration across national-cultural boundaries." Buchanan goes on to say that "The Power to Tax is informed by a single idea-the implications of a revenue-maximizing government."

Originally published in 1980, The Power to Tax was a much-needed answer to the tax revolts sweeping across the United States. It was a much-needed answer as well in the academic circles of tax theory, where orthodox public finance models were clearly inadequate to the needs at hand.

The public-choice approach to taxation which Buchanan had earlier elaborated stood in direct opposition to public-finance orthodoxy. What Buchanan and Brennan constructed in The Power to Tax was a middle ground between the two. As Brennan writes in the foreword, "The underlying motivating question was simple: Why not borrow the motivational assumptions standard in public-choice theory and put them together with assumptions about policy-maker discretion taken from public-finance orthodoxy?"

The result was a controversial book-and a much misunderstood one as well. Looking back twenty years later, Brennan feels confirmed in the rightness of the theories he and Buchanan espoused, particularly in their unity with the public-choice tradition: "The insistence on motivational symmetry is a characteristic feature of the public choice approach, and it is in this dimension that The Power to Tax and the orthodox public- finance approach diverge."

James M. Buchanan (1919-2013) was an eminent economist who won the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986 and was considered one of the greatest scholars of liberty in the twentieth century.