Jeremy Bentham - Developing Ideas About Taxation And Law

Jeremy Bentham's ideas on taxation are spread over several different works, such as A Protest Against Law-Taxes (1793), his Proposal for a Mode of Taxation (1794), Supply Without Burden or Escheat Vice Taxation (1795), and a further pamphlet of similar date entitled Tax With Monopoly. Ideas on taxation also appear in other works, such as his Manual of Political Economy (1798). While Bentham's criteria for taxation reflect the utilitarian principles for which he is famed, his views are also coloured by the ideas developed by his predecessors, such as John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith. This paper will examine Bentham's substantial contribution to the development of tax theory in the light of these earlier thinkers. It will consider, for example, his opposition to Locke's views on property and version of social contract theory, which posited that tax was something paid in return for protection from the state, by means of a voluntary alienation of the `natural' right to property. Bentham did not accept the idea of natural rights: rights could not exist unless granted by law, which was the domain of government, and which thus had the power to interfere with property rights by taking property away by means of taxation. More than any other thinker, he enshrined the idea that a tax can only be imposed by law, an idea which remains relevant today, in the light of the proliferation of 'quasi'/'soft' law and oft-iterated views that tax involves not only law but also a higher moral code.