Engländer’s treatise makes tax theory inseparable from incidence theory. Its program is stated in the preface: principles of taxation cannot be applied without knowing how taxes work through prices, incomes, and production.
Vielmehr ist ohne Kenntnis der volkswirtschaftlichen Wirkungen der Steuern eine richtige Steuerpolitik und damit die Anwendung der Steuergrundsätze unmöglich.
English translation: Rather, without knowledge of the economic effects of taxes, a correct tax policy—and hence the application of the principles of taxation—is impossible.
The book accordingly moves from definition and justification to the shifting of particular taxes. Engländer distinguishes taxes from fees, prices, penalties, and insurance premiums as compulsory payments not tied to a determinate service to the payer. He also rejects both benefit-exchange theories and metaphysical theories of the state: collective needs are ultimately individual needs requiring organized satisfaction. Taxation is justified as civic sacrifice for the organized community.
Die richtige Begründung der Steuer liegt in dem Werte der organisierten Gemeinschaft.
English translation: The proper justification of the tax lies in the value of the organized community.
This foundation determines his account of justice. The ultimate standard is the common good, while familiar canons such as equality, certainty, convenience, and economy are subordinate guides. Justice is not payment according to benefit received, but distributive justice expressed through equal sacrifice.
Die Steuer ist so aufzuerlegen, daß der in ihr begründete Güterentzug für alle Wirtschaften das gleiche Opfer bedeute.
English translation: The tax is to be imposed in such a way that the withdrawal of goods effected by it means the same sacrifice for all economic units.
Because money has diminishing marginal utility, equal sacrifice supports progression, exemption of the subsistence minimum, universality, allowances for family and illness, and heavier taxation of funded income. Yet Engländer resists deriving income equalization directly from this logic. Unequal incomes may be ethically imperfect, but in a market economy they also sustain effort, saving, and future provision of goods. Tax policy must therefore combine distributive justice with productivity.
The central taxonomic move is his distinction between direct and indirect taxes by the relation of Steuerquelle to Steuerobjekt, not by the legislator’s hope that a tax will or will not be shifted. A tax is economically judged by its final incidence and systemic effects, not by the person named in the statute. Shifting is the evasion of a burden through price changes: sellers may shift forward through higher prices, buyers backward through lower prices. This prepares the book’s most distinctive argument about consumption taxes.
Against the simple view that consumption taxes burden consumers as such, Engländer argues that their final effect depends on the whole price and income system. If a taxed commodity becomes dearer, consumers may maintain purchases of it by reducing purchases elsewhere; demand and income then fall in other sectors. Assuming unchanged supply and total price sums, the state’s tax income appears not by a simple destruction of consumer purchasing power, but by reducing other private incomes.
Nicht die Kaufkraft der Einkommen vermindert sich, sondern indem ein besonderes Staatseinkommen aus Steuern auftritt, vermindern sich die anderen Einkommen.
English translation: It is not the purchasing power of incomes that diminishes; rather, as a distinct state income from taxes arises, the other incomes diminish.
Thus Verbrauchsteuern, including the turnover tax, tend in equilibrium to strike the earning economy and to approximate proportional income reduction. They are not thereby ideal instruments of justice: they lack minimum exemption and progression, and their concrete effects depend on elasticities, fixed-supply goods, cost conditions, monopoly, and the stage of production at which taxation occurs. Badly designed indirect taxes can leave factors idle, distort production, shorten the production structure, or impair saving. They are defensible only as parts of a carefully balanced tax system.
Direct taxes receive the same incidence treatment. Rent taxes are generally difficult to shift; capital-yield taxes fall on capitalists but may affect saving; wage taxes may fall on labor or, near subsistence, partly on capital. Engländer rejects confiscatory treatment of ground rent or “unearned” income simply because it is unearned: relative income position and effects on the social product remain decisive. The income tax is therefore the chief vehicle of progression and minimum exemption, while wealth taxes supplement the heavier taxation of funded income; extraordinary real levies remain exceptional.
The conclusion rejects any Einheitssteuer. Physiocratic land taxation rests on a false theory of net product, and a single income tax would require lower exemptions, weaker progression, high costs at low incomes, and greater evasion. Engländer’s preferred result is a plural system combining direct and indirect taxes according to their incidence and administrative role. The work’s originality lies in joining welfare ethics, legal classification, and price-theoretic incidence: tax justice depends not on statutory form but on final burden, distribution, and the maintenance of productive capacity.
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