Robert Meyer · 1884
Meyer frames the treatise as an inquiry into how modern finance science has tried to make taxation just, rather than as a program for immediate reform. Its first movement is historical: the familiar demands for generality and equality are traced through older fiscal writing, Smith, Mill, French liberalism, and newer German theory, not to canonize them but to show how unstable their meanings have been.
Die Forderung der „Gerechtigkeit“ der Besteuerung ist so alt, als die Besteuerung selbst.
English translation: The demand for "justice" in taxation is as old as taxation itself.
The central problem is that justice cannot be derived from verbal formulas alone. Smith’s “ability” language still carries traces of benefit and protection; Mill’s equal sacrifice is more precise but psychologically obscure; German social finance adds the concrete taxpayer—income, property, needs, household position, and security of life. Meyer’s own solution begins by rejecting the benefit or insurance analogy altogether. A tax is not a price for state services, but a compulsory withdrawal from private economic resources.
Die Steuer erscheint als eine der Privatwirthschaft ohne Entgelt entzogene Güterquantität
English translation: The tax appears as a quantity of goods withdrawn from the private economy without compensation
This definition shifts the whole theory from formal payment to economic effect. The person assessed may not be the final bearer; the tax may reduce consumption, diminish capital, enter costs, alter prices, or be partly shifted through wages, rents, profits, and interest. Yet Meyer does not infer that incidence is unknowable or that distributive design is futile. The task of finance science is precisely to connect legal form, economic reaction, and final burden without pretending that any tax is either wholly nominal or wholly transferable.
From this standpoint Meyer reconstructs equal sacrifice. He criticizes earlier theories for invoking “sacrifice” without specifying what is sacrificed. The answer is not a vague pain of payment but a change in the household’s ordered satisfaction of wants across an economic period. Taxation moves the margin of satisfied needs downward; its burden is measured by the urgency of the wants displaced or impaired.
Die Wirkung der Steuer drückt sich in dem Unterschiede der Intensität der früher und der jetzt befriedigten mindest dringenden Bedürfnisse aus.
English translation: The effect of the tax is expressed in the difference in the intensity of the least urgent needs satisfied before and now.
The resulting principles of justice are both stricter and more flexible than simple proportionality. Generality requires inclusion of all taxable economic persons, but it is limited by legality, certainty, administrability, timing, and the exemption of subsistence. Equality means equal public claim upon taxpayers in view of their actual economic capacity, not equal rates on abstract income. Capacity includes income and wealth, but also debt, family obligations, locality, health, occupation, the security and duration of earnings, and the distinction between labor income, funded income, inheritance, gifts, windfalls, and conjunctural gains. Progression is therefore not introduced as confiscatory social policy; it follows from the declining urgency of wants and from the greater security attached to accumulated wealth.
Meyer’s preferred system is plural yet ordered. Consumption taxes may be just where they avoid necessities and permit household adjustment; yield taxes may serve where true income is difficult to ascertain; special taxes on inheritances, unearned gains, and exceptional profits compensate for defects in ordinary assessment. But these instruments remain auxiliary. The only general tax capable of approximating the taxpayer’s whole economic power is the income tax.
Eine allgemeine Steuer kann nur Einkommensteuer sein.
English translation: A general tax can only be an income tax.
The closing argument distinguishes fiscal justice from social reform. Against Wagner, Meyer allows that taxation inevitably affects distribution and may justly exempt subsistence, employ progression, or burden unearned accessions more heavily; but he denies that the fisc has an independent mandate to remodel property relations. Redistribution is legitimate only where it follows from the principles of tax justice themselves. Meyer’s lasting contribution is thus mediating: he preserves liberal legality and determinacy, incorporates the historical school’s attention to concrete social conditions, and grounds just taxation in incidence-sensitive equality of economic effect.
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