Alfred Amonn’s Festschrift contribution examines whether tax policy can be grounded in an objectively ascertainable principle of justice. Its central claim is that familiar fiscal prescriptions—progressive taxation, exemptions for small incomes, allowances for family circumstances, and heavier taxation of income secured by property—are defensible primarily through economic and social expediency, not deductions from justice. The essay moves from a critique of established fiscal doctrine through competing accounts of legitimate income differences to practical assessments of particular taxes. It concludes by retaining popular feelings of justice within a framework governed by the requirements of collective life.
Amonn begins with a contrast: philosophy has never established an uncontested measure of social justice, yet public-finance scholarship has often treated equality, proportionality, ability to pay, and equality of sacrifice as self-evident ethical principles. Such terms leave their decisive content unspecified. Equality must be equality in some respect; proportionality requires a denominator. Classical writers supplied income or wealth as that denominator, supporting proportional taxation. Later marginal-utility reasoning shifted attention from monetary amounts to their subjective significance: the same percentage supposedly imposes less sacrifice on a richer taxpayer. For Amonn, this transition does not establish an unambiguous foundation for progression.
He tests the stronger interpretation of ability to pay by pursuing its implications. If additional income always makes its possessor more capable of contributing, he argues, larger incomes should bear taxation until their remaining amounts fall to the level of the highest untaxed incomes. This is Amonn’s inference from the principle, rather than a neutral account of every possible equal-sacrifice theory. Its importance to his argument is practical: the resulting compression would remove the incentive to earn above the permitted level and thereby extinguish the tax base. A principle apparently demanding justice would defeat taxation’s purpose.
The ethical problem also reaches beyond taxation to the legitimacy of the incomes being taxed. Amonn distinguishes subjective effort from objective achievement: greater exertion seems more readily deserving of greater reward than a larger result alone. Even income from accumulated property cannot be classified uniformly. Saving may reflect personal effort, but it also depends on circumstances that sickness or misfortune can deny another equally industrious person. Inheritance similarly sets the recipient’s lack of personal merit against the owner’s freedom to dispose of acquired wealth. Fraud and exploitation admit clearer condemnation; they do not, he maintains, justify treating all income differences alike.
Man sieht: man kann unter dem „Gerechtigkeits“-Gesichtspunkt einander diametral entgegengesetzte Forderungen vertreten.
English translation: We see that, from the standpoint of “justice,” one can advocate diametrically opposed demands.
The opposing demand comes from equivalence between service and payment. If equal services warrant equal prices in private exchange, why should public services require different contributions? Pursued consistently, this argument supports a uniform poll tax rather than progression. Amonn regards equivalence as more readily defensible by reason than income equalization, but rejects both extremes as workable fiscal rules: equalization undermines revenue-generating activity, while a uniform levy cannot finance expanding public responsibilities. Differentiated burdens emerge instead from the need to raise sufficient revenue without imposing intolerable costs or damaging production and distribution.
Eine positive Wissenschaft kann nur Zweckmäßigkeitsfragen entscheiden.
English translation: A positive science can decide only questions of expediency.
This sentence defines the disciplinary boundary underlying the essay. Justice belongs to philosophy or social ethics; public-finance science can assess means, consequences, and feasibility. Amonn does not therefore abandon the arrangements conventionally defended as just. He reconstructs their grounds. Exempting very small incomes avoids disproportionate collection costs; he cautions that ordinary exemptions need not secure an actual subsistence minimum. Family allowances prevent inadequate disposable income from disrupting family life. Social policy seeks to preserve social cohesion and satisfactory communal functioning, which differs from realizing an abstract distributive ideal.
Progression receives the same reconstruction. Amonn explains its adoption through rising expenditure and the inability to increase lower-income burdens proportionately without harmful consequences. Appeals to justice helped legitimate the change, but its underlying rationale was practical. That rationale also supplies a limit which egalitarian demands, in his account, cannot reliably provide:
Die Progression muß dort aufhören, wo sie den Erwerbs- und Sparwillen zu hemmen droht und damit die Produktion, die Kapitalbildung und den wirtschaftlichen Fortschritt.
English translation: Progression must stop where it threatens to inhibit the willingness to earn and save, and thereby production, capital formation, and economic progress.
He similarly defends heavier taxation of property-backed income as a way of avoiding excessive burdens on other incomes, rather than as an administrable distinction between ethically deserved and undeserved wealth. Indirect taxation is necessary because direct taxation has revenue limits. Its incidence also depends on shifting, preventing a straightforward judgment about who bears its burden. Exemptions for essential goods are consequently assessed through their economic effects.
Amonn’s conclusion qualifies, rather than simply dismisses, justice. Manifestly unjust taxation can itself be inexpedient, and ignoring the public’s sense of unfair treatment threatens collective stability. Justice therefore matters as a social reality without becoming an overriding scientific rule. The essay’s enduring conceptual move is to distinguish objective ethical justification, subjective legitimacy, and practical fiscal necessity:
Der oberste Grundsatz bei der Ordnung des öffentlichen Lebens kann nur der der politischen, sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Zweckmäßigkeit sein.
English translation: The supreme principle in ordering public life can only be that of political, social, and economic expediency.
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