Law is complicated for many reasons. Private people (here referred to as the personally taxed) don’t have the means, both financial and time, sometimes also the ability to understand the language used in lawmaking, which isn’t made to be easily understood, to keep up with the law. Normally people aren’t really expected to, if you’re a “good” person (morality being subjective and cultural, of course), you’re unlikely to break a law and get punished for it (not diving into edge cases of people forced by their circumstances). But then you’re forced to comply with tax law. If it’s automated, you can get unrightfully made to pay more without your knowledge. If it’s not, you get forced into a game staged against you. People shouldn’t be taxed. Tax should be solely handled by the companies, because they have the means to hire people dedicated to taxes. I feel like this is very important and tax is frequently brought up in many ways, but I don’t see people speaking of this and I’d love to!

Disclaimer: I file for tax literally refreshing for it to be available and help other people with their tax. It’s precisely why I think personal taxation is wrong. I know too many people who paid way too much in tax and didn’t know and cannot claim it, because it’s been too long since.

  • FuckYourselfEndless [ze/hir]@hexbear.netEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Marx and Engels, from the early 1840s right up until – in Engels’s case – the early 1890s, make a string of prescriptive observations very much of contemporary resonance. They support progressive taxes, both on capital and income, have a strong preference for direct over indirect taxation, and back restrictions on inheritance. The 1880s basis for a land-value tax is challenged, while taxes on financial transactions, though associated with the stock market, whose “immorality and rascality” Engels is happy to denounce, are nonetheless indirect in structure. The management of state finances is critiqued. There is even some tacit endorsement of tax evasion, both personal (by Marx) and corporate (by Engels).

    There is also the rare sight of Marx as a campaigning activist, as he and close associate Wilhelm Woolf highlighted regressive taxes, to contrast the lives of peasants and laborers with those of the 1%-ers of their day, through the pages of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, in 1848-9.

    The tax landscape of Marx and Engels is clearly different to our own – thus in 1849, indirect taxes accounted for 40% of the Prussian Royal Finance Ministry total tax take, and direct taxes, only 29%, whereas today in the UK or Germany, indirect taxes are in the minority, with direct taxes generating around two-thirds of the total take.

    . . .

    Property tax, in need of reform in many countries, is one tricky item in the Marxist tax universe. Although then UK Chancellor Philip Hammond argued that Labour’s (tentative) support for a land-value tax (LVT) in 2017 would be “attacking land on Marxist principles,” both Marx and Engels were strongly opposed to LVT, as propounded by Henry George in Progress and Poverty, given that “what Henry George demands, leaves the present mode of social production untouched.” But Marx’s observation on The New English Budget in 1857, “now, if taxes are not to be raised by customs and excise duties, they must be directly derived from property and income,” points to some ambivalence in this area.

    https://marxistsociology.org/2019/08/marx-on-taxation/

    Basic Marxist article on taxes if anyone’s interested.