Quote:
Originally posted by sgtclub
OK, so it is essentially a "do on to others" approach to morally. And applied to taxes, I guess the view would be that progressive taxation is OK because if I was lower in the food chain I would want others to feel more pain than me? Doesn't seem like this is a moral justification at all.
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What you're extracting from Rawls is that if you were poor, you'd want to soak the rich more? Jesus, and I thought
I was a cynic.
I suppose if I put it that way, I wouldn't think of it as moral either. However, I think the idea is that you remove yourself from the table entirely. If, say. you're not born yet -- and don't know where you'll end up on the economic spectrum -- what kind of taxation system would you devise? Presumably, many people would agree that taxing (on a percentage basis) the poor somewhat less, and taxing the rich somewhat more, is the most just (and, daresay it, moral) way to allocate taxation levels, which recognizes a variety of competing goods, including the various benefits received by different folks on the spectrum from the government, the relative ability to pay, the need to optimize revenue, etc. As Burger mentioned, there would be an implied limit to the upper end of taxation, because even those on the lower end of the spectrum would understand that you still need incentives to strive to become wealthy in the first place.
Gattigap
ETA, what Burger said.
