Socialism and the Revenue Maximizing Leviathan

In their recent book, Brennan and Buchanan (1980) describe possible constitutional limits upon the taxing power of a revenue-maximizing governmental Leviathan. Their emphasis is upon tax limitation, but in the process they find it necessary to describe in some detail the taxing policy an unconstrained Leviathan would adopt. Leviathan 'could levy a tax that expropriated the individual's maximum potential earnings beyond the allowed subsistence level' (p. 40). Such taxes would be both discriminatory (with different tax schedules for different individuals) and regressive (with the...