Back to the Future for Taxation

Taxation is an art, not a science, of measuring and auditing. Faced with the challenge of putting machine labor on a level playing field with human labor, the two leading forms of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century taxation, income taxation and general consumption taxation, were wrecked at their roots. What emerged from that wreckage was a return to historic norms: a series of excise taxes and charges, but this time with the avowed and focused purpose of not only raising revenue but also pricing and internalizing otherwise externalized harms to the self and to the biosphere.