Government as Contractual Claimant: Tax Policy and the State

Introduction This is a paper about the relationship between taxation and liberty. Applying insights from constitutional economics[1] and corporate finance, in this Article I first make a descriptive observation about the role of government in its capacity as tax collector, and then move to a normative claim about how this description of government’s relationship with taxpayers should inform constitutional economics and quotidian debate about tax policy. As a descriptive matter,…