The aff’s contract of tax payment for welfare reinforces the state’s control over who deserves quality life
Rosembuj 22, Tulio, Tax, Coercion, and the Moral Impact of the Law (June 29, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4149658 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4149658
The monopolies of physical violence and taxes build the modern State. The
liberal autocracy achieves legal absolutism, the entire legal production of the
legal system based on the law. The State's supremacy becomes sovereign by
the sole act of law in its territory, jurisdiction, and over its inhabitants. (N.
Elias)
The bourgeoisie continues and improves the monarchical State, with the
government of the Prince as a superior master legislator and enforcer of his
will. The social order responds to the sovereign imperative of those who have
the growing public apparatus and subject their activities to the legal mandate,
coercion, and the material force of decisions.
Everything depends on a producer body of select representatives of the
wealth register and the higher level of literacy in the community. The perfect
right is the one that is configured in the requirement with and by force.
Coercion is an inseparable property of the law, and the sanction confirms the
right to force on those who must comply. The rule is sovereign, and the force
criterion is its decisive element.
The novelty lies in the qualitative change in the extension and dimension of
the scope of the law. The extension acquires a generality that it lacked before
because the interests now are more diffuse than the previous ones. This is
not a confrontation between members of the nobility or warriors. Legal
absolutism includes any inhabitants.
The subjection to the precept distinguishes between the class of property owning and educated citizens or subjects and the non-property and illiterate
mass, which is objectively dangerous for the stability of the legal system. The
law aspires to guarantee the patrimonial freedom of individuals and the
security of individuals who deserve it.
The sovereign discretion granted to the State is constrained to ensure that its
power does not exceed the objective legal guarantees and is subject to its
discipline. The omnipotence of the State is under the condition to the respect
of inviolable and sacred legal proprietary order. Objective means excluding
subjective differences that serve people because it ignores the rights that do
not ensure property and guarantee its complete safety.(P. Costa)
The primary rules indicate the hierarchical prohibitions, whether they are
related to severe crimes or taxes. The secondary regulations deal with
execution and compliance through the Administration and justice. Coercion
imprints its character, from the beginning, on civil, criminal, and tax laws.
The liberal autocracy establishes a social contract with the emerging forces of
commerce, capital, and real estate, based on ensuring the freedom and
conservation of its heritage from threats, arbitrations, and personal or material
plundering, from other individuals or the self State. The State offers the
security value as sovereign consideration to the obedient subject.(P.Grossi.
The law serves to channel the formal equality of all. It is an essential flag
because it buries the will of the Prince, but also a smoke screen, which
excludes non-owners, workers, and the most humble sectors, who remain as
they are without sufficient protection, and that makes them alone responsible
for their poverty.
Legal absolutism responds to a declared monopoly of the production of law -
legal or paralegal- supported by a limited and census-based democracy. The
consequence is illegal legality, as a source of unfair arbitrariness, and legal
illegality, as a source of exceptionality or urgency.
From the absolute monarch of the 17th century to the liberal autocracy of the
18th and 19th centuries, there is a line of continuity that focuses on the
ownership of the State's symbolic power (saying and doing the right)
depending on the dominant specific social interests. Private social bourgeois,
warriors, nobility and bourgeois monopolies, and budding trusts with higher
ambition.
The legal system is shrinking because there is not enough coercion to
guarantee some security and patrimonial freedom at the sacrifice of all others.
The language of power does not speak the same language as those outsides.
(M.Vogliotti)
Coercion splits the law from any other social value, particularly moral values.
The resulting law is neatly amoral.
Criminal legality and coercion divide subjects into two classes: proprietary and
danger. The dichotomy provokes the unfolding between the patrimonially
deserving issue of the legal guarantee and the one who is dangerous,
dispossessed, and poor.
The priority of the law in the crime and the sanction did not reach that social
majority relegated in its rights, the meat of criminality, submitted to the pure
administrative government of police surveillance.(P. Costa)
Tax legality follows the same course. The law is the vehicle to guarantee the
patrimonial freedom of individuals, but its action is based exclusively on the
absolute supremacy of the Administration over the subject. The tax collection
need follows a similar criterion of criminal law: control, surveillance, and police
over the mass citizen other than the owner.