Taxation is just-pretax wealth is a product of complex society not market

(Liam, Law/Phil@NYU, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/liam-murphy-how-not-argue-tax-justice/ , 10-30)

This brings us, last, to their normative theory of justice. Saez and Zucman are economists, not political theorists, yet they clearly have a political vision. What is it, exactly, that leads them to claim that “injustice” has triumphed? They never make their conception of justice fully explicit, but it is possible to discern a few features. My sense is that their view of the market is one that I share: its moral value lies entirely in its superiority to alternatives in promoting overall welfare and (I would add) its compatibility with individual liberty. There is no moral significance to the particular allocation of rewards a purely laissez-faire market would produce and in fact, for markets to be compatible with justice, they have to be carefully regulated so as to avoid laissez-faire outcomes. The foes of this view—proponents of libertarianism, or “market fundamentalism,” as Saez and Zucman call it—hold that pretax incomes are just precisely because they result from market exchange. There are two versions of this idea. One appeals to some natural moral entitlement to property, so that whatever property I end up with after free exchange simply belongs to me. The other appeals to some notion of just reward, or desert, so that I am entitled to the results of market exchange because I deserve them. Each view is subject to strong objections. One that applies to them both is that pretax market returns are not, in fact, ideally competitive free-market returns, but market returns earned in an economy shaped by all kinds of government policy, taxation included. Pretax income can’t be used as a baseline because it is, in fact, an output of the very system (taxation and all the rest) we are trying to make just.