Alan Cottey: UEA Personal Pages
This page contains brief information on, and links to, other documents by me on Asset and Income Limits.
It is time to take seriously the idea of limiting the assets and incomes of humans as individuals. When, on the global scale, the problems over over-consumption and the gap between rich and poor are discussed, the focus is usually on rich and poor nations. Yet, great as is the disparity between the richest and poorest nations, it is dwarfed by the disparity between individuals.
Yet redistributive taxation cannot solve the problem of over-consumption. Direct taxes on assets and income which have already been legitimised as the property of the individual are strongly resented. Further, the response to a redistributive tax regime is for rich and middle-income people to demand even higher baseline assets and incomes. Redistributive taxation does not begin to address the problem of over-consumption - it might even make it worse.
Asset and Income Limits (AIL) is different. It is not 100% taxation above a threshold. AIL denies the legitimacy of an individual holding assets and income above whatever limits apply to him or her. The article discusses the proposition in detail and how it could be workable...
In this poster I set out briefly some important conditions for an economy to be sustainable. From this, I argue that unlimited assets or income for individuals should be socially unacceptable and outline some features of an economy with personal asset and income limits...
In this 2013 paper AIL is considered in a broad cultural and economic context. The author's accepted manuscript may be found here.
The basic version of this page was created in 2006 and the page was last modified on 2 September 2015