This paper examines what Kant says about the economy in Feyerabend’s notes of Kant’s lectures on natural right. While Feyerabend does not report Kant having a systematic discussion of the economy as a topic in its own right the text is interesting in what it shows about the context and the development of Kant’s thought on issues to do with political economy. I look at the Feyerabend lecture notes in relation to things said about the economy in Achenwall’s Natural Law, Kant’s text book, as well as in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. Looking at the three texts in relation to each other illuminates the development of Kant’s thinking and the paper focuses on tracing the relations between ideas to do with the economy in the three texts. I look at Kant’s developing thoughts on the economy in relation to the following ideas: an account of money; an account of value and price; the theorization of labor; taxation; property and the commons.

Local news is in crisis. Too few subscribers are willing to pay the costs required to create sustained and high-quality local news products, and the advertisers that previously subsidized local news have fled to new sites, especially social media platforms. Press organizations and policymakers have begun experimenting with possible fixes. Media institutions have looked to new private funding models, especially nonprofit institutions supported by philanthropic foundations. And state legislators have begun testing different public financing vehicles for local media. Yet these efforts represent only a small set of possible solutions to the crisis in local news. And they have proven insufficient to save news organizations from financial devastation. This chapter argues that the local news crisis should be understood as an innovation failure, one that calls for solutions from areas of the law that have long grappled with similar problems. In markets like pharmaceuticals and technology, policymakers often employ “innovation policy pluralism,” or combinations of intellectual property protections with non-IP tools such as prizes, grants, and tax credits. Such combinations harness both free-market forces and government regulation to foster socially valuable services in productive ways. This chapter surveys these different innovation policy levers and maps them onto both existing and proposed local press interventions.

In the Pounds parable, a nobleman, disliked among his people, goes abroad, and returns to prove himself a good administrator, though one with harsh standards, as is Jesus in the parable in regard to his enemies. In Genesis, Joseph, disliked by his brothers, had gone abroad to Egypt and proved there to be a good administrator in the time of the famine, but one who, for a time, treated his brothers harshly.

This chapter explores how taxes shape the meaning of other payments and money flows in highland Bolivia. The concept ‘ecology of payments’ is introduced to describe the world of payments amongst the so-called informally employed in the city of Cochabamba. It explores how, for instance, receipts for commercial licence taxes and property taxes paid provide people with the right to make other kinds of payments, such as fees to local neighbourhood associations and unions. An ‘ecology of payments’ pays attention to the multiple links and dependencies between payments and the way they transform each other. This approach encourages a focus on the local impact of taxes paid, as opposed to the effect of taxes on long-term state–society relations. To ascertain the role of taxes within this ecology, the chapter also aims to understand how the concept of formality informs the power and character of different payments.

A foreword commenting on the anthropology of tax as a field of study and important topics for research. These include examining tax as the materialisation of value regimes and relations of power, as well as interrogating the work that goes into producing the fiscal subject.

This chapter explores how taxing the traditional livelihood practice of distilling spirits transformed the status of work and traditions, making previously ordinary ways of life illegal, and leading families to weigh their business self-interest against relationships, legal and moral responsibilities, and values. The chapter elucidates the opaque qualities of Istria’s vibrant moonshine market by unpacking the values underpinning it and the relationships between the winemakers, craft distillers, and bootleggers of which it is constituted. Taxing and regulating spirits challenged societal values in ways that forced new considerations into long-standing relationships, particularly around the circulation of the biowaste necessary for distilling. Families sought to maintain livelihoods based on farming, winemaking, and distilling while navigating new regulatory regimes, but those who could not handle such changes retreated from formal business ownership and into the margins of the market. This shift demonstrated that tax can make and unmake markets in sometimes unintended ways. At its core, this chapter illuminates how values in Istrian culture intersect in the practice of distilling and are complicated by the introduction of taxes and regulations.

This chapter explores the knowledge creation aspect of contemporary tax reforms in Nigeria. It offers a historical perspective on this process which lets us see today’s reforms not only as the re-creation of long-retreated systems of state taxation-led ordering, but against the backdrop of what intervened in the meantime – a four-decade late-twentieth-century interregnum where revenue reliance on oil profits created a very different distributive system of government-as-knowledge. Today’s system of tax-and-knowledge is not just reform but an inversion of what came before.

In this chapter, I show how the current shift to digitalising tax administration in Kenya is connected to its colonial fiscal structures both in its design and implementation. Firstly, the idea that technology can help economic development in countries like Kenya has existed since colonial times and still features in current policies that endorse technology for economic development. Secondly, colonial structures are also present in the implementation strategies of a digital platform like the e-filing system central in this case study as they rely on colonial infrastructures for implementation. ITax, the e-filing system that is the focus of this chapter, was implemented quite rapidly and made mandatory within a short period. This chapter argues that the ‘promise’ of digitalisation as a driver of sustainability, modernisation, and economic growth is outweighed by the harm done by colonial history impacting its practice. I argue that colonial fiscal policies are still shaping Kenya’s tax practices. A closer look at Kenya’s colonial fiscal history is important for understanding how the current tax systems are shaped and informed by past practices.

Tax is both an aspect of everyday life for people round the globe, bound up in political governance, and central to the organisation of our resources and any efforts to promote equality. While tax is studied across multiple disciplines, in anthropology it has received less attention. This introduction argues that an anthropological approach to tax, which centres ethnographic data and non-normative understandings of fiscal relations, is crucial to a comprehensive appreciation of taxes and key to building more equitable futures. The introduction is structured around three main questions: what is tax, what is taxable, and what do taxes do? It maps out why it is important to talk about tax now, the crucial influences of an anthropology of tax, the current landscape of this small but growing field of work, and the future of anthropological approaches to tax.

This chapter investigates tax payments and self-making amongst Romanian migrants in London. Vicol demonstrates how taxation is a mode of anchoring oneself in a moral order premised on self-sufficiency. Although the UK’s mainstream media cast Romanian migrants through tropes of welfare dependency, Romanian self-narrations as hard working, taxpaying subjects enabled interlocutors to constitute themselves as good migrants. However, becoming a taxpayer in practice was also an exercise in a particular type of bureaucratic literacy. A host of digital barriers, language deficiencies, and unhelpful bureaucrats drove many to seek out private consultants who made a business of helping their co-nationals decode their obligations to HM Revenue and Customs. Thus, this chapter also explores taxpaying as a technical exercise of making oneself legible through the language of the fiscal authority. Taxation becomes part of the making of the migrant subject. It is about the paradoxical ways in which a digitising state premised on self-reliance prompts affirmations of independence at the level of discourse, while simultaneously generating new networks of dependency in practice.

This chapter contributes an ethnographic case study on the creation of international tax norms at the OECD during the ‘Base Erosion Profit Shifting’ initiative. I argue that what makes countries share taxing rights and multinational corporations give money, as in tax to specific jurisdictions and not to others, is not necessarily this ‘natural’ law of reciprocity, but changes to the dominant modes of relatedness, conversation, and presence in international tax norms. Tax scholars, but also recent anthropological studies on tax, explore taxes against a gift-exchange logic. I suggest that this conceptual obsession with mutual interest, return, and benefits obscures the fact that taxes are often unilateral monetary transactions. More generally, it overlooks the human capacity to give and provide, under specific conditions, without calculating or receiving something in return. While taxation is not a form of sharing, I argue that it is productive to pay attention to the many similarities between these two types of transfers. They share, at times as I show in the chapter, more commonalities than taxation and reciprocal gift exchanges, and there are moments when taxation facilitates and enables sharing.

This chapter examines the scope of the Commonwealth’s power to impose taxation.The tax power enables the Commonwealth to raise revenue, as well as to indirectly regulate behaviour by using taxes to encourage or discourage behaviour. In general terms, a tax is a compulsory exaction of money for public purposes enforceable by law and which is not a fine or pecuniary penalty, a fee for service or a fee for a licence. The Constitution imposes special rules about the procedure for enacting federal tax laws, which are not justiciable, and special rules about the content of federal tax laws, which are justiciable. The Constitution also makes the power to impose duties of customs and excise an exclusively federal power, thereby limiting the power of the States to impose taxes on goods.

Paths to a liberal order are not limited to those followed by Western countries. A possible Middle Eastern starting point was zakat, Islam’s only “pillar” with an explicitly economic function. Zakat appears in the Quran as a system that finances designated state expenses through a tax on wealth and income. The rates were low by the standards of Antiquity, and they were fixed. Besides, the payment of zakat legitimated the underlying wealth or income. Hence, it could have served as the foundation for political checks and balances based on secure private ownership. Yet zakat’s specifics were suited specifically to Arabia; it left out major sources of income and wealth in the broader Middle East. For these reasons alone, rulers imposed extra-Islamic taxes. Having set precedents for arbitrary taxation, they then essentially stopped enforcing zakat. A Quran-based Islamic institution for empowering the individual against the state thus turned into a minor device for local poor relief. The waqf’s emergence in the 700s as a core Islamic institution was a creative response to zakat’s abandonment as a state-enforced transfer system. Its unintended effects, such as the persistent weakness of civil society, are rooted, then, in zakat’s loss of relevance to Islamic governance.

An underappreciated difference between fifth- and fourth-century Rome was the emergence of stipendium and tributum (military pay and the land tax to fund it). Encompassing every citizen landowner and soldier, stipendium and tributum likely involved more people than any other civic institution at Rome. Moreover, this fiscal system changed the way in which Rome operated. It created a set of tasks that needed to be completed; it then instituted a new set of roles to complete those tasks; then it elevated a set of people in order to fill those roles; and finally those people developed new tactics to derive maximum benefit from their new functions. The key stakeholders in all this were the tribuni aerarii, who operated the system in local areas across the countryside. Though poorly attested in the extant sources, these men had the ability to control the smooth operations of the war machine. They promptly realized that they could hold the fiscal system hostage to extract political concessions. The exclusive rule of Rome’s patrician leaders, now reliant on plebeians to pay and collect taxes, was doomed.