The distributive justice literature has recently formulated several tax proposals, with limitarians or property-owning democrats proposing new or higher taxes on wealth or capital income intended to decrease the growing wealth gap. This essay joins this debate on inequality and redistributive taxation through the lens of the “benefit principle for public policy.” This principle says that specific rules and institutions are acceptable to the extent that they create benefits for all individuals in society, or at least don’t make anyone worse off. This benefit principle opposes wealth accumulation to the extent that wealth was generated through rent-seeking—that is, income unrelated to economic productivity, which is not embedded in mutually beneficial exchanges. I maintain, however, that ruling out rent-seeking requires not ex post taxation, but primarily a more “predistributive corrective policy,” that is, reconfiguration of market institutions to prevent wealth accumulation through rent-seeking in the first place. The alternative response is, thus, not to tackle inequality as such but to reform the market to promote the occurrence of mutually beneficial exchange.

中文翻译：

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反对寻租的预分配：利益原则对税收再分配的替代方案

分配正义文献最近提出了几项税收建议，其中限制论者或拥有财产的民主党人提议对财富或资本收入征收新的或更高的税，旨在缩小日益扩大的贫富差距。本文从“公共政策的利益原则”的角度加入了关于不平等和税收再分配的辩论。该原则指出，特定的规则和制度只要能为社会中的所有人创造利益，或者至少不会让任何人的境况变得更糟，就是可以接受的。这一利益原则反对财富积累，因为财富是通过寻租产生的，即与经济生产力无关的收入，不包含在互利的交换中。然而，我坚持认为，排除寻租不需要事后征税，但主要是一种更加“预分配的纠正政策”，即重新配置市场制度，从一开始就防止通过寻租进行财富积累。因此，另一种应对措施不是解决不平等本身，而是改革市场以促进互利交换的发生。