Tax with Monopoly

A 1794 fiscal experiment: pair a tax with a monopoly, so that what the tax takes, the granted privilege gives back.

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1839(published posthumously)
Original language: English

Overview

As Britain slid into a long and costly war with revolutionary France in 1794, Bentham set out to work systematically through every source from which a government might raise money. Tax with Monopoly is one of the schemes that came out of that survey — a proposal, in the words of its subtitle, for a mode of taxation whose burden might be lessened or even balanced by an indemnity. The idea is to pair a tax with a grant of monopoly, so that the party taxed receives, in the exclusive privilege, something that offsets what the tax takes: the state gets its revenue, and the payer is compensated rather than simply mulcted. It is a characteristic piece of Bentham the fiscal engineer, hunting for ways to fund the state that spread the pain more cleverly than a blunt levy. Like nearly all his political economy it stayed in manuscript during his lifetime; he never published the treatises this material belonged to, and it reached print only through later editors. It is a minor and technical piece, of interest less for any influence it had — it had almost none — than as a specimen of how relentlessly Bentham turned his calculus of gain and loss on the dry machinery of public finance.

Key concepts

What does 'tax with monopoly' propose?

A mode of taxation in which a levy is paired with a grant of monopoly, so the party taxed receives, in the exclusive privilege, something that offsets what the tax takes. The state still gets its revenue, but the payer is compensated rather than simply losing money. Bentham offers it as one scheme among many for raising funds with less of the plain resentment a blunt tax provokes.

What prompted Bentham to devise this scheme?

Britain's slide into a long and costly war with revolutionary France in 1794. Needing to fund it, Bentham set out to work systematically through every source from which a government might raise money, and this proposal was one product of that survey. It belongs to his political economy, the writings in which he treats public finance as a problem to be engineered rather than a matter of custom.

What does the scheme reveal about Bentham's method?

It shows him as a fiscal engineer, applying his calculus of gain and loss to the dry machinery of taxation. Rather than accept a tax as simple subtraction, he looks for a structure in which the payer receives an offsetting benefit, spreading the pain more cleverly. The piece matters less for any result it had than as a specimen of how relentlessly Bentham costed and redesigned even the least glamorous parts of government.

Why did this proposal have almost no influence?

It was a minor and technical scheme that Bentham, like nearly all his political economy, left in manuscript during his lifetime. He never published the treatises the material belonged to, and it reached print only through later editors. Without publication or a champion it had no chance to shape policy, and it survives chiefly as evidence of the range of his fiscal thinking rather than for any mark it left.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A tax that gives something back

Can a tax be softened so it does not simply take? Bentham proposes pairing a levy with a grant of monopoly, so the payer receives, in the privilege, an offset for what the tax removes.

Surveying every source from which a government at war might raise money, Bentham hit on this scheme: pair a tax with a grant of monopoly, so the party taxed receives, in the exclusive privilege, something that offsets what the tax takes. The state gets its revenue; the payer is compensated rather than simply mulcted. It is Bentham the fiscal engineer, turning his calculus of gain and loss on the dry machinery of public finance, hunting to spread the pain more cleverly than a blunt levy. A minor and technical piece, it had almost no influence and survives mainly as a specimen of how relentlessly he costed everything.

monopoly
taxation
banking
competition
public welfare
accessibility

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Within this work

passages held: 5
distinct concepts: 17
by passages held, corpus-wide: #835

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1776 A Fragment on Government
Bentham's first published book, carved out of a larger unfinished attack on Blackstone; the 1776 debut that brought him to the notice of reformers and set the course of everything he wrote after.
EN
1789 An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
The theoretical foundation under all of Bentham's legislative projects, printed in 1780 but withheld until 1789; the penal code it was written to introduce was never completed, and the book outgrew the code it served.
EN
1790 Bentham's Draught for the Organization of Judicial Establishments Compared with the National Assembly
A rival judicial blueprint Bentham drew up in 1790 against the French Assembly's own reform draft and sent unbidden to Paris; an early mark of his turn toward democracy, and left unfinished.
EN
1795 A Protest Against Law-Taxes
A short pamphlet provoked by the Irish budget of 1793 — printed that year, published in 1795, extended in 1816 — and one of the political-economy tracts in which Bentham argued that taxing legal proceedings shuts the poor out of the courts.
EN
1802 Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation
An early essay, written about 1782 and left unpublished, testing his science of legislation against the hard case of colonial Bengal; it reached readers first through Dumont's French edition and only later in English.
EN
1802 Essay on the Promulgation of Laws and the Reasons Thereof
Transmitted to print through Dumont like his other early legislative writing, this short piece insists that publishing a law — together with its reasons — is a condition of its authority rather than a favour to the governed.
EN
1802 Principles of Penal Law
One half of the penal–civil pairing at the core of Bentham's science of legislation; assembled and published in French by Étienne Dumont in 1802, and reaching English readers only through later retranslation from the French.
EN
1802 Principles of the Civil Code
The source of Bentham's doctrine that security of expectation outranks the other ends of law, and the civil-law counterpart to his penal theory; published in French by Dumont in 1802 and carried into English only by later retranslation.
EN
1816 Anarchical Fallacies
The work in which Bentham's utilitarianism turns to demolish the doctrine of natural, imprescriptible rights; written in the 1790s against the French revolutionary declarations and first published, in French, by Dumont in 1816.
EN
1817 Papers Relative to Codification and Public Instruction
A collection of Bentham's 1811–15 correspondence with American and Russian authorities, published in 1817; the working papers behind his later Codification Proposal and among the beginnings of the Constitutional Code.
EN
1817 Swear Not at All
Part of Bentham's late assault on the Anglican establishment: an 1817 tract against the swearing of oaths, above all the religious subscription forced on students at Oxford and Cambridge.
EN
1822 Codification Proposal
The 1822 pamphlet in which the ageing Bentham offered his services as codifier to any liberal government; it opens his "legislator of the world" years and points toward the unfinished Constitutional Code.
EN
1823 Leading Principles of a Constitutional Code for Any State
A short 1823 statement, published in The Pamphleteer, of the principles behind Bentham's unfinished Constitutional Code; the clearest brief version of the representative democracy his final years argued for.
EN
1824 The Book of Fallacies
Bentham's satirical catalogue of the fallacies used to resist reform, edited from his manuscripts and published in English in 1824 after Dumont's French version of 1816; the most quotable and least systematic of his major works.
EN
1826 A Commentary on Mr Humphreys' Real Property Code
A late sign of Bentham's codifying cause gaining ground: his 1826 Westminster Review response to James Humphreys' proposal to codify English real-property law, welcoming it while pressing it further.
EN
1830 Emancipate Your Colonies
An early argument for shedding colonies that his own age passed over: written in 1793 for the French National Convention, held back while Britain and France were at war, and printed only in 1830.
EN
1839 Principles of International Law
A work his own century treated as utopian: four essays from the late 1780s, printed only after Bentham's death, in which he coined the term "international" and set out an early plan for perpetual peace.
EN
1839 Principles of Judicial Procedure with the Outlines of a Procedure Code
Bentham's theory of how courts should operate, drawn from manuscripts he worked on for over thirty years and published only posthumously; his fullest case against legal technicality and the exclusion of evidence.
EN
1839 Tax with Monopoly you are here EN
1840 Nomography or the Art of Inditing Laws
A late unfinished fragment, printed in the posthumous Works, on the craft of drafting legislation — Bentham's catalogue of the faults of legal style and their cures, with an appendix on his own methods.
EN
1840 Pannomial Fragments
The unbuilt goal of Bentham's whole legislative project: fragments, published posthumously, toward the foundations of his Pannomion — the single complete code he projected for decades and never finished.
EN
1841 A Fragment on Ontology
One of three linked fragments on logic, language and metaphysics that Bentham wrote around 1813–15 and never published; the metaphysical root of his theory of legal fictions and the home of his method of paraphrasis.
EN
1841 An Introductory View of the Rationale of Evidence
A compact case against excluding any relevant testimony — Bentham's own digest of the argument the young J.S. Mill drew out of his manuscripts as the five-volume Rationale of Judicial Evidence (1827).
EN
1841 Essay on Language
Written around 1813–16 with his essays on logic and ontology and unpublished until the posthumous Works; Bentham's attempt at a universal grammar, built on the claim that the sentence, not the word, is the true unit of meaning.
EN
1841 Essay on Logic
One of the linked essays of the mid-1810s, printed only after his death; here Bentham recasts logic as the art of thinking toward a purpose, and it lays bare the classifying method underlying his whole system.
EN
1841 Securities Against Misrule Adapted to a Mahommedan State
Constitutional writings Bentham produced in 1822 for Tripoli, at a Tripolitan reformer's request, adapting his checks on misrule — above all a free press and public opinion — to a Muslim state; printed only after his death.
EN
1843 A Manual of Political Economy
Bentham's principal treatise on political economy, written in the 1790s, first printed in the collected Works of 1843, and given an authoritative edition by Werner Stark in the 1950s; the source of his "be quiet" rule for the state.
EN

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