Deliberate Distortion
For more details on this topic, see Pigovian tax.Not all distortions are bad; Pigovian taxes create distortions that correct for externalities and therefore have a negative MCF.
Here, the fiscal distortion is deliberate, so as to compensate for externalities. "Sin taxes" are levied on products that incur additional costs to society, such as alcohol, tobacco and pollution. Ideally, these taxes raise the price to the exact level that the market would bear if the negative externalities were included in the price. Pigovian taxes are often preferable to outright prohibition, since prohibition incites trafficking, often resulting in crime and other social costs, but no revenue.
Read more about this topic: Excess Burden Of Taxation
Famous quotes containing the words deliberate and/or distortion:
“It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)