The purpose of this book is to offer a unifying conceptual framework for the normative study of taxation and related subjects in public eco- nomics. Such a framework necessarily begins with a statement of the social objective, taken here to be the maximization of a conventional social welfare function, and then asks how various government instru- ments are best orchestrated to achieve it. The structure is built on the foundation provided by the fundamental theorems of welfare econom- ics. The key deviation is due to the infeasibility of redistribution by in- dividualized lump-sum taxation. Because of this limitation, the fi scal system relies.
