Cournot seminar – Korinna Schönhärl (Trier Universität)

Event details :

We are pleased to welcome to the next session of the BETA Cournot seminar organised with the support of the FSEG on Friday 13/03 at 2:00pm:

Korinna Schönhärl (Trier Universität)

who will present her paper entitled

Tax Guidebooks and Their Narratives in the Second Half of the 20th Century

Abstract: Tax guides give tips on how to reduce tax payments, i.e. call on economic entities to pursue optimization. However, their legitimation narratives differ between countries and have changed over time. This is shown by a comparison between Spanish, US and West German tax guides from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s. The thesis is that the trend towards governmental self-optimization and self-discipline found in advice literature from the mid-1970s was also reflected in the tax advice books of some, but not all, countries. This took the form of extreme criticism of the tax system as a whole, which, it was suggested, could only be improved through individual resistance in the form of tax avoidance. This undermined the narrative of taxpaying as a community task and civic duty. In societies where the “retroliberal” narrative of the unjust tax state was untenable, in contrast, the genre of tax guides was unable to establish itself.