Are all taxes equally harmful? What is worst tax? What is the least harmful? Property and income taxes are strongly decried. Are they the worst two? Which is worse?
The inheritance tax makes the family almost impotent, given that the family is the most important of all social instutitions besides the church, it is the most powerful
A tax is a cost applied on some action, the consequence of which is to change the order of preferences when making choices (economize on taxes).
An income tax increases the costs of hiring labor, and so employers will economize on labor by reducing their overall workforce and production, leading to decrease in supply and higher costs of goods. A property tax increases the costs of owning property, and so property owners will instead consume more and accumulate less capital.
Are either form of taxes equally harmful? Well for the organization collecting the tax there are associated costs. For example if an organization is tasked with defending property, then the more property there is to defend the more expensive it is to defend it. That means economizing on property may be a good thing as too much property will impose too many costs on the organization. If that organization were to fund itself with an income tax, the result would be that there would gradually be less income to tax and more property to defend.
So to answer your question, a tax is least harmful if it imposes costs that are aligned with the costs of the venture it is funding. If it imposes costs on some completely unrelated activity then it is most harmful.
It’s all realative. They are all great for parasites in the short term, though. No matter what they distort the market though. Sales taxes hurt business owners/entrepreuers in that feild/ Inheretance taxes do wonders on incentives and destroying working “middle class” families/ income taxes hurt everyone (minus parasites) in general/ inflation hurts everyone. Honestly they all screw you in there own unique and god awful way.
Least harmful on the state and the society/economy?
One ill of taxes is the breach of privacy.
Another ill is the cost of administration. (and there are of course many other ills)
VAT (sales tax) and tax on corporate profits score extremely high on both those accounts. VAT requires government espionage on all transactionsin the whole economy. Corporate profit tax requires government espionage on all transactions made by all companies. Those two kinds of taxes define a totalitarian Orwellian society and should already therefor be abolished even regardless of their “economic” effects.
Without VAT and corporate profit tax, no company would need to do any accounting at all. It would immensly simplify life for small businesses. Whole precentages of the GDP are actually spent today just to ADMINISTER those two taxes, and millions of citizens are effectivily scared away from trying to run an own business (they excell at the operational competence, but are detered from doing any business by the Chinese Wall accounting regulations).
And those two kinds of taxes actually give quite small income to government compared to the salary taxes.
Is that stuff about a head tax being least harmful just a myth?
It is simply a matter of you tax what you want there to be less. That is the principle behind sin taxes and tariffs. If you want people to drink less or smoke less then you put bigger taxes on those items to make them more expensive and less desirable. If you want to native industries then you tax imports to make them at least as expensive as the natively produced items, if not more expensive.
With that in mind, if you want people to consume more and invest less, then you create our tax system. Also if you want wages to be less then you add FICA type taxes. If you want to put native industries at a disadvantage in a global market then you also create the type of corporate tax we have.
What it comes down to is how do you want taxes to work. If you want people to consume less and invest more then tax consumption through a sales tax. If you want to hide those taxes then use the VAT. If you want people to consume more and invest less then tax income. All taxes are harmful in one way or another. It just comes down how you want people’s behavior to change because of the type of tax that is implemented.