7.1 Motivations and Objectives

A long-established reasoning for progressive taxation is that all taxpayers should be subjected to equal utility sacrifice in paying taxes. The term “equal sacrifice” may be interpreted in three different ways. According to equal absolute sacrifice, everybody gives up the same amount of utility while paying taxes so that the difference between the utility of before-tax income and the utility of after-tax income is the same across taxpayers (Mill, 1989). Thus, implicit idea under the notion of equal absolute sacrifice is that the social evaluation function is of symmetric utilitarian type. That is why often equal absolute sacrifice rule is referred to as the “utilitarian” form of equal sacrifice (see Lambert and Naughton, 2009).

Equal sacrifice rule of taxation has sometimes been interpreted as sacrifice proportional to one's wellbeing (Cohen Stuart, 1889; Seligman, 1894). In other words, under equal proportional sacrifice everybody should give up the same percentage of utility while paying taxes. Evidently, given the positivity of utilities, equal proportional sacrifice is the same as equal absolute sacrifice in logarithms of utilities. In this case there is a tacit assumption that the social evaluation is of the symmetric Cobb–Douglas category so that under logarithmic transformation of utilities it becomes the symmetric utilitarian sum of logarithms of utilities. Finally, the equal marginal sacrifice principle claims that the total tax burden should be divided out among the taxpayers such that the after-tax marginal utilities of the taxpayers are equalized.

This chapter describes discretionary practices when discussing how the bureaucratic context affects the encounter between welfare workers and citizens. It focuses on the (stronger or weaker) effects of bureaucratic rules, procedures, values and so forth in encounters between welfare workers and citizens in bureaucratic organisations. An important feature of the bureaucratic organisation is the fact that the presence of clients is involuntary. The chapter introduces M. Weber's definition of the ideal-type bureaucracy. It also introduces the work of Michael Lipsky and Lipsky-inspired scholars on the discretionary practices of street-level bureaucrats. The goal of helping citizens on the basis of individual cases often contradicts the administrative rules and structures of bureaucratic organisations. In bureaucratic organisations, as analysed by Lipsky, staff are constantly considering the ambiguities and contradictions of their performance objectives and consequently form their own ideals of how to solve their clients' problems and deliver the best service.

Chapter Three explores the development of British propaganda policy towards the Soviet Union. While Ministers began the process of dismantling the wartime information machinery, the developing threat of the Soviet Union forced them to sanction defensive measures where British interests were threatened. The chapter also looks at discussions on anti-Communist propaganda that would ultimately lead to the formation of the Information Research Department (IRD) in 1948. The chapter also shows how, while agreeing to overseas information activities, Bevin resisted calls for Britain to start a Cold War offensive involving subversion and special operations inside the Eastern Bloc.

Chapter 2 describes four regular challenges for lexicographers when they are composing their semantic definitions for individual words, and it shows how each of these challenges has led to disputed meanings in lawsuits. First, just about every word of English has more than one basic sense and disputes can center around which meaning is intended. An example is given from a patent for a dental prosthesis involving SUBSTANTIALLY. It can have a “booster” meaning or a “downtoner” meaning, and which one is selected determines whether there is patent infringement or not. Second, there is the issue of the precise extent of the meaning of a word and its permitted “vagueness.” What exactly does APPROXIMATELY (300 acres) cover in a real-estate contract? And how broadly or narrowly is the word DISEASE understood in a medical insurance contract? Third, words can be used with nonliteral and extended meanings, as in metaphors. Some lawsuits are described involving FIGHTING, CHEATING, and MURDER, where the dispute centered on whether the intended meaning was literal or extended. Fourth, how are dictionary definitions impacted by the changing technological world around us? The word TANGIBLE is discussed from a movie contract fifty years ago when the objects referred to where in plastic or paper form. Are they still TANGIBLE today when they exist on a computer screen?

This chapter examines the financial and material burdens placed on Lorraine and Savoy with a view to comparing how these changed over the course of the reign. It also examines how they differed from the demands made of the French frontier provinces. The chapter looks at the problems of security, order and discipline in the occupied territories, which dictated what resources the French Government needed to invest there and how much they could take. The principal objective of royal policy in Lorraine in the first few years of French rule was to cover the costs of the military occupation, but in the longer run much depended on whether the French stayed. Improvements in military discipline meant that the occupations of Louis XIV's personal rule were significantly less harsh on the population than occupations earlier in the seventeenth century under Cardinal Richelieu.

This chapter investigates the development and implementation of segregation policies after Dutch rule returned to the colony in 1816. The Leprosy Edict of 1830 inaugurated a period of 'Great Confinement' following fifteen years of reorientation and a change in a slave's legal status from commodity to person. The confinement was not limited to leprosy sufferers. By 1820, a differentiation between leprosy and elephantiasis became more common in Dutch medical literature. The German physician Constantin Hering, who practised in Suriname from 1826 to 1832, made a clear distinction between the two diseases. Hering's presentation of Pauline's case story shows how he framed leprosy within a homeopathic perspective, but with characteristic elements of colonial framing reminiscent of Van Hasselaar. In the 1840s, colonial authorities maintained the impetus of the 'Great Confinement' policy. The regulations of the leprosy edict were tightened. Sufferers were no longer permitted to own patents or companies.

The chapter introduces readers to Northern Ireland by discussing key features and characteristics of the region’s society, economy and politics. A brief overview of the Northern Ireland conflict is presented and its impact on the evolution of Northern Ireland’s political system and landscape is charted. The chapter also contains a review of the multi-level governance literature which forms the basis for disentangling aspects of Northern Ireland’s relationship with the EU since the devolution of powers in 1999.

The historical background to democracy, which good citizens must defend, started with the Greeks. Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius thought that political history was circular, which meant that good regimes, ruling on behalf of the people, held sway for a time but deteriorated into bad regimes – tyrannical – ruling for the rulers’ benefit. Their solution was to propose “mixed regimes,” containing monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements which, checked and balanced, would have to cooperate with each other by compromising different interests. Such a regime was the Roman Republic, which promoted both compromise and public virtue (“republicanism”) in the sense of devotion toward the state. During the Enlightenment, European political thinkers added the concepts of “sovereignty,” in order to impose public order, and “social contracts,” to make sovereigns at least somewhat answerable to subjects. Thus when the Founders convened to invent their government, they used “common sense,” prescribed by Paine, Jefferson, Madison, and others, to fashion a mixed government of special character. That government, which the Founders called “republican,” rested on a written “constitution,” which reined in “factions” via “checks and balances,” and which refrained from creating a “sovereign” who might, as in the French case almost immediately, plunge the nation into war.

Chapter VI provides case studies for the conceptual metaphor of conflict myth in the image reaching from the fourth in the first millennium BCE. Its approach is informed by Aby Warburg’s emphasis on gesture language and its history of reception as developed in his Mnemosyne Atlas and by Erwin Panofsky’s approach to iconology to develop the concept of interpictoriality as a network of pictorial references or Bildgedächtnis (collective pictorial memory).