The debate about tax responsibility should be allowed to focus on identifying and discouraging categories of tax behaviour that create risk for the people of the world generally, says David Quentin.
In ordinary circumstances the degree to which one’s behaviour is ‘responsible’ is not determined by reference to measurable outcomes. A person’s speedometer is not a measure of how responsibly she is driving nor is the fact that she has killed or injured zero other road-users. Ordinarily one determines that a person is conducting herself responsibly by assessing her behaviour in the round having in mind the degree to which she generates risk for herself for her passengers and for other road-users rather than the degree to which measurable outcomes on some particular scale eventuate.
There nonetheless appears to...
