Ethical Thinking On Adam Smith 's Tax Principle

Adam Smith is a famous British ethicists and economists of18th century. It can be said that his economic system is based on his ethics theory. So there are rich ethical connotations in Smith’s economic ideas, of course, including tax theory, an important component of economic theory. This paper discusses the theory as the core of Smith’s tax revenue principles theory itself has profound ethical connotations. Based on this logic, studying the four principles of tax of Adam Smith has more practical meaning on the reform of our country entered the deep ethical problems in the field of tax and the purpose is to give reasonable suggestions for tax reform in our country.This thesis introduces the background of Adam Smith’s times firstly, and then by introducing Smith’s view of government, the outlook of finance and taxation closely associated with it to explain the reasons that Smith put forward four principles of tax is that the tax is the main source of revenue. The purpose of taxation is that tax funds are used to maintain the normal operation of government and comply the secondary distribution by government tax revenues. All these reflect the willing of the ruling class, needing the corresponding theoretical support. For putting forward the principle of tax, this paper introduces the contents of his tax theory at the same time. Then the author introduces four principles of tax of Smith respectively----fair, definiteness, save, convenience, explaining its rationality from the ethical perspective, and introduces four principles applying to explain its role between different kinds of tax. As the first person systematic summarist the ethical principles of the tax, all theories about tax principles after are evolved from this, and has guiding significance for contemporary reform, reflecting the ethical characteristics of the times. In the last part of this paper, the author mainly expounds the current tax system in our country firstly the author proposes the outstanding moral issues of the field of tax, although production relations with Adam Smith time is in opposite with the reform period of China, but a lot of social problems is similar, then analyzes these problems occur because the tax system is not complete since the reform and opening up as well as public servants in general revenue is not in high moral standards. So the author thinks that the ethical dilemma of our tax field can be obtained from the explaining of four principles of taxation of Smith.At last the author concludes that new round of China’s tax reform should draw Smith’s proposal to develop measures to rationalize the tax reform with Chinese characteristics.