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In 2014, newly elected Commission President Juncker pushed to create the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), with the aim of creating jobs and stimulating growth. With guarantees offered by the fund and the involvement of the European Investment Bank, the plan was to use €21 billion to leverage €315 billion of investment in the European economy. The EFSI legislative process was very fast with legislation emerging in just a year, with the first EFSI regulation appearing in mid-2015. Using policy frame analysis, this article zooms in on the discursive patterns of the European Commission, European Parliament and Council, expecting to find transport infrastructure a key theme given the low investment levels in this sector after the financial crisis in 2008. Analysing key documents at two periods in time, and drawing on interviews with officials, it explores the arguments used to make the case for EFSI and how these changed over time, leading to the extension of EFSI through an amended regulation in December 2017. In so doing, it shows the strategic positions of the institutions during Agenda-setting for EFSI. Moreover, the article explores questions of legitimacy and accountability. It reveals how key events including the Paris Agreement on climate change (December 2015) and Brexit referendum (June 2016) increased the persuasiveness of its framing.

AbstractThe following essay analyzes the arguments made by the principal academic proponent of income taxation, Columbia University economist E. R. A Seligman, after it was found to be unconstitutional in 1894. Seligman thought that the prevalent theory of just taxation, that it should be based on a natural right to one's person and property, was wrong. The principal American philosophical proponent of this natural rights-based approach to taxation was the late Brown University philosopher and economist, Francis Wayland. The essay analyzes the flaws in Seligman's contention that there are no natural rights and, therefore, no natural property rights, so that taxation could not be justified by the benefits received for the protection of such rights. Instead, he claimed taxation should rest upon a person's financial capacity. Since that capacity would be most accurately measured by net worth, we would have expected Seligman to endorse a proportionately assessed net worth tax (which was commonly used by the states in the nineteenth century). Alternatively, he argued for an income tax progressively assessed. This essay argues that since income is only a portion of financial capacity, his argument fails.

AbstractThis essay seeks to answer the question of how the behavior of wealthy advocates of some version of socialism can be reconciled with their advocacy of those ideas. The answer is that the conception of egalitarianism under which they choose to live is one that redistributes income, not wealth, while the egalitarianism that they advocate for others is that in which all wealth is the property of one person who decides how much will be distributed to others.