Itemizing Personhood

This Article argues that tax law has a significant role in the design of non-market interactions. Tax law often translates real life into tax terms, and constructs our daily rituals as either non-deductible, personal consumption or deductible income-producing expenses. It depicts relationships as either taxable market transactions or as philanthropic, amicable, or domestic non-market ones. It characterizes some benefits as taxable fringe benefits and others as non-taxable psychological benefits. It taxes work but not leisure, sales but not gifts; it allows the deduction of travel expenses but not the costs of commuting, of secretarial help but not of childcare. In this Article, I argue that many of these notoriously puzzling distinctions express a set of closely related commitments to distinguish the market from the non-market realms. Drawing on the rich body of literature on commodification, the Article develops a new framework for the tax treatment of the non-market realm: It starts by identifying four distinct ways in which tax and commodification can interact: incentivizing non-market interactions; encouraging resource materialization; price-tagging of goods and services; and making the government a partner in taxable interactions. The Article then uses this framework to shed a new light on several controversial tax policy questions, such as taxing imputed income, taxing endowments, and disallowing personal deductions.<br><br>The Article does not view commodification as inherently harmful. Rather, it identifies several novel strategies for using tax law in modularly managing commodification's various dimensions. Tax law's pliability, I argue, allows policymakers to distinguish the sore aspects of commodification from its other, potentially desirable functions, and to encourage only the latter. This analysis does not only provide a new perspective for evaluating tax policy, but also provides the commodification literature with a unique set of tools for effectively addressing commodification concerns.