Top: Getting Money Right

Taxes Drive Money

Stanley Dundee

2017-09-19 v. 1.1

Here's Mitchell et al. (2016) on value from taxation (pp. 110-11):

One of the most important powers claimed by sovereign government is the authority to levy and collect taxes (and other payments made to government including fees and fines)... In all modern nations, it is the government's own currency that is accepted in payment of taxes... It is because anyone with with tax obligations can use currency to eliminate these liabilities that government currency is in demand. For this reason, neither reserves of precious metals nor legal tender laws are necessary to ensure acceptance of the government's currency. All that is required is the imposition of a tax liability to be paid in the government's currency...
Or see taxes drive money at New Economic Perspectives.

Back in 1913, Alfred Mitchell-Innes published a paper (with a sequel in 1914), which anticipated many aspects of modern money theory. Those papers were reprinted in 2004 along with responses by modern scholars in a fascinating volume. Mitchell-Innes cites the dissent of US Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase from the famous legal tender cases of the 1870s. Here's Chase, page 79 U. S. 578:

The real support of note circulation not convertible on demand into coin is receivability for debts due the government...
This understanding that taxes drive money is not even particularly new.