Should government's power to tax be limited? The events of the late 1970s in the wake of California's Proposition 13 brought this question very sharply into popular focus. Whether the power to tax should be restricted, and if so how, are issues of immediate policy significance. Providing a serious analysis of these issues, the authors offer an approach to the understanding and evaluation of the fiscal system, one that yields profound implications. Fiscal arrangements are analysed in terms of the preferences of citizen-taxpayers who are permitted at some constitutional level of choice to select the fiscal institutions to which they themselves are to be subject over an uncertain future.