The Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the city of Charlottesville, VA can’t collect its business license tax from freelance writers. Writer Corban Anderson, represented by the Institute for Justice, will get a refund of the taxes he had been assessed.

The city does not list freelance writing as having to pay the tax, but the city held that a “catchall provision” in the law let it tax writers.

Virginia has a self-employment tax, which I assume writers have to pay. The issue here is a “business license tax,” which is something different. I’ve found the website for the tax in the city of Fairfax, which I suppose is similar. It requires applying for a business license before doing any business. That would mean Charlottesville required, in principle, that anyone who sells an article for money would first have to apply for government permission. Failing to get a license before going into business is a criminal offense. People going into business are supposed to estimate their gross receipts for their first year of operation; don’t ask me how anyone starting any kind of business can do that!

I haven’t been able to figure out whether writers were being taxed twice on the same income, but it seems likely. The business license tax is a municipal tax, so it’s separate from the state income tax. The amount of the tax might be deductible from the writer’s income, but that would still leave them paying more, unless they earned so little it pushed them below the taxable level.