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seawaspAnd here's my next discussion, this one on why you can't just view yourself as a pure and independent worker...
One of the most common refrains in the Far Right/ American Libertarian camp is "Taxation is Theft!", and variations thereof about how it's morally wrong to steal the results of your hard work, often with a clearly stated disdain for any arguments founded in the idea that supporting a society is something that requires any of their effort -- as though "society" is an at best neutral outcome of there being people, or at worst is the active enemy of people getting things done.
I was in that camp for a couple decades -- a Randian Objectivist-type Libertarian -- and so I am deadly familiar with that mindset, and with how clear and simple it seems to be to those who accept it. And -- as I discussed in a prior post -- a lot of this really comes down to a naive idealism about the fairness and reasonableness of the world, and about the ability of rational people to make rational long-term decisions.
And, to a very NARROW extent, I will absolutely agree that Taxation is Theft -- or rather, that it can be theft, as in, taking money from people who did not agree to it. HOWEVER...
Taxation -- or some mechanism effectively identical to it -- is necessary in any society that's large enough for people to literally NOT BE ABLE TO TELL what they owe to society. This is obviously connected to the principle of "diffuse benefits" I've mentioned several times previously. In a very small group of people, you can generally tell who does what, and how what Person A does affects you, supports you, or impedes you. This makes it pretty easy to recognize when you owe somebody something, and to be able to pay it back with labor, money, or goods.
This is simply not the case in a society of many thousands of people or larger. It's absolutely not the case in any modern country. You absolutely do not know -- may not even SEE -- what the benefits of the society are, because they are so complete and absolute a background to your existence that they are as invisible as air. But they are there, they are very real, and they are often very much diffuse in that even knowing about them doesn't carry the full impact of their importance.
Libertarians, for instance, often scoff at the "who builds the roads" point, arguing that private organizations and individuals could build the roads better, faster, and more reliably than any government-run agency. And, to a small degree, they're right -- but only when you are talking about roads (or other public works) that serve a sufficiently CONCENTRATED group of people that doing that work will produce visible, non-diffuse benefits, making some kind of profit for the makers of the roads. Privatization of services is well-known to result in non-service to outlying groups -- cutting them off from all the benefits of those services, and weakening those groups so that they have even less leverage to exert to get any access to or participation in society.
This is very bad for a society, as many of those in such outlying groups perform various useful services (say, such as farming, when rural areas are being underserved) that benefit everyone -- but not in a sufficient concentration to make any one private group find it profitable to take the expense of providing the service (roads, sewers, electric, internet, etc.).
More importantly, the very IDEA that anyone in such a society is a "producer" who somehow is generating their product without the support of society is, not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely ludicrous. Let's take my avocation, writing, as an example. A naive view of my work is that I sit down and write stories, and that these stories are 100% my creation, and I have done all the work in creating them. And visually, yes, that's exactly what happens. When I wrote Grand Central Arena I wasn't asking other people to help me write it, I sat by myself in a room and worked out all the details of the Arenaverse, and I wrote every single word that appears on paper.
But in truth? I was always being supported, moment to moment, by my society in doing so. Grand Central Arena takes its very existence
from my reading of hundreds of other peoples' works, most prominently the work of Doc Smith. I was introduced to Doc's work by Mr. Dickinson, my 6th grade teacher. My father's collection of SF paperbacks gave me much more inspiration -- and the existence of SF paperbacks is only possible due to the productivity of the overall society giving people enough leisure time and expendable cash to make it practical for people to produce tens or hundreds of thousands of copies of books and distribute them around the country. I'm writing on a computer that can't be manufactured without an industrial base of a hundred million people or more.
Writing fiction for money is the production of a luxury good -- something that literally has NO VALUE unless you're in a society that can afford leisure time for pure amusement. More, it's dependent on the existence of those public roads and extensive rail systems and shipping industry, to make sure the product can make it where it needs to go reliably, safely, and affordably. The ebooks are dependent on there being a robust, stable, trustworthy electronic network with secure payment systems and bandwidth to deliver the material anywhere it's requested.
None of these supports are things that just happen, nor are they things that become universally available because a company or individual decides to do them. They happen because SOCIETY, as a general whole, recognizes a need and exerts pressure to make SOMETHING meet that need. Government is, generally, the "something" that does these kind of things.
And to convince people to support the government? That's a hard sell, because -- once more -- the best government benefits are DIFFUSE. Universal healthcare would improve the average health of the nation, reduce the actual costs of medical support for the population by a factor of roughly two, and drastically reduce the overall number of sick days lost per year -- but on any smaller scale, these benefits look trivial. Moreover, even when we agree to provide some benefit -- a road, street lights, medical care -- there are always those who notice that they can benefit from it WITHOUT paying for it. This is an aspect of the so called "Prisoner's Dilemma", in which the best benefit for both participants is to be found when they cooperate -- but if one cooperates and the other betrays the agreement of cooperation, the betrayer makes out personally better.
When dealing with major societal/government issues, an awful lot of people choose "betray", in great part because they literally can't SEE the benefits.
Because of thise, some form of taxation (involuntary funding of the society/country) is necessary, and will likely ALWAYS be necessary.
Moreover, taxation of this sort both practically and morally MUST be heavier upon the upper classes than the lower. Those in the lower echelons of society are impacted far more by the loss of even relatively small amounts of resources, but those who are sufficiently wealthy are far less affected by the same proportional loss, and in fact often are actively improving their position even after similar losses. If I make 50,000 a year and I need almost all of that to survive -- which I very well may, depending on where I live -- taking 10% of my money in taxes could break me. But someone making 10 million dollars a year in the same location would barely NOTICE the reduction in lifestyle by losing 10% of their money. Even if they live ten times more lavishly than I do, they could be taxed at 90% and still be comfortably able to save ten times my salary every year -- without changing their basic lifestyle.
And the honest truth is that there is no one on EARTH who is somehow doing so much more work that they are, individually, creating a hundred million dollars in value per year. The super-rich are simply exploiting aspects of our society and its mechanisms to extract labor from huge numbers of people in the form of that value. Even the greatest and most brilliant inventors could only DO what they did because they were a part of our society, and had the advantages of those resources -- that collected knowledge and experience -- to build upon.
So, yes, taxes are necessary -- one can argue the specifics of any individual tax, but for the sake of the society THAT SUPPORTS US ALL in ways we cannot even begin to comprehend, we ALL are expected to contribute.
And -- as the Spider-Man principle requires -- from those with the most power and thus the greatest benefits of a powerful, stable society, that much more is expected to be returned to the society that made them.
One of the most common refrains in the Far Right/ American Libertarian camp is "Taxation is Theft!", and variations thereof about how it's morally wrong to steal the results of your hard work, often with a clearly stated disdain for any arguments founded in the idea that supporting a society is something that requires any of their effort -- as though "society" is an at best neutral outcome of there being people, or at worst is the active enemy of people getting things done.
I was in that camp for a couple decades -- a Randian Objectivist-type Libertarian -- and so I am deadly familiar with that mindset, and with how clear and simple it seems to be to those who accept it. And -- as I discussed in a prior post -- a lot of this really comes down to a naive idealism about the fairness and reasonableness of the world, and about the ability of rational people to make rational long-term decisions.
And, to a very NARROW extent, I will absolutely agree that Taxation is Theft -- or rather, that it can be theft, as in, taking money from people who did not agree to it. HOWEVER...
Taxation -- or some mechanism effectively identical to it -- is necessary in any society that's large enough for people to literally NOT BE ABLE TO TELL what they owe to society. This is obviously connected to the principle of "diffuse benefits" I've mentioned several times previously. In a very small group of people, you can generally tell who does what, and how what Person A does affects you, supports you, or impedes you. This makes it pretty easy to recognize when you owe somebody something, and to be able to pay it back with labor, money, or goods.
This is simply not the case in a society of many thousands of people or larger. It's absolutely not the case in any modern country. You absolutely do not know -- may not even SEE -- what the benefits of the society are, because they are so complete and absolute a background to your existence that they are as invisible as air. But they are there, they are very real, and they are often very much diffuse in that even knowing about them doesn't carry the full impact of their importance.
Libertarians, for instance, often scoff at the "who builds the roads" point, arguing that private organizations and individuals could build the roads better, faster, and more reliably than any government-run agency. And, to a small degree, they're right -- but only when you are talking about roads (or other public works) that serve a sufficiently CONCENTRATED group of people that doing that work will produce visible, non-diffuse benefits, making some kind of profit for the makers of the roads. Privatization of services is well-known to result in non-service to outlying groups -- cutting them off from all the benefits of those services, and weakening those groups so that they have even less leverage to exert to get any access to or participation in society.
This is very bad for a society, as many of those in such outlying groups perform various useful services (say, such as farming, when rural areas are being underserved) that benefit everyone -- but not in a sufficient concentration to make any one private group find it profitable to take the expense of providing the service (roads, sewers, electric, internet, etc.).
More importantly, the very IDEA that anyone in such a society is a "producer" who somehow is generating their product without the support of society is, not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely ludicrous. Let's take my avocation, writing, as an example. A naive view of my work is that I sit down and write stories, and that these stories are 100% my creation, and I have done all the work in creating them. And visually, yes, that's exactly what happens. When I wrote Grand Central Arena I wasn't asking other people to help me write it, I sat by myself in a room and worked out all the details of the Arenaverse, and I wrote every single word that appears on paper.
But in truth? I was always being supported, moment to moment, by my society in doing so. Grand Central Arena takes its very existence
from my reading of hundreds of other peoples' works, most prominently the work of Doc Smith. I was introduced to Doc's work by Mr. Dickinson, my 6th grade teacher. My father's collection of SF paperbacks gave me much more inspiration -- and the existence of SF paperbacks is only possible due to the productivity of the overall society giving people enough leisure time and expendable cash to make it practical for people to produce tens or hundreds of thousands of copies of books and distribute them around the country. I'm writing on a computer that can't be manufactured without an industrial base of a hundred million people or more.
Writing fiction for money is the production of a luxury good -- something that literally has NO VALUE unless you're in a society that can afford leisure time for pure amusement. More, it's dependent on the existence of those public roads and extensive rail systems and shipping industry, to make sure the product can make it where it needs to go reliably, safely, and affordably. The ebooks are dependent on there being a robust, stable, trustworthy electronic network with secure payment systems and bandwidth to deliver the material anywhere it's requested.
None of these supports are things that just happen, nor are they things that become universally available because a company or individual decides to do them. They happen because SOCIETY, as a general whole, recognizes a need and exerts pressure to make SOMETHING meet that need. Government is, generally, the "something" that does these kind of things.
And to convince people to support the government? That's a hard sell, because -- once more -- the best government benefits are DIFFUSE. Universal healthcare would improve the average health of the nation, reduce the actual costs of medical support for the population by a factor of roughly two, and drastically reduce the overall number of sick days lost per year -- but on any smaller scale, these benefits look trivial. Moreover, even when we agree to provide some benefit -- a road, street lights, medical care -- there are always those who notice that they can benefit from it WITHOUT paying for it. This is an aspect of the so called "Prisoner's Dilemma", in which the best benefit for both participants is to be found when they cooperate -- but if one cooperates and the other betrays the agreement of cooperation, the betrayer makes out personally better.
When dealing with major societal/government issues, an awful lot of people choose "betray", in great part because they literally can't SEE the benefits.
Because of thise, some form of taxation (involuntary funding of the society/country) is necessary, and will likely ALWAYS be necessary.
Moreover, taxation of this sort both practically and morally MUST be heavier upon the upper classes than the lower. Those in the lower echelons of society are impacted far more by the loss of even relatively small amounts of resources, but those who are sufficiently wealthy are far less affected by the same proportional loss, and in fact often are actively improving their position even after similar losses. If I make 50,000 a year and I need almost all of that to survive -- which I very well may, depending on where I live -- taking 10% of my money in taxes could break me. But someone making 10 million dollars a year in the same location would barely NOTICE the reduction in lifestyle by losing 10% of their money. Even if they live ten times more lavishly than I do, they could be taxed at 90% and still be comfortably able to save ten times my salary every year -- without changing their basic lifestyle.
And the honest truth is that there is no one on EARTH who is somehow doing so much more work that they are, individually, creating a hundred million dollars in value per year. The super-rich are simply exploiting aspects of our society and its mechanisms to extract labor from huge numbers of people in the form of that value. Even the greatest and most brilliant inventors could only DO what they did because they were a part of our society, and had the advantages of those resources -- that collected knowledge and experience -- to build upon.
So, yes, taxes are necessary -- one can argue the specifics of any individual tax, but for the sake of the society THAT SUPPORTS US ALL in ways we cannot even begin to comprehend, we ALL are expected to contribute.
And -- as the Spider-Man principle requires -- from those with the most power and thus the greatest benefits of a powerful, stable society, that much more is expected to be returned to the society that made them.
