Idiot of the Day: On Taxes, Force and Missing the Point

I’m a little late on this, but I had to share this doozy from the NY Times.  In honor of tax day, Richard Conniff argues that we should start calling taxes “dues” because the word brings to mind social obligation rather than force and punishment.

The whole thing is kind of annoying, but the worst was the last paragraph:

So this will be an uphill struggle. But we need language to remind us that this is our government, and that we thrive because of the schools and transit systems and 10,000 other services that exist only because we have joined together. Instead of denouncing taxes, politicians would do better to appeal to the patriotic corners of our hearts that warm to phrases like “we the people.” “Taxation” is a throwback to the time when kings picked our pockets. “Paying my dues,” a phrase popularized in the jazz music world, is language by which we can stand together as Americans.

First, we don’t thrive in this nation because of government - we thrive because of entrepreneurial spirit, good ideas, liberty, moral values, etc.  This things are sometimes aided by taxes and government spending, and sometimes harmed.

Second, by singling out schools and transit systems, he ignores the main reason conservatives fight for lower government, missing the point of our outrage altogether.  I don’t object to the use of tax money to pay for public goods like roads and national defense, which meet the twin criteria of non-excludability and non-rivalry in consumption - things that are generally considered market failures.  I do object, most heartily, to the use of my tax money for those “10,000 other services,” which include transfer payments like welfare, earmarks, subsidies and other forms of corporate welfare, and programs aimed at social engineering.

Conservatives and libertarians also often object to the form that taxation takes, such as the unconstitutionality of an income tax, the progressive tax code that punishes success at the margins and the unnecessary complications that force Americans to waste time and money just trying to avoid breaking the law.

“Taxation” may be a throwback to an earlier time, but it conveys what “dues” cannot: the underlying threat of force behind taxes.  If you don’t pay your dues, you don’t get to stay in the club.  If you don’t pay your taxes, the government can throw you in jail.  That’s a distinction that goes far beyond semantics.

No thinking conservative sits around saying “there shouldn’t be any taxes on anything!”  But there is plenty of room for objections that go far beyond the feel-good rhetoric of doing your part and fulfilling your social obligations.

 

Quick Links

Because I’m too busy annotating a bibliography to blog, I’ll just link two articles you should read.

The first is Kathleen Parker on the recent feminist kerfuffle  over Ted Kennedy endorsing Barack Obama.

In the minds of women with nothing left to protest, true betrayal is supporting a man when a woman is running. How dare he. It’s all rather … frock-ish. Perhaps precious? In 21st-century America, feminist outrage has morphed into feminine pique.

In the press release, which featured the sort of exclamatory punctuation one usually associates with a too-tight bodice, NOW-NYS President Marcia Pappas wrote that Kennedy’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s opponent “really hit women hard.”

Note to NY NOW feminists: please find something more novel to complain about than how poorly Ted Kennedy treats women.

In other news, George Will writes about “The Biofuel Follies:”

To avoid drilling for oil in ANWR’s moonscape, the planet savers evidently prefer destroying forests, even though they absorb greenhouse gases. Will ethanol prevent more carbon-dioxide emissions than would have been absorbed by the trees cut down to clear land for the production of crops for ethanol? Be that as it may, governments mandating the use of biofuels are one reason for the global rise in food prices, which is driving demand for more arable land. That demand is driving the destruction of forests—and animal habitats. In Indonesia alone, 44 million acres have been razed to make way for production of palm oil.

In the rush to do good, or at least appear to be doing good, politicians are distressingly prone to forgetting the law of unintended consequences.  I think this is why a lot of conservatives (certainly myself) oppose big government. Not because we hate poor people, or think that we should live in an anarchic society.  We mostly just look at policies like ethanol subsidies and think “why exactly are we trusting these people to solve our problems?”