Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, June 26, 2006

"Taxes are the price we pay for civilization." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Over on his personal blog the other day, my friend Mike Treder, wrote this: "Taxation, in my view, is not a ‘necessary evil’ and should not be regarded as an accommodation we grudgingly make. On the contrary, taxation is a positive."

This is a sentiment that seems obviously true to some people and, apparently, equally obviously untrue to even more people, at any rate in the United State these days.

Actually, it seems to me perfectly reasonable that a person will feel a little grumpy about paying taxes (especially in an era when so much tax-money currently goes to line the pockets of bomb building billionaires to kill countless innocents and, hence, ensure there will be future generations of traumatized militants to use as the pretext for keeping that corporate-militarist money machine in perpetual motion), but Mike is of course exactly right when he says: "When applied wisely, wealth redistribution results in positive-sum gains. This works at every level, from family to municipality to region to nation (and, someday, the whole world). It is a means of establishing and building community; indeed, it is the basis of any healthy, interdependent, civilized society."

I think it is very important for dem-left folks to talk regularly about these basic points, however obvious we find them, because there is a vast and insidiously ramifying constellation of hyper-individualist assumptions and arguments that are uncritically accepted across both the contemporary American right and left that really damages our capacity to explain some of the vital intuitions dem-lefties otherwise share about the necessity to accept our common inheritance, our ongoing interdependence, the way we all benefit from general welfare, and so on.

Taxes mean different things in different contexts.

In relatively democratic societies, for example, taxation is tied to representation. This means that government -- which has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, an invitation to abuse if ever there was one! -- can only fund its activities so long as people who are governed have a say in the public decisions that affect them. There have been few more powerful means ever devised to facilitate good government and undermine government abuses of its powers than this.

Anti-tax, incoherent "tax is theft" positions will often be completely indifferent to the ways in which unequal distributions of power, knowledge, luck, temperament, or what have you will tend to ensure unfair or duressed outcomes that benefit some over others -- even if these are not strictly speaking called "taxes."

This is why it makes no real sense to think of the so-called conservative crusaders who decry the Estate Tax as a "death tax" as true anti-tax crusaders in the first place. The elimination of the Estate Tax presently paid by a small minority of the greatest beneficiaries of relatively democratic diverse secular societies with a division of labor would constitute the stealthy creation of a "birth tax" disproportionately imposed on majorities of citizens, whatever their circumstances, simply by virtue of being born in societies saddled with sprawling irresponsible debt loads accumulated exclusively for the benefit of precisely the elites who refuse to pay.

Unless there is some kind of anarchic dis-invention of government as such, governments will still do things that cost money. And there will not ever be such a dis-invention, dis-mantlement, or "spontaneous order." I do not mean for that assertion to be taken as a kind of resignation or article of faith. On the contrary, the indispensability of statehood seems to me entailed by the following basic facts of political life:

[1] Dispute arises out of the ineradicable diversity of stakeholders who share a finite world but infinitely differ in their positions, histories, aspirations, capacities, and luck. [2] State institutions with monopolies on the legitimate recourse to violence would always arise out of the general preference for even duressed social order to the incessant violent adjudication of disputes. [3] But more to the point, we are all of us inaugurated into moral personhood in the context of already-existing civil orders subjection in which renders us the sorts of conscientious subjects who care to debate questions about legitimate state violences in the first place.

Given all this, it is actually facile to pine after smashing the state: One can only either champion the democratization of that state (which means you are a person of the Left), or champion control of the state by a privileged minority you take to merit that privilege as a matter of birth, incumbency, or natural merit in whatever construal (which means you are a person of the Right).

The dream of smashing the state is not so much utopian or idealistic on my view, as a confession of incomprehension of basic facts of political life.

The Estate Tax is one key way of funding some of the most socially indispensable functions of government in a way that asks most from society's most conspicuous beneficiaries (as would be the steeply progressive taxation of income, especially including investment income, and property, which should also be key sources of such funding as they are not) -- and even ensures that they will not actually suffer the burden of this payment while they live.

These socially indispensable functions of government include, by the way, the provision of healthcare, social security, education, maintaining equitable systems of law, financing of campaigns for elected office, licensing of professions, safety regulation, and access to reliable information. All of these function to render the scene of consent legible by ensuring that it is neither duressed nor misinformed and hence that market transactions are actually free, fair, and yield their benefits without externalizing their risks and costs.

To the extent that general welfare provides the substance of a scene of consent that is free in fact rather than merely as the empty formalism typically championed by market-ideologues of the political right (whatever their party affiliation), it must be pointed out that these provisions prevent stealthy institutionalized initiations of force through social stratifications that enable the relatively secure to benefit opportunistically from the relatively precarious and the relatively knowledgeable to benefit opportunistically from the relatively ignorant.

Either this means that much that has been derided by classical and neoliberal political discourse as "positive" liberty well satisfies the criteria through which "negative" liberty is typically championed, or this means that every benefit assigned to "negative" liberty is produced as neutral through a figurative sleight of hand and is in fact suffused with disavowed contingencies and parochialisms of the kind typically assigned to "positive" liberty.

As another good result, the Estate Tax (just like progressive taxation when it lacks the egregious corporate loopholes of the current corrupt regime) undermines somewhat the tendency for wealth to concentrate in ways that facilitate the emergence of any inevitably anti-democratizing hereditary aristocracy.

The loss of this intelligent source of funding would not eliminate the spending it pays for (and often the very people who decry the Estate Tax most are the very ones demanding the most costly military spending, which is sometimes the very basis of the fortunes they so zealously guard in the first place), it would just displace funding of the spending onto majorities who are most likely to suffer real diminishment in their quality of life by taking on this undue burden and whose misery is most likely to damage the capacity of our democracy to function in general (since misery makes people less informed, less deliberative, less tolerant, and, obviously, less equal and hence more cynical).

But quite apart from these familiar arguments, I think the problems with these "anti-tax" arguments go much deeper still, and involve real conceptual confusions that dem-left folks must grasp and respond to far better than we tend to do.

Part of the problem with the very idea of "involuntary taxation" is that it is oblivious to the ways in which moral categories we depend on for our sense of our dignity, categories like voluntary and property, are not themselves "natural" or "essential" traits inhering in the human condition as such but are the hard-won accomplishments of centuries of social struggle and public collaboration.

You know, I often think conservatives, neoliberals, libertarians, and such just seem to assume laws and infrastructure grow on trees, that they're just there to be taken for granted. Who cares how they came to be or how they are maintained? They'll just always be there. Even if we cheat and loot and dismantle and consume them, they'll automatically replenish themselves.

And so, the focus becomes how we should each focus on getting whatever we can as individuals -- assuming that the physical and ritual and legal artifice that constitutes the context on the basis of which we determine what is possible and important in the first place is simply to be taken for granted. Somebody else will always be around to teach kids manners and critical thinking and the rules of the road, to maintain the bridges and plumbing pipes and treaties and protocols (treaties and protocols that constitute the very substance of what passes for the market -- contrary to facile market ideologues who seem to think markets are natural upwellings of tidal forces of supply and demand rather than the contingent social artifice they conspicuously are instead), to clean up after our messes, and such.

But this kind of facile infantile disavowal of the social construction and public maintenance of what passes for civilization (including the cultural and social props for the categories of individual dignity, ownership, consent, and self-creation as well as for their corresponding experiences) goes very deep.

I suspect that the very experience people are calling upon when they testify to the intuition that there is something frustrating about "involuntary taxation" is an experience indebted to taxation itself. It isn't clear to me that what we mean by something being "voluntary" or that it is important to the dignity of individuals that crucial things be "voluntary" would make much sense or make quite the same sense if we didn't happen to be beneficiaries of a long struggle that sought to empower individuals as citizens in democratic societies devoted to general welfare and human rights, in part through the insistence that the legitimate force deployed by governments be yoked to a taxation that always confers representation in that government.

"Anti-tax" zealots just want to enjoy the accomplishments of civilization without inquiring into their conditions or paying for them themselves. This is definitely a way of thinking that needs to be addressed across many simultaneous layers of conceptual abstraction through to very concrete institutional argument. This is not to say that we won't grumble at the thought of the enjoyable ways we might otherwise spend the cash we have on hand that we must pay instead as the price of civilization. But sensible people neither forget nor disavow that civilization has a price, and that taxes -- like the active citizen participation that better ensures the taxes are spent righteously and well -- are an indispensable part of that price.

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