“Uncle Sam, I want to know what you doing with my fucking tax money.”
-Cardi B
Last week of course was Tax Day, and I made the mistake of getting into another political discussion on Facebook. I posted one of those memes that quoted on top, “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society” and at the bottom it said: “WRONG – Taxes are the price we pay to avoid getting kidnapped by government.”
So one of my liberal friends responded, “No- taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”
And I responded with two words: “Or else.”
As I’d said last April 15th, I can’t agree with the premise that “taxation is theft,” but I get the logic behind it. It makes more sense than saying “paying taxes is patriotic.” Patriotism has nothing to do with it. Resident aliens have to pay federal taxes without being American patriots, and everybody has to pay local sales taxes. As for taxes creating a civilized society, clearly that’s a matter of opinion. What is unquestionably true is that we have never been able to fund a government through purely voluntary contributions, and so for government to exist and do those things that we deem necessary, it has to use law enforcement to get revenue. The main difference between private force and government force is the public’s assumption of government legitimacy. That is the only thing that makes taxation not theft.
If we acknowledge a need for government, that does not mean we all agree that that necessity makes everything government does a necessity. Was the Transportation Security Agency absolutely necessary to our existence before 9/11? And is it actually doing anything productive now?
There is a difference between supporting the government because it is legitimate and treating it as legitimate simply because it IS the government.
On this score, liberals broadly assume that the government is justified in itself, and therefore its actions are assumed to have necessary purpose, and if it acts egregiously, that only proves that The Right People need to be in charge of an ever-expanding system, not that the system has exceeded its justifications.
By contrast, if libertarians act as though taxation is theft, or government is inherently wrong, they are acting on the classical-liberal assumption that government is not infinitely justified in its actions, that it is necessary insofar as it is an improvement on the “state of nature” or rule by the local gang, and that when there is no distinction between the rule of law and rule by force, government loses its necessary claim to superiority over other armed groups.
The problem is that the current state of affairs is neither a case of liberals trying to make government do good things nor right-libertarians trying to impose limits on government. We currently have Republicans in power, and while they have in the past embraced both a Hamiltonian approach to big government and a libertarian sympathy to “small government” and business-friendly law enforcement, what we are seeing from the current Administration is the brazen declaration of conservatism as nothing better than the use of big government for the material benefit of those already in power.
The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, is used by critics as the go-to example of this psychology, for good reason. Among other things, Pruitt used his position to charge the government for repeated travel expenses including a four-day trip to Morocco, ostensibly to promote gas exports when that is not in the purview of the EPA. He is even more famous for charging the government to fly first-class on most of these trips, and for creating a detail of security guards that previous EPA heads did not consider necessary. (In his defense, Pruitt needs to travel separately from the common folk because he’s intensely unpopular.) More recently, the Washington Post reported that Pruitt charged $25,000 to have a secured phone service or “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility” built in his office. The article says, “according to former agency employees, the EPA has long maintained a SCIF on a separate floor from the administrator’s office, where officials with proper clearances can go to share information classified as secret. The agency did not specify what aspects of that facility were outdated, or whether the unit inside Pruitt’s office would meet the physical and technical specifications a SCIF generally is required to have. ”
Your tax dollars at work, liberals.
Not only that, while Pruitt might even exceed his boss’ level of taxpayer-funded decadence, Pruitt as administrator is a very typical example of a Trump appointee maintaining the agency that he was appointed to while serving the opposite of its purpose. Both Pruitt and Energy Secretary Rick Perry have used their positions to promote the coal industry and other polluters. Perry of course, became famous in 2011 for a presidential candidates’ debate in which he had promised to eliminate three federal agencies including the Department of Energy, except he couldn’t remember the name of that Department.
Now, liberals might consider the conservative-libertarian drive to kill federal agencies to be counterproductive or even crazy. But an Energy Department that did not exist would not be acting as a souped-up Chamber of Commerce and doing so on the public dime and with government authority.
This is not simply a case of reducing the scope (or budget) of a regulatory agency, but preserving its existence (against libertarian ideology) in order to enact policy to the benefit of private groups. Thus the premises of liberal regulatory government are turned against themselves in order to make government actively benefit the people who are supposed to be regulated.
Critics of government, both liberals and libertarians, have used the terms “rent-seeking” and “regulatory capture” to describe how elites turn government’s regulatory power to their benefit, but the modern Republican Party goes far beyond this. Regulatory capture is redundant when you can just BE the government.
Moreover, this is not justified in terms of any free-market ideology, including Randian selfishness. The so-called Captains of Industry are the people most dependent on government for their lifestyle. That which can be granted by government – like, unlimited vacation junkets – can be taken away by government.
And the only way these appointees and corporate beneficiaries can justify a government-sponsored lifestyle is to assume that this is the normal and permanent state of affairs.
When the ruling class considers the rest of the country to be not the source of sovereignty, but an economic resource to be exploited by force, and all parties involved conclude that government is serving no other purpose, that is when revolutions start.
Now, let us all work to make sure that never happens, but if it does, would liberals stand in front of the mob and say, “but without government, who would fix the roads?”
The point is not whether or not we want government to fix the roads or maintain public services. The point is that acceptance of those services is not a blanket justification of government institutions. Justification of government as such is exploited by the same conservatives who say government shouldn’t be spending on poor people, so that they can redistribute income upward and use government force to benefit themselves.
If leftists can’t grasp this distinction between libertarianism and conservatism, let alone the difference between ideal conservatism and what passes for it now, then they can’t complain when the rest of us question the difference between Stalinism and socialism.
Nevertheless, this means that the ultimate burden is on the Right. Because if the “official” right-wing party is going to embrace a level of villainy that Snidely Whiplash would find implausible, it threatens to render any opposition to the Democratic Party establishment illegitimate. Which means that anybody who wants a real opposition either has to invest in the Libertarian Party, create a new center-right party (the new Whigs, maybe?) or convince the “moderate” Republicans in Congress to volunteer for spine implants.