more on taxes

All the arguments I considered in my previous "taxes" entry under "issues" are consistent with utilitarianism (on which what matters morally ultimately is just the level of overall happiness).

There are also arguments of an anti-utilitarian sort, which take a more principled stand against taxation, to the effect that there is something intrinsically wrong or morally bad about "taking people's money" through taxation.

When individuals (as the result of income, gift, etc.) are in physical possession of money (or quasi-physical possession, given things like modern bank accounts), or would have been had it not been for taxation, they often quite naturally feel that it's in some sense wrong for that money to be taken out of their physical possession at threat of force (which, in one important sense, is all taxation is, where the threat is usually one of additional monetary penalties and/or imprisonment).

(What's usually at debate in the tax rhetoric between liberals and conservatives is the level of taxation, not whether to have any at all. But libertarians - true moral libertarians who apply their view to politics - have an argument against all taxation. The natural attractiveness of this argument is something I try to help my students see by using my thumb and index finger to simulate a gun, walking up to a student, and pretending to demand their money upon pain of being shot. And then I note to my students that, even if I were going to take that money and give it to Oxfam [or otherwise do something very morally good with it], and even if my "victim" were to know this, they would all initially react in moral horror. Admittedly, this little illustration is somewhat unfair to anti-libertarians about taxation, since, as normally practiced these days, there is nothing remotely like immediate threat of death, and, further, when I engage in my illustration, my "victim" has already lost tax money to the legal authority presently in charge.)

But the only theoretical explanations on offer as to why this really would be wrong appeal to claims about property/entitlement or claims about desert (i.e., deservingness, what people deserve). (Or, of course, both - someone could quite intelligibly think that both are relevant.)

1. I'll began with the latter, namely, desert. Often, an appeal to desert in the context of taxation simply just amounts to comments about "hard work". But this clearly will not suffice. Suppose one night I jumped the fence, got into your vegetable garden in your backyard, and worked really hard picking and collecting all sorts of ripe vegetables, and then the next day I succeed in selling them for lots of money. Surely I can't reasonably complain about the physical taking of "my money" on the grounds that I worked really hard to get it. So let's go ahead and put aside these obvious cases where hard work does not generate desert (even without demanding from the desert-proponent a theory of what distinguishes these cases from others). Putting aside these cases, I will make three observations.

A. What one gets (in terms of money) out of one's hard work (or, more generally, one's level of work, whatever that happens to be) is a function of a hell of a lot more than just that level of work. Things like background economic circumstances, background state of technology, circumstantial moral constraints (e.g., family circumstances), level of education, level of native ability/talent, and luck, are all very crucial. (Even if we treat level of native ability/talent as something which can generate desert, there are still all those other things which very plausibly do not, and they can all vary dramatically while holding level of work AND level of native ability/talent fixed.) So, minimally, for example, the white male American with the (at least comparatively) high-quality education who ends up with an upper-middle-class paying job in Silicon Valley cannot reasonably complain (on grounds of hard-work-generated desert) when the government takes some of that money he is in physical possession of in order to give it to a female Cambodian with almost no education who ends up growing rice for money (so as at least to marginally increase her quality of life). So, minimally, appeal to desert cannot ground a reasonable objection to taxation for humanitarian purposes (humanitarian purposes which could, of course, be intra-US).

I fully admit that this is not at all like the comparison between two white male Americans with the same opportunities, when those are evaluated by paying attention to availability of education, luck, etc. (By the way, all this illustrates, despite my not having given a general explanation, how it is COMPARATIVE desert judgments that are by far the most important when it comes to taxation. This is different from the issue of punishment, where it is ABSOLUTE level of desert that is more relevant.)

B. There is a very important sense in which personal identity changes over time, especially over many years and decades, such that (despite strict numerical identity, as philosophers would put it) it is extremely implausible to say that a person now deserves his very low quality of life for decisions he made four decades ago. For example, suppose someone made very bad decisions in his early 20th, took a lot of drugs, totally ruining for the next four decades (at least given current politics) his ability, however hard he might work, to acquire anything much above a very low level quality of life (at least by American standards). It would be extremely implausible to claim that this state of affairs is justified because he deserves it, on grounds of his choices for decades earlier. So, further, desert cannot ground a reasonable objection to taxation for purposes of helping people out in these sorts of circumstances.

C. Even if someone deserves her plight (even fully deserves it, which has to be the very rare case), surely it cannot be denied that it is still a morally good thing if her quality of life can be raised. For example, suppose someone was very lazy and made some very bad decisions over the course of several months, and at the end of the few months is in a very medically compromised state (whether injury or illness doesn't matter) but has no health insurance to cover it. Even if, in the circumstances, she deserves her plight, it is still extremely plausible that it would be a morally good thing if her situation were to improve (say, by the government paying for her health care). It is for this very strong reason that I endorse at least some level of minimal government health care even for the lazy and irresponsible, and why there is no reasonable appeal to desert as a ground for objecting to such governmental expenditure of tax revenues.

2. Let's now turn to appeal to property/entitlement. Someone might argue: forget about desert; it's MY body (not just something I bear a physical relation to, but something I bear a very important moral relation to), and, using it to work on things I am entitled to work on (e.g., things owned by other people who gave their consent to my so working on them), I performed some services and/or produced some goods which led, via antecedent informed and consensual agreement by all involved parties, to my having physical possession of some amount of money; so it's MY money, i.e., money I'm entitled to, money I have ownership over; so it's just wrong for anyone or anything else to forcibly take any of it away from me.

This, I will most certainly grant, is an intuitively compelling line of argument. Nonetheless, once you really pause to think over it, it turns out to be seriously problematic.

There are two important things to note in this spirit.

A. Let's go ahead and temporarily grant the (admittedly very natural) idea of "MY body", i.e., the idea that one bears a very important moral relation to one's body such that, when one uses it to work on things one is entitled to work on, one is then entitled to the results of such work as determined by antecedent informed and consensual agreement. (Philosophers these days would use the term "self-ownership" for this moral relation supposedly holding between oneself and one's body.) Since pretty much everything ultimately has some natural resource input (e.g., no one's body comes equipped with completely internal powers of TV creation), whether or not one is ultimately entitled to work on the things that one does, so that, as just explained, one is entitled to the results, depends upon whether the initial use of natural resources (in particular, the distribution of those uses) was morally proper. And - here is the punchline - it is simply very implausible to claim that this condition of moral propriety on initial natural resource use is met. Saudis (or at least some Saudis) are rich because of very unequal access to natural resources in the form of oil. Turning to the US, all sorts of historical facts crucial to our current economic, political, and technological state such that people can get jobs paying nice 5 and 6 figures salaries involve blatant violations of this moral propriety condition. Think of historical facts concerning military action against Native Americans and how the US acquired all the land it now has, something very crucial to our current state. And think of how, already having leveraged itself into a superior bargaining position, the US gets itself even further unequal access to various kinds of natural resources (rice, bananas, oil, etc.). Given an enormous multitude of such historical facts, it actually turns out to be rather absurd to claim that one is morally entitled to whatever one gets out of one's standard American job. And so, as a result, there can be no reasonable appeal to entitlement of this sort to claim that there's got to be something intrinsically morally bad about taxation.

B. Further, even if there is something to this "MY body" idea, it would be implausible to exaggerate its significance to the level of saying "whatever is in conflict with it/'MY body' is intrinsically morally wrong, period". For example, imagine four people living on an isolated and very technologically underdeveloped island. Further, suppose everyone needs blankets to survive the cold of the night, and the only source of adequate blanket material is the especially long and robust hair that grows on the head of one of the individuals, Mr. Hairy. In that case, surely Mr. Hairy could not reasonably refuse some of his hair to the other three individuals on grounds of "MY body". And if, in the face of Mr. Hairy's refusal, the three other individuals took some of his hair at threat of force (in particular, threat of imprisonment of some duration), surely he could not reasonably complain on grounds of "MY body". Perhaps in both cases Mr. Hairy could reasonably appeal to "MY body" if the others wanted his hair merely for trivial decorative purposes. But, as we are actually imagining it, where the others want it because they need the hair for nighttime blankets without which they will die, such an appeal would be very unreasonable. What this shows is that, when the cause or project is morally worthy enough, taxation can be fully morally proper even when (if it were somehow ever to actually happen in the real world) it infringes to some extent on "MY body".

If you are interested in further discussion of these topics, I recommend:
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(By the way, my island/Mr. Hairy example is a modification of an example that originally comes from this last work, Otsuka....)

(A final parenthetical comment: I actually don't really believe in either desert or entitlement/"MY body", since I'm a pretty hard-core utilitarian. But I have not tried to argue for these extreme views here, since these extreme views are NOT NECESSARY to establish what I'm claiming about taxation. The basic point of what I've been arguing above is that, EVEN IF we grant the relevance of both desert and entitlement/"MY body", it is extremely implausible that these have the nature and significance needed to reasonably claim that there is something intrinsically wrong with taxation.)