2. Politics and Taxes Aren't All About You
Politics is precisely not about you, at least not about you only. Your taxes are also not about you, at least not only you. Neither politics nor taxes are about your self-interest, unless that’s been correctly enlightened enough to include the interests of everything you depend on. Politics, and taxes, are by definition about the teams you are on. We can easily fall into an ultimately self-undermining error if we don’t acknowledge that one of those teams must be the nation as a whole.
Taxes are where the rubber meets the road when it comes to loyalty to our national team. Taxes are not a transactional payment for what you directly get back in easily identifiable individual benefits. Taxes are your part of the entire cost of keeping your country in good shape. Your part of what the Founders defined as a key constitutional duty, which is to promote “the general welfare.” However successful and strong you are, you still need Team America to be thriving, or your prosperity is based on frail foundations. Contributing to the costs of programs you don’t directly use, but which are needed to run the country, benefits you indirectly. You might call that redistribution, but it is also enlightened self-interest and the required rational response to the logic of our national INTER-dependence. It’s time to put your money where your mouthed loyalty is, your rationally enlightened inclusive loyalty, that is.
Adam Smith, the much misrepresented master economist, usefully said “Every tax…is, to the person who pays it, a badge…of liberty. It denotes he is subject to government.” Like the Founders, Smith got it: No taxes means no government, no liberty, no public good, no practical platform on which to build a private pursuit of happiness. Taxes are not a punishment. They are the price of your liberty. What can look like a sacrifice is a sacred and immeasurable gain.
The crucial tax question facing the country this election is: What’s the right thing to do when the team you love, or at least can’t do without, is in trouble? Should the team members who are strongest step up and do what's needed and take one for the team? Or should they use their strength as leverage to force changes that will require that the weak do more, while the strong do less? Which of those is the right thing to do, the decent thing to do, the loyal thing to do? However you dress it up, that’s the moral shape of the tax issues we face.
Gregory Mankiw, a Mitt Romney adviser, said in a New York Times op-ed, “Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that when the government taxes the rich, only the rich bear the burden.” But much more important is the opposite idea: Don’t let apologists for the shirking strong fool you—tax cuts for the wealthy are specifically an added burden others will have to bear. Every dollar less they pay is a dollar more the rest of Team America will have to provide somehow.
Though frequently framed to focus attention on your individual self-interest, politics and economics are really team sports and necessarily involve interactions with the interests of others. Any ideas that spotlight the self-only aspects, but leave your INTER-dependencies in the dark, put you at risk of being led into logical errors. We must broaden the beam of our illuminating ideas, as the Founders did, to correctly enlighten our self-interests, by including the role of the public good.
Taxes are where the rubber meets the road when it comes to loyalty to our national team. Taxes are not a transactional payment for what you directly get back in easily identifiable individual benefits. Taxes are your part of the entire cost of keeping your country in good shape. Your part of what the Founders defined as a key constitutional duty, which is to promote “the general welfare.” However successful and strong you are, you still need Team America to be thriving, or your prosperity is based on frail foundations. Contributing to the costs of programs you don’t directly use, but which are needed to run the country, benefits you indirectly. You might call that redistribution, but it is also enlightened self-interest and the required rational response to the logic of our national INTER-dependence. It’s time to put your money where your mouthed loyalty is, your rationally enlightened inclusive loyalty, that is.
Adam Smith, the much misrepresented master economist, usefully said “Every tax…is, to the person who pays it, a badge…of liberty. It denotes he is subject to government.” Like the Founders, Smith got it: No taxes means no government, no liberty, no public good, no practical platform on which to build a private pursuit of happiness. Taxes are not a punishment. They are the price of your liberty. What can look like a sacrifice is a sacred and immeasurable gain.
The crucial tax question facing the country this election is: What’s the right thing to do when the team you love, or at least can’t do without, is in trouble? Should the team members who are strongest step up and do what's needed and take one for the team? Or should they use their strength as leverage to force changes that will require that the weak do more, while the strong do less? Which of those is the right thing to do, the decent thing to do, the loyal thing to do? However you dress it up, that’s the moral shape of the tax issues we face.
Gregory Mankiw, a Mitt Romney adviser, said in a New York Times op-ed, “Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that when the government taxes the rich, only the rich bear the burden.” But much more important is the opposite idea: Don’t let apologists for the shirking strong fool you—tax cuts for the wealthy are specifically an added burden others will have to bear. Every dollar less they pay is a dollar more the rest of Team America will have to provide somehow.
Though frequently framed to focus attention on your individual self-interest, politics and economics are really team sports and necessarily involve interactions with the interests of others. Any ideas that spotlight the self-only aspects, but leave your INTER-dependencies in the dark, put you at risk of being led into logical errors. We must broaden the beam of our illuminating ideas, as the Founders did, to correctly enlighten our self-interests, by including the role of the public good.