Taxation really isn’t theft

The basics of property rights
In recent discussions around tax justice some right wing groups like the Institute of Economic Affairs have argued that it is morally wrong to tax people. They say that the taxation is akin to theft. The argument that taxation is theft comes from the idea that “I own my property and the government has no right to take it from me”. This needs a very strong idea of property rights and that is really hard to justify. If you look through the history of political thought two big arguments from two big philosophers define the debate on property rights, David Hume and John Locke. Subsequent thought has built on them and combined their views but understanding both helps understand the debate.

Government necessitates property rights
Hume’s justification for property rights is that the only type of government that people will accept is one that protects property rights. In his story of how and why government forms property rights play a crucial part for Hume. For Hume it’s a matter of Human psychology that people are not going to submit to a government which is going to take away their property therefore governments must grant and respect property rights. But the important thing to note about this account is that it’s descriptive not moral. People are selfish and so will not want government which conflicts with their self interest. This does not mean that people have a moral right to property simply that they expect property rights from government. One of Hume’s most well known ideas is that we cannot derive morality from facts about the world. Whether or not you agree with Hume it is very clear from reading him that he doesn’t think that these facts about government bring about any moral obligations. You cannot argue that taxation is theft from this point of view because you are talking about a morality which this view doesn’t even acknowledge exiting. The only arguments on taxation and property rights that this view allows is the question of how high a level of taxation will people tolerate.

Property rights come as a result of our labour
Locke’s justification of property rights is one of the most enduring and popular despite its religious roots. It’s more complicated than Hume’s and has far greater range of interpretation but most people agree on the core elements. When we work the land we infuse it with our own labour and we then develop rights to that now developed land because our labour is a part of it.  This works for Locke because the land is owned by God and God desires that we develop the earth. There are two restrictions to this ability to acquire land that arise from our duty to God. We aren't allowed to acquire so much land that it goes to waste and we must leave enough land for others to be able to get what they need. Locke believed that the invention of money circumvented these two restrictions. Money means that we can sell any fruit of the land that we ourselves don’t need and that others do not need to own property in order to get what they need. Instead people can be paid for work and buy what they need. If this actually worked then there would be unlimited strong property rights. But it doesn't. Whilst it is the case that people cannot find work, aren't paid well enough or cannot work then all property holders who have more than they need have no property rights to that extra property. 

More modern takes on Locke
Locke’s justification may seem a little outdated with its emphasis on working the land and God granting property rihgts but the idea that our work means we own what we make is intuitive and some have tried to salvage it. The most appealing to me of the attempts to modernise it are ones that focus communal responsibility. These accounts replace God with the community and say the obligations retained are to the community rather than God because land is communal. The most flawed attempts are those by philosophers like Robert Nozick who try to simply remove God from the equation. They deny that there are any obligations to others and simply claim that by working you have made something and that thing is purely yours. Nozick is one of the founder members of the taxation is theft club. But the problem with this point of view is they fail to deal with the other ingredient that is combined with your own labour. Creativity does not create property ex nihilo. There is always something which is combined with creativity to create property. In Locke’s story there is land, in modern life there is infrastructure that allows businesses to develop. Whether you say it is Government, God or the community something has a claim to that which was used to develop the property along with the persons own creativity and labour.

This is exactly what President Obama was talking about when he said “you didn’t build that”. It should be immediately obvious the stupidity of the republican response “we built this” when they handed out Lego bricks to attendees of their conference asking them to build things out of Lego. Obviously you made the building butsomeone else made the Lego. Another party (government, God or community) invested something into your property and therefore they also have a right to whatever you produce. Taxation isn’t theft in as much as it is simply the other party claiming the proceeds from their investment.

Poverty is about money, to say otherwise is perverse

Ian Duncan Smith is speaking again today about how poverty should be defined using terms other than money. Future measures of “poverty” that could be measured include family breakdown, drug addiction and worklessness. Whilst these are all bad things, they are each distinctly different from poverty. Only 37% of children in poverty are in single parent families and only a tiny proportion of those in poverty suffer from drug or alcohol addiction. This is well documented stuff.

If you measure family breakdown then a large proportion of what you will find will be family breakdown that occurs in rich households. Similarly drug or alcohol addiction isn’t limited to poor people. If the government aims to fight poverty by fighting relationship breakdown and addiction then that is a valid strategy. These things do have a negative effect on people in poverty (as I said earlier they are bad things). But if they are successful then you will eventually see the regular rate of poverty (measured by income) fall as these people come out of poverty. If however you measure poverty by looking at family structure and addiction as well as introducing policies to fight them then your results will look better than reality for people in poverty.

Government schemes tend to be more effective at helping already better off people.  A King’s Fund report looking at unhealthy behaviours showed Labour’s public health measures were successful at reducing unhealthy behaviours but this was mainly within already well off families. Part of what justified spending money on public health initiatives is because poor health is a much bigger problem for people in poverty. If the government puts money into fighting family breakdown it’s reasonable to believe that the main beneficiaries will be well off families. If the rate of family breakdown is part of measuring poverty then that measurement of poverty would fall without anyone actually in poverty being affected. This is a much better example of a perverse effect than the one cited by IDS.

Problems with measuring worklessness aside, unemployment is already measured and is a politically important number by itself with or without being taken as part of the definition of poverty. The majority of children in poverty have at least one parent working. But that’s not the crux of the issue. The crux of the issue is that if you are employed and live a perfectly healthy lifestyle but simply can’t afford to pay your everyday living cost then the government do not have a policy to help you. The government’s social justice strategy is devoid of anything that would help people who have a job that doesn’t pay them enough to get by. This could be because they don’t actually believe them to be poor but if that is the case then the government should just say so. It would be interesting to see how low a standard of living they would set as acceptable because as I’ve discussed before most would define the current as below acceptable.

Motherhood and apple pie: Politicians and Values

Selecting for values

I talked in the last post about how one of the functions of politicians is to act for proxies of us in parliament and we partially select them to make the right decision and judge them on perceived competence. However not all issues are right and wrong and competence isn’t the only the criteria we use to select politicians. The other criteria we use to select politicians is values. We want politicians to support projects which are in accordance with our values and not support projects which are in violation of our values. We are not aware of every current policy or every potential future policy responding to situations that arise but we hope that a politician with the right values will support the right policy. 

There seems to be two main ways that politicians show they share our values. First they highlight which policies they support and explain how this shows they have value X or Y. Second just go straight ahead and tell us what their values are either by saying “I love motherhood and apple pie” or by making judgements on cases “Bob is wrong to steal all the apple pie in the world”.

Values that don’t need selecting for
The odd thing is that most of the time when talking about values politicians talk about values that pretty much everyone has. Everyone thinks that hard work is a good thing. Everyone thinks that the neediest people in society should be helped. Everyone likes families. There is not a rogue politician out there who is trying to outlaw families. Nor is there a politician that thinks poor disabled people should be crapped on.  Politicians and campaigners talk about these values in order to make you think that their opponent does not value this thing. But as soon as you think about this for more than a second and realise that everyone in politics is a human being it is clear that this isn’t the case.

Right wingers don’t want to hurt disabled people. They genuinely think that removing state support in certain cases will help people help themselves. Left wingers don’t think that unemployed people should sit around living off the dole. They genuinely think that removing state support will make people less likely to get a job. Both have arguments to support their case. These issues actually boil down to competency and not values. But more often than not they politicians use them as evidence of their values.

Prioritising values
Aside from a few outliers politicians actually share most of their values. Where they differ is that they value one thing more than another. Whilst everyone likes motherhood and apple pie but not everyone wants to sell their mother for an apple pie. For example it could be argued that they value families more than hard work in their support for a redistributive system that takes money from earners (who work hard) and giving it to families. But no one does say this instead left wingers describe it as them supporting families (and implying or directly saying that right wingers don’t like families). Right wingers describe the same policy as not supporting hard work.

Value questions in politics are all about tradeoffs otherwise they are not value questions but instead competency questions. The two types of questions should be discussed differently. Questions of competence should be answered in a debate on evidence of what works and what doesn’t. Questions of values should be about tradeoffs. They obviously overlap often but the distinction is still important.  

Too often questions which are simply ones of competence are portrayed as ones of values. Other politicians are accused of not valuing the right things when in fact they are simply not achieving what they aimed to achieve. This happens to all governments, policies do not always achieve what they aimed to achieve. Often it is simply a politician being making an incompetent decision and not realising rather than being evil.  Political debate would be so much better off if we realised that rather than continuing the values confusion.