Category Archives: ethics

Taxes, or Whose Money Is It? III

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This is the third of a short series of posts that explores the nature of taxes.  In the first post, I looked at the property nature of taxes: whose money it was, both before and after, the taxation process.  In the second post, I looked at a second set of questions: the nature and purpose of government and the purpose of government spending.  In this post, I answer a question concerning the utility of revenue neutrality for tax program changes.

We established in those earlier posts that money continues to belong to us and not our government after it has been allocated to government in the form of taxes.  We  established subsequently that what our government is permitted to spend our money on is quite limited.  From these, we can now answer that third question: is revenue neutrality in changing (by a little or with a wholesale replacement, in the manner of a Cainian 9-9-9 replacement, for instance) our tax system useful or necessary?

The answer to this turns out to be quite straightforward; although, it depends on a couple of circumstances.  Even though the money is ours and not government’s, and even though permitted government spending is quite limited, enclosed by those bounds are these simple facts.   Government has a purpose clearly defined by us in our social compact, and within that purpose, government must spend in order to achieve that purpose.  There is a minimum level of government spending, defined by that purpose, which our government must do.

Separate from this, but no less important, is the simple fact that people and our markets adapt to a government spending régime.  We always seek the optimal allocation of our money within the bounds of the economic environment within which we must operate, and we tend to stabilize there and form habits of spending and acquisition appropriate to those parameters.  Free markets adapt very quickly to changing conditions, but they do not adapt instantaneously: habits are hard to change, and changes take time to ripple through an economy.

Thus, the straightforwardly dependent answer to our question is this.  Plainly, since the money is, and always will be, ours regardless of whether it sits in the coffers of free market participants or those of our government, revenue neutrality from tax system change is not necessary, per se, and so it has no inherent appropriateness.  However.  Were our government’s spending already at that minimum level needed for government to achieve our purposes for it, then revenue neutrality would be necessary to maintain that minimum level.

On the other hand, were our government’s spending significantly above that threshold level, then a degree of revenue neutrality would be needed in order to avoid unnecessary market disruption while the new tax system is put into place.  Neutrality should not be absolute, here, however; with government spending exceeding its necessary amounts, some degree of revenue reduction in the year of enactment, is not merely acceptable, but necessary—as a first step in a separately needed sequence for getting that spending back down to where it belongs.

Our current government’s spending is wholly out of control: it vastly exceeds revenues, it is allocated to wholly inappropriate matters (vis., loans to government-favored enterprises), its allocation to welfare far exceeds what is appropriate or necessary (vis., paying people for two (or more) years for not working), and its allocation to entitlement programs which are bankrupt, or nearly so, is inherently wasteful.  Thus, we find ourselves meeting the second criterion above: too much spending.  A degree of revenue reduction in the year of enactment of a tax system overhaul or replacement is entirely appropriate.  Revenue neutrality is not at all necessary or appropriate today.

Confliction

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I confess to being conflicted about the manner in which Muammar Gaddafi’s death is being handled.  The problems I have range from the premise (as yet unsubstantiated) that he was murdered after capture, to the way his body is being held on display for the viewing pleasure of gawkers, to the delay in his burial, apparently in violation of Muslim tradition if not law, for the sake of those gawkers and for the benefit of outside agitators—human rights activists.  All of this seems to run counter to Christian and Muslim tenets.

It’s easy enough, though, for me to be conflicted; I live an easy life in a very well-off country.   It’s easy enough, also, for those human rights activists, from the safety of their ivory towers, to bleat about murder and their need—especially their need, they insist—to be satisfied that Gaddafi died properly.  As though they’ve never had to deal with the butchery of government thugs from beneath the thumb of such a government.

The Libyans, though, they lived for 42 years under Gaddafi.  For 42 years they suffered the terror of his random, unprovoked butchery.  For 42 years, Libyans had to suppress their fears and go about such lives as the Libyan regime allowed them in an outward calm as though there were nothing wrong—for how could there be; Gaddafi applied the magnanimity of his Third International Theory throughout his governance.  Many of today’s Libyan adults have never known anything other than Gaddafi’s…rule.

Rationally, in many senses morally, it is inappropriate to gloat over a man’s death.  It is inappropriate to delay a burial and a commending of a soul to its fate solely for the benefit of the still-living self-important.  But humans are emotional, as well as rational, creatures.  Our emotions demand to be satisfied, the same as our intellects.  In the end, the emotional release associated with the handling of an evil man, the emotional release from the treatment of Gaddafi and his body, may well override, and create legitimacy for, such treatment and such a display.

To paraphrase a man, “under the circumstances, the only logical action would have to be one of [emotion].”

Welfare and the General Welfare

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It has been argued that providing welfare for the least fortunate among us serves the common good—our “general Welfare.”  This is certainly true when that welfare flows from individual to individual or group, or from private group or the community to the individual or the group.

However, when that welfare flows, as a first resort, from government, it cannot be for the general Welfare—both by design and by logic.  That government welfare is not in the design of our government, not in our Constitution, is made plain by Representative James Madison in the 3rd Congress, on the matter of providing welfare to Haitian revolution victims:

Mr. Madison wished to relieve the sufferers, but was afraid of establishing a dangerous precedent, which might hereafter be perverted to the countenance of purposes very different from those of charity.  He acknowledged, for his own part, that he could not undertake to lay his finger on that article in the Federal Constitution which granted a right of Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

Rep Madison clearly recognized the dangers inherent in government-driven welfare: our Constitution has given our Federal government authority to pursue certain limited ends only.  These ends do not include authorization to provide the vast array of goods and services that today reduce so many of us to government dependency.  Instead, assistance is properly first the obligation of private individuals and private organizations, where dependency is not automatically created, and where it is accidentally, the scope of that dependency is far more limited.

Thomas Jefferson recognized, as well, the danger of ascribing a welfare component to the “general Welfare”—the national welfare—clause of our Constitution.  To interpret, wrote Jefferson, “general welfare” as granting the Federal government an independent power to “do any act they please, which might be for the good of the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless.”  He wrote on another occasion, “Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated….”  Plainly, this includes a lack of Constitutional authority to provide welfare to individuals or to government-selected groups of individuals.

Nor can the government, as a first resort, provide welfare—under the guise of the general Welfare—as a matter of logic.  The general Welfare is the common good; it is the benefit of all of us as a national whole.  Thus, it cannot the benefit only some of us, and it cannot diminish any of us.  Yet, when government serves as the provider of the first instant of welfare, it can do so only by taking from some and giving it to others through a wealth redistribution mechanism—by taking from a disfavored group and giving the proceeds to a favored group.  Plainly, setting some groups above others cannot serve the common good: it can serve only a part of the whole, and it can do so only at the expense of the rest of the whole.

In the end, then, if there is to be welfare, and there needs to be, it must come from us directly.  Welfare is a matter of our personal obligations—from our Judea-Christian heritage and from those First Principles of our Declaration of Independence.  All men have an inalienable endowment, imbued in us by our Creator.  We have, then, a personal obligation to be the first source of welfare for those less fortunate than us, who actually need the hand up.  But it must come first from us to us, and not first through our government as intermediary.

A question was asked recently of the Estonian Economics Minister Juhan Parts.  “[D]oesn’t the government have to help those on the losing end of social change?”   “Of course,” he answered, “it’s important to help a society’s losers, the ones who are left behind. It would be wonderful to have a fantastic healthcare system and offer social guarantees for every emergency.  But you have to have the money.  We…have to reflect on what’s important for a society’s development….  If all you do is administer, nothing comes of it. The state must clear the way for those who want to achieve something. That’s the function of the state.”

We knew that once.  We would do well to relearn it.  Together with that uniquely American perspective (absent, you’ll notice, from Parts’ answer): we are first to help each other.

Taxes, or Whose Money Is It? II

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This is the second of a short series of posts that explores the nature of taxes.  In the first post, I looked at the property nature of taxes: whose money it was, both before and after, the taxation process.  In this post, I’ll look at a second and subsequent set of questions: the nature and purpose of government and the purpose of government spending.  In a third post, I’ll answer a question concerning the utility of revenue neutrality for tax program changes.

Having established in that earlier post that, under our social compact, the money collected by our government in the form of taxes remains our money and not government’s, we can address that next set of questions, beginning with: what is the purpose of our government?   With an answer to this, we can address the second question of our present set: on what should our government be spending our money?

Reviewing, briefly, we recall that men began in a state of lawless nature, even though each had certain rights and properties inherent in their very being, and in these rights and properties, each man was the equal of every other.  This so-called Natural Man’s existence, though, was quite Hobbesian: the stronger could—and would—prey on the weaker: might made right, and the Devil enjoyed the hindmost.  Out of this existence, groups of men agreed among each other to form social compacts and then to create governments in which they would vest some portion of their individual rights.  In this way, a government could act to protect all of the members of the compact, against both external marauders and fellow members of the compact.  Government, thus, would enforce each member’s inherent equality and his endowment of rights and consequent liberties.

I also mentioned, tangentially, in that earlier post that Locke, Rousseau, et al., held that the only legitimate government was one that governed with the consent of those being governed—the second two conditions I described in that post.  Take note, thus, of the means by which Natural Men form their government: it is via a wholly voluntary agreement among the members of a group—a social compact—to form themselves into a polity and then to form a government to lead that polity.  By being the outcome of an agreement among men, their government is necessarily subordinate to those men.  Indeed, our own principles statement takes both the need for consent and that inherent subordination of government to men as First Principles (our endowment is one of our First Principles, also, but that is beyond the scope of this post).  On consent, our Declaration of Independence says in so many words:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

The inherent subordinate role our government plays is clearly stated twice:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

and

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations…evinces a design to reduce them…it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Our compact’s blueprint, our Constitution, puts this principle into practice:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land….

Thus, our nation is a nation governed by law, not by government.  Further, Article I, Section 9, the 9th and 10th Amendments, and the Bill of Rights generally make clear the American Sovereign is We the People, not our government.

Having arrived at the subordination of our government to us, what is it we have instructed our government to do?  We have required it, in a concrete way, to act to preserve our endowment of rights, our liberties, and to do no other thing at all.  This is clear in our Constitution’s Preamble:

…to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity….

Our government has, by design, that Lockean/Rousseauan purpose: to secure us from external threat, to protect us from each other, and in the process to enforce our rights and freedoms.  Absent from this is an obligation of government to protect us from ourselves.  That’s wholly our responsibility, as are the outcomes of our actions, where those affect us.

Within this mandate which we have levied on our government, then, on what have we authorized our government to spend our money?  Once again, we specified this in our blueprint, in the first clause of Article I, Section 8:

…Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States….

This clause explicitly identifies the purpose for which we have authorized our government to collect taxes, but since it makes no sense to collect taxes except in order to spend them on those purposes, this enumeration of taxing purpose is also is an enumeration of spending purpose.

However, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and today’s Progressives argue that this clause, in fact, authorizes spending for any purpose that Congress might decide is useful.  The clause’s position in Section 8, which enumerates the powers of Congress, both Hamilton and our Progressives consider irrelevant. James Madison’s argument, though, put forth in The Federalist Papers #41, remains valid today.

Had no other enumeration or definition of the powers of the Congress been found in the Constitution, than the general expressions just cited, the authors of the objection might have had some color for it; though it would have been difficult to find a reason for so awkward a form of describing an authority to legislate in all possible cases. …

But what color can the objection have, when a specification of the objects alluded to by these general terms immediately follows, and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon?

Plainly, then, far from any purpose at all, the authorization to spend our money is limited to that Article I, Section 8.  This drives us to wonder about the first clause’s enumerated purposes: to pay the nation’s debts, to provide for our common defense, and to provide for our nation’s general welfare.  Our debts are self-explanatory, as is our national defense (indeed, several of those enumerated powers simply add up to “provid[ing] for the common Defence”).  Finally, in light of the spending authorization’s position as the first of a series of enumerated powers, of enumerated taxing purposes, of enumerated spending purposes, those other enumerating clauses clearly add up to our general welfare, our common (as opposed to individual) good.  Indeed, our common good is itself bound up in keeping our country safe physically (our common Defence) and fiscally (paying our national debts).

Spending by our government can have no other purpose than these.  There is no room in our authorizations, for instance, for bailouts of institutions that have histories of poor decisions and irresponsibility with their own resources.  In a free market, the common good is best served by letting failed enterprises fail and thereby letting newer, stronger enterprises replace them.  There is no room in our authorizations, for instance, for wealth distribution, since that can only reduce the welfare of some as it tries to increase the welfare of some others.  The most effective wealth redistribution, the most efficient wealth redistribution, occurs in a free market where we can make our own decisions concerning the exchange of our own wealth, in the form of our money or goods, for the wealth of another in the form of his goods or money.  There is no room in our authorizations, no matter how heart-wrenching, for our money being spent via government mechanisms as a first resort, even on hand-ups those who’ve merely had a run of bad fortune.  Our Judeo-Christian heritage enjoins us as individuals to see to the welfare of those less fortunate.  Only after we have done what we can, only after our charities and churches have done what they can, only then is it appropriate that government spend our money on hand-ups.

Moral Hazards

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Earlier this month, President Obama claimed that “We created over two million jobs in the private sector — a million jobs this year alone in the private sector, but in the public sector, we keep on seeing these layoffs having an adverse effect….”  On the floor of the United States Senate earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers….”  And Vice President Joe Biden has been out on the stump assuring anyone who will listen that Republicans who vote against Obama’s Jobs Bill, or any part of it, are personally responsible for every rape, robbery, and cop killing that ensues after the bill fails.  Obama was plainly lying and Allysia Finley did a fine job of exposing him.  Reid also was plainly lying, and The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial staff did a fine job of exposing him.  Biden was plainly, well, Biden.

Rather than pursue the lies, though, I want to look at a different aspect of this “plan” of the Progressives.  This is in a throwaway line at the end of Finley’s column: “Paying governments to keep teachers and firemen on the rolls may sound good, but it actually creates a moral hazard.”  Let’s explore this moral hazard.

There are, actually, three hazards in the plan to transfer, ultimately, $130 billion dollars (the amount in the original Jobs Bill) to state and local governments, ostensibly to provide jobs for teachers, firefighters, and police.  The first hazard is that this creates a dependency in those state and local governments on continued Federal funding, and it inures those governments from the costs of the jobs they provide.  What happened with the nearly trillion dollar stimulus of 2009 that sent all those hundreds of billions of dollars to the states and cities for hiring teachers, firefighters, and police—or for “saving” all those jobs?  The Federal money ran out, and now there’s nothing left with which to continue paying those employees.  The state and local governments didn’t go through the belt tightening and efficiencies they needed to because, shielded from those costs, they had no incentive to do so.  Thus they still “need” Federal funds.  Continued Federal funding will only continue this dependency, though.  Further, continuing to have no stake in the costs, these governments will continue to have no incentive to take seriously their role in controlling them.

The second hazard concerns the individual recipients—those teachers, firefighters, and policemen—of this Federal jobs “welfare” that is washed through the state and local governments (what there is left of it after those government entities have skimmed off their cut).  They’re drawn into the same sort of dependency and shielding from costs.  They need this steady infusion of Federal largess—both in pay and in lucrative benefits—because, by using it for so long, they’ve lost their ability to work on their own—never mind that they might not be teaching, or fighting fires, or patrolling our streets.  Their dependency is just as complete as the governments through which their payments are washed.  And as with the state and local governments, these individuals have no skin in this game.  They just need their Federal hit.

The third hazard is this.  From where will the money for this “jobs” bill come?  There are three sources for this money: taxes, borrowing, and printing.  Yet, as Congressman Ron Paul points out repeatedly, borrowing and printing are just taxes.  Borrowing is a tax because the loan must be paid back, now and into the future, by us through our taxes.  Printing money is a tax because the increase in money in our economy drives up prices—it’s inflationary.  Ultimately, then, the money for all those dependency-creating transfers must come from the rest of us.  But this isn’t a private enterprise operation, where we as consumers get a choice in the product, its quality, and its price.  This is a government operation, in which we must participate without any choice or control at all: we must pay the tax price, and we must accept the product as it is delivered.  We’re denied a stake in the product; we just have to accept all the risk of which the state and local governments, and the individual recipients, are absolved.

None of this is to say we don’t need quality teachers, firefighters, or policemen; we certainly do, and in spades.  But we can’t continue feeding the expectation that the Federal government will pay for everything forever, that there is no such thing as failure.  That’s the path to national bankruptcy.