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Title: A Simple Reform Author: William Gillis Date: September 6th, 2018 Language: en Topics: reform, taxes Source: https://c4ss.org/content/51277
If the problem with taxation is the coercion, then surely the priority
of any coherent and consistent libertarian reformism on taxes should be
to minimize the number of people who are robbed at all. Of course this
would mean entirely abolishing taxes on the poorest.
By the non-aggression principle, a mugger drawing a gun on you to take
your wallet is a crime, regardless of how much you subjectively value
your wallet’s contents. Thus the government’s armed thug taking $20 from
a poor person is in a certain sense categorically the same crime as said
armed thug taking $2,000,000 from a rich person. The biggest problem by
far, the NAP says, is the stickup, the aggression, the threat of bodily
injury, less so the particular thing obtained by it.
Abolishing taxes entirely on say the bottom 50% would not only be the
most consistently libertarian incremental tax reform — in that it would
stop the largest number of violent robberies for the lowest cost — it
would also have the benefit of forcing the statist left to defend their
paternalist claims to know better than the poor how their money should
be spent. Think of how simple such reform efforts would be: libertarian
representatives could just introduce a bill to increase the un-taxable
portion of income/payroll by a few thousand dollars. It would be akin to
letting millions of people out of prison, out of being taxed entirely.
Meanwhile the net impact on the national budget would be minimal, less
than many other tax cuts. Leftists and liberals instinctively opposed to
all tax cuts would be incapable of wailing about a “tax cut for the
rich” and would have to directly tell poor people “we know better than
you.”
Now of course some might object in horror to the “unfairness” of some
people being taxed while others are not. There are, after all, a number
of “flat tax” conservatives who think it far better that everyone be
taxed than a few escape the state’s thugs. But this logic is patently
un-libertarian. Should we oppose reforms that would let some drug users
out of prison while others remain? Surely we should try to liberate as
many people as we can from aggressive violence. If one’s sense of
justice is that everyone be equally aggressed against by the state then
why not also or instead assert that they should be equally rich?
Lastly of course some bootlickers might try to argue that robbery of the
rich is substantially worse than robbery of the poor. This is a very
hard argument to make for a lot of reasons, not least of which is
because surely money matters more to the poor than it does to the rich.
Desperation, opportunity costs, barriers to entry, etc, strike the poor
dramatically. 50% of a rich person’s income might have relatively
marginal impact upon them whereas 5% of a poor person’s income is much
more frequently disastrous. If you object to this on the grounds that
utility is intensely subjective and maybe the rich person more
desperately values the extra millions above their daily needs, well
you’ve proved too much because then we cannot differentiate between the
theft acts at all. But even if you refused to extrapolate insights into
subjective value and fixated on some kind of objective and
context-independent moral value to each fiat dollar stolen, you would
still have to drastically discount the unjustness of the act of armed
robbery to make robbery of the poor somehow dwarfed by the greater net
money extracted from the rich.
And this points to why libertarians as a whole aren’t agitating to free
the poor from taxation entirely.
Despite much noise about principled non-aggression and anti-statism, the
libertarian movement remains almost widely grounded in a right-wing
narrative of class conflict wherein they broadly imagine the poor as
moochers and the rich as mostly unfairly burdened creators. Thus their
reputation and draw as defenders of the elites, defending the violent
subsidies that historically built and maintained absurd wealth, even in
some cases advocating for new violent horrors to save said elites. Such
vulgarity has always operated with the thinnest of veneers of support
for liberty, but it’s worth confronting when it attempts to appropriate
and weaponize the rhetorical arguments of NAP absolutists.
I, on the other hand, am honest about my broad social evaluations: I am
not personally an adherent of the NAP, I’m a consequentialist seeking to
maximize freedom for all. I think the NAP’s focus on the most immediate
and visible acts of aggression provides cover for complex shell games of
coercion and systemic oppression. To create a truly freed market would
require the tearing down of the self-perpetuating economic hierarchies
rooted in titanic historical violence and myriad active forms of state
subsidy, and to maintain a truly competitive market once we are freed
would require active socio-cultural pressure in myriad ways to organize
against and undermine the emergence of new economic elites or class
structures. As an anarchist I not only think we can do all that without
appealing to or empowering a centralized apparatus of violence like the
state, in fact I think non-statist means are the only possible way to
achieve such.
Personally I would support abolishing taxes on the poor not only because
it would limit the number of robberies the state performs, but because I
think the poor are by far more impeded than the rich in our society and
are owed restitution for everything that has immiserated and constrained
their flourishing. I also believe that they are, broadly speaking,
brimming with unrecognized or suppressed productivity and creativity,
and liberation from their chains is low hanging fruit that will benefit
everyone.
The explicit taxes paid by the poor to the state are but a tiny fraction
of their impediments in our grotesquely warped and quasi-feudal economy,
but it should unquestionably be a site of horror and outrage to anyone
of conscience.
Socialists might object that a program of abolishing taxes on the poor
without raising them on the rich might collapse public support for
state-provided social services, allowing the state to be captured by the
interests of a few taxpayers as a kind of explicit self-protection
service, with welfare systems only existing to manage unemployment pools
for exploitation. But how would that be any different than things are
now? What pretense is really achieved by forcing the poor at gunpoint to
pay in a meager portion of the state’s budget at great personal cost?
“We all pay in” is a terrible excuse for a redistribution project. If
the point is to embrace democracy, how can you justify obscuring from
the voters what your actual values and goals are?
Of course if you think that the erosion of “we all pay in”
justifications would erode support for the state and majoritarian
democracy and cause people to stop seeing it as “just the things we do
together” well to me that’s a feature not a bug.
And if by popular pressure the percentage of the population that pays
any tax increasingly shrinks until it encompasses only the absolute
richest and they in turn give away their vast and undoubtedly unjustly
acquired wealth to avoid taxation or are whittled away to nothing,
causing the state to disappear entirely — well surely that would be
something of a victory for all camps! With the state and their wealth
gone they can happily try to accumulate wealth again, in the open, free
of taxation, only subject a starkly declining rate of profit and diffuse
social sanction against centralizing accumulation. If they can actually
make a buck without the seed plunder and plutocratic institutional
structures benefiting them, great for them.
I agree with socialists that the poor are massively oppressed — vast
redistribution is clearly called for before we can ever achieve any
semblance of a free market or free society — but as an anarchist I
believe that economic reform and restitution must come organically from
the bottom-up, not the top-down. The state will only reproduce the
centralization and violence that constitutes it.
So get the state out of our lives. I’m more of a revolutionary on this
front, but if you must be a reformist let’s start with abolishing all
taxes on the poor. Socialists who object will be exposed as the
paternalist state worshipers they are. Libertarians who object will be
exposed as acolytes of the plutocratic upper classes.