How I Learned to Stop Worrying and ♥ the Tax

This commentary showed up on APM's Marketplace yesterday:

I love taxes. When I pay my taxes I am telling my community I value you.
...
If we are saying "I value you" when we pay our taxes, what are the people and corporations who don't pay all their taxes saying? Are they saying the opposite? Are they saying that all those people who do so much for us every day don't matter?

Exactly. I would add, What about the politicians who campaign on the idea that taxes are evil and my fellow citizens who, like lemmings, would follow those politicians off that cliff selfishly to keep a few extra shekels in their pockets? It's not all about the welfare state. It's not just about distributive justice. There is a public good.

In Locke Step

Much of the anti-government ire in the United States today seems to have its ideological roots among the Enlightenment thinkers who stoked the bourgeois revolutions of the late-18th and early-19th centuries, but there are significant differences between then and now, both in content and consequence. First, the political underpinnings of Enlightenment politics were not so much anti-government per se as much as they were anti-aristocratic. That is, the new middle-class in Europe and its colonies abroad had accumulated a critical mass of cultural and human capital which for the first time made it possible for them to generate a coherent identity and to direct the solidarity of that new identity at the falling nobility. Democracy was to be a self-correcting form of government to supplant the older, oligarchical model.

Today, anti-government sentiment is both irrational and indiscriminate. It is irrational because it is inconsistent ideologically, demanding that government simultaneously go away and continue to provide the invisible services to which our society has become accustomed. It is indiscriminate because it fails to recognize two things: first, the tendency for self-interested behavior to benefit only a select few (i.e. a new oligarchy) and the larger (and invisible) social structures that constrain so much of our behavior; second, the ways in which contemporary democracy can (and in countless cases has and does) benefit all individuals.

I believe the solution to this problem is in information. First, we need to hold our media to a higher standard. I can think of two recent examples to illuminate this. One is the midterm elections which were repeatedly called a "bloodbath," a "pummeling," and other equally hyperbolic qualifiers. The reality is that it was none of these things. By relatively small margins, one of two parties took control of one of two chambers of one of three branches of government. A shift and a message? Yes, but fully consistent with what has happened in the past to partisan-majority congresses in midterm elections. Two is the current debate about airport security. To believe the evening news, the townspeople have gathered in the square with torches and pitchforks, but the reality is that an overwhelming majority of Americans do not find full-body scans or pat-downs to be a worrisome intrusion on personal liberties. Second, we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard. Anti-government sentiments are rooted in knee-jerk cultural assumptions. For democracy to work--that is, for us to have a civil and just society--we need a critical and informed citizenry, not a bullhorn and a list of rhymed slogans.

A Culture of Civil Cynicism

Krugman would have us believe that we have taken a wrong turn, making a bad decision collectively, to limit government in a time when we should in fact be asking our government to do more, not less.

It's the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

I would challenge the origin of these ideas. What so many ignore is that the anti-government sentiment that seems to have come to a head in the likes of the Tea Party is actually a deeply ingrained part of the American culture. It is more than "rhetoric." It is hardwired into our national identity. In some very overt ways, the founding fathers intentionally hamstringed our government believing as Thoreau so neatly summarized, "That government is best which governs least."

In historical perspective, it is little wonder why early Americans felt this way. The Independence movement was an Enlightenment, bourgeois reaction against the perception of governmental intrusion (primarily via taxes). That first attempt at self-governance, the Articles of Confederation, was true to these principles. It was also a colossal failure, and likeminded proposals for editing the scope of government today would certainly share that fate.

Things are a lot different now in the early 21st century than the late 18th. We have gone from early industrialization to full industrialization to post-industrial service economy (i.e. finance). Our economy went from largely regional to global very quickly. Localized governance--at least as popularly conceived--is wholly inappropriate to addressing these intricately interconnected issues.

As an academic, I will be among the first to agree that cynicism and a critical approach are essential. However, when such thinking becomes so institutionalized that it becomes a kneejerk reaction writ large, it becomes counterproductive. In a representative democracy, it is the duty of the people to be vigilant. That vigilance needs to be accompanied by a reasonable awareness of the contextual realities.