I Earned This Money...

There is an ultra-right wing / libertarian meme to the effect that ‘I earned this money, the government should not have the right to take it away’. That hearkens back to the neo-con line that they want to shrink government down to the size where they can drown it in a bathtub. Clever line, I suppose, but stupid ideology. They seem to have forgotten that government has a purpose, and that purpose is laid out in the very first American document – the Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

We live in a democracy – an imperfect democracy, where money seems to speak far louder than ordinary individuals, but a democracy nonetheless. That means that we elect the people who create the laws. We elect the people who levy the taxes. We elect the people who decide where those taxes are to be spent. If we do not like the results of the actions of those elected officials, we have the option to elect someone else.

None of us agrees with all the actions of the government. It serves the interests of so very many people and so very many groups. Some of those interests may be contrary to our personal interests. That does not make government some evil entity imposed on us against our will. It also does not leave us without recourse. We can either change the government, or we can move somewhere that the government is more to our liking.

Based on the statements of the right wingers, you would think taxation was some new evil imposed comparatively recently on citizens. Taxes go back as far as recorded history. As far back as there were governments, those governments levied taxes to pay the cost of the government. Why did they do that? Was it because they were evil? It was because the government provided services, and taxes were deemed to be the fairest pay to pay for those services. That is still the case.

Not every individual will use every service, and not every individual will use every service equally. The attempt is to be fair to the greatest number of people, both in the levying of taxes, and in the spending of tax revenues. In any given year, some people will pay for more than they get, and others will get more than they pay for. Unless we want to spend far, far more to create a pay-as-you-go for all government services, that is inevitable. Do you really want to have to pay for the road every time you drive to the store? If police patrol a neighborhood to reduce crime, do you want to have to pay every time they drive past? We could, perhaps, but it would be far more expensive and far more cumbersome than the existing method of levying taxes.

So when some fool asks why they should have to pay for something they don’t use, my response is because they receive some other service partly paid for by others. It should all work out reasonably fairly in the end, despite their protestations. Part of the problem comes with progressive income taxes, particularly among some of the highest income people. Yet in many ways, the highest income people receive the greatest benefit, though they choose not to recognize it.

The wealthy own large amounts of personal property and business property that are protected by military, police, and fire services. Their businesses use public roads to transport workers and perhaps customers to and from the business, as well as raw materials to and finished products from the business. They indirectly use public schools to educate their workers. They use courts to protect their legal rights in doing business. They may use the patent or copyright offices to register and protect their legal rights to original work.

We all benefit from most of those things, even when we don’t use them directly. Something like the patent office protects innovations, making it more advantageous for people to innovate and release the details of those innovations. That means we all have newer, better, and more innovative products than we might otherwise have. As patents expire, other companies can then use that technology to compete and reduce the cost of those innovations.

We also have groups like FDA food inspectors, who try to ensure the wholesomeness of our food, and force companies to make corrections when they don’t produce wholesome food. We have local and state health inspectors who check restaurants to try to make sure they comply with cleanliness requirements. Are those groups perfect? Far from it, but too often there are too few inspectors for the number of places needing inspection. Are we all better off – even the very wealthy - because of these ‘governmental’ efforts? I’d have to say so.

What about schools, though? Only a limited number of people are in school at any given time, and only a limited number of adults are parents of kids in school. Yet we all have to pay for the school system. Still 89.5% of the students in America go to public funded schools, and 85% of the private school students go to religious schools. So perhaps 2% or less of American K-12 students go to private non-religious schools. I don’t have hard statistics, but in talking with people about schooling, even most parochial school students don’t spend their entire K-12 schooling in them, but spend at least some time in public schools.

What that boils down to is that over 90% of Americans spend at least some of their schooling in public schools.