Taxes, justice and coercion
MY colleague wrote a very good post on his own blog the other day outlining some of the fundamental disagreements that make it difficult for liberals and libertarians to agree. I think he's right that liberals don't generally agree with quite a number of the propositions he's laid out, but the one that caught my eye in particular was this one:
Taxation is coercive but imprisoning the guy who nicked your lawn gnome isnt.
I found this proposition ticklish in part because the libertarian emphasis on formulations like "taxation is coercive" really is a good example of something that drives liberals nuts. I'll address why that is in a minute. But I also focused on it because it reminded me of one of my favourite episodes of a superb 1990s Dutch documentary TV series called "Buren" ("Neighbours"), produced by the deadpan telejournalist Frans Bromet, which actually centres on a dispute over lawn gnomes.
The dispute in the episode (which can be viewed here, if you're in the right country) doesn't involve larceny; there are two neighbours who both sell lawn gnomes out of their homes, they make vague negative insinuations about each other and about the quality of each others' gnomes, which they both import from Poland, and it turns out to be all bound up with one neighbour's Polish girlfriend, whom the other neighbour had also imported from Poland. But unlike this one, most episodes of "Buren" do involve legal disputes. In one episode, a man turns to the police after a pushy neighbour threatens to "cut his throat" during an argument; the neighbour says it was a figure of speech, the man then says the neighbour's son threw a cherry bomb in his yard, the son admits it but says it was in retaliation for the other guy's son dumping dog poop on their lawn, and ! so forth . In another episode, a family complains because the neighbour's stove hood vents into their yard, and they don't like the smell of her cooking. "Buren" aired in the years just before another Dutch TV producer, John de Mol, came up with "Big Brother" and launched the modern reality TV era, and I think you can see the influence.
So let me explain what I think this has to do with the difference between my colleague's approach to taxation and lawn-gnome theft, and my own. If the thread seems tenuous, I apologise. Anyway, here's what I understand my colleague to be getting at. Taxation, presumably, is coercive because the government simply orders you to hand over some portion of the goods you possess, on pain of imprisonment. You haven't signed a contract regarding this transaction, and it's not punishment for your violation of someone else's rights; it's simply forced upon you, regardless of whether or not you agree with it. Imprisoning someone who nicks your lawn gnome, on the other hand, is retribution for their violation of your property rights. It's not coercive; the person imprisoned has broken a rule with which they can be presumed to agree, the rule that people's possessions belong to them, and punishing them is simply just.
Liberals are likely to disagree with this formulation for two reasons. First, liberals think of taxation as paying one's fair share for the collective goods that make society feasible. Every society needs collective goods to function, including transportation and infrastructure, education, the justice system itself, and so on; the more wealthy a society wants to be, the more collective infrastructure it needs. Payment for those goods cannot be left voluntary, as ultimately everyone would welch. So paying your taxes is a basic obligation of citizenship, and collectively deciding on the level of taxation through democratic government is the closest we can come to making this transaction consens! ual. Not paying taxes means violating your obligations as a citizen; when the state punishes someone for not paying taxes, it is acting in a fashion no more or less coercive than when it punishes someone for stealing someone else's property.
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