I think it’s a testament to the core goodness (or at least the desire to be good) of most people that we don’t, for the most part, want to take things that don’t belong to us, and that we aren’t entitled to. It’s not that people don’t, of course. But when they do, most people take great pains to justify their actions in their own minds and to their peers.
Some people say the person they’re stealing from have more than they need. Some say their victims did something bad anyway, and so a thief is really just Karma’s agent. But the most insidious actually claim they are owed it, going so far as to claim an implied contract. A “Social Contract.”
What rubbish.
Take Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts’ likely Democratic Senate candidate next year, and her now-viral rant on the “Social Contract”:
“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.
“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.
“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
Any first year law student knows that an actual Contract is “an agreement with specific terms between two or more persons or entities in which there is a promise to do something in return for a valuable benefit known as consideration.” Both parties give something to the other, and in most cases, both parties come out ahead on the transaction.
Interestingly, Elizabeth Warren was a first year law student once. She should get her money back from Rutgers Law. Apparently in her world, if one person creates value via their labor, all the rest of us lazy schlubs who DIDN’T invent something or make something or risk something should get to just take a part of the profit, just because we live near the factory. We never dealt with the factory owner. We never signed anything. But we’re still entitled. And somehow, that defines a “contract”?
What this ignores (and what I haven’t heard a lot of in the criticism of Ms. Warren) is that everyone who pays taxes (and plenty of people who don’t) are getting the same benefit from our tax dollars as the factory owner! In fact, since the rich guy almost certainly pays more for the same police service, we’re getting a much better deal out of it. Oh wait – that’s right! The factory owner is also part of “the rest of us”!
It’s telling she doesn’t include the productive classes of society in her use of the word “us”.
~~~
But here’s the true nature of my understanding of the “Social Contract” I actually participate in.
I don’t pay my taxes for the benefit of the factory worker, I pay them for MY benefit.
I pay for roads, because I want to drive to work on them. I want to drive to stores and buy things that I want or need. I want to take goods home from the market, and I want the market to have the goods in the first place.
I pay for police, because I don’t want to be accosted on my way home from wherever I am. I don’t want the things I bought for me and my family taken from me, and if they are stolen, I want some help getting my stuff back.
I pay for fire services because I need help if my house is on fire. If the brush behind my house catches, I’d rather it not spread to my roof.
I’m glad the factory owner also has access to roads and police and firemen, but not for his benefit. I want him to have that access, because then I can access his product. Or perhaps work in his factory and get a paycheck, which is also to my benefit.
I pay for schools for my children’s benefit. I also benefit from having a population with a base level of education. I personally benefit if my neighbors are literate and can do basic math, if for no other reason than they can ring up my order when I go out to eat.
That’s the real social contract. I voluntarily pay my taxes, after getting a chance to help chose the person responsible for setting my tax rates. I make that choice based in no small part on what and how much that policy maker has promised me he will spend.
I make that contract with my government for MY benefit. I wish the factory owner well, but we don’t owe each other a damned thing.
We’ve both already paid up. That “next kid who comes along” will pay his own taxes (I hope), and he’ll also enjoy those benefits for himself.
The only thing I think our generation owes “the next kid” is to not saddle HIS generation with the credit card bill for OUR stuff, so he can’t afford schools and police and firefighters and roads even if he wants them.
And here’s the greatest part – all of this self-interest actually helps EVERYONE! Well, anyone willing to work hard and take advantage of the exceptionalism of our great nation, anyway.
~~~
Put it another way. Imagine the factory owner before he was a factory owner. He’s the guy working down the hall from me. We both pay the same in taxes, and get the same benefit – safety and a structure that gives us BOTH the opportunity to get rich if we have the will and the way.
Suddenly he has an idea, gets a loan, mortgages his house, and starts building The Next Big Thing and makes millions. Now he pays way more in taxes than me.
So yeah – he didn’t get rich on his own. He had the benefit of living in a free society. But he already paid for that, and now the difference between his bank account and mine are a result of HIS actions and choices, not society’s. (That is, unless Society stops thinking of property rights as fundamental individual rights and starts feeling like they can help themselves to other people’s stuff, destroying said society in the process. Or if Society has “bad luck.”)
He took advantage of an opportunity that I also had, but chose not to pursue. How in the hell does he owe me for anything?
~~~
You hear this argument a lot from people who aren’t bright enough to understand the difference between “carefully limited government” and “total lawless anarchy.” “I bet all those tea partiers enjoyed driving to their rally on those government roads.” Is there a more dishonest strawman in our modern political discourse?
If ONLY the government only spent money on police and firefighters and roads and other such necessities!
~~~
Here’s what society didn’t bargain for.
We didn’t agree to waste millions on lavish conferences for the Department of Justice.
We didn’t agree to throw half a billion bucks down the drain in a futile attempt to prop up a failing company that just happened to be run by a big Obama donor.
We didn’t agree to pay our firefighters absurdly high salaries, or to pay them twice when they weren’t even working.
We didn’t agree to pay out $16.5 Billion in unemployment benefits for people who were actually employed.
We didn’t agree to pay out $48 Billion – nearly 10% of all Medicare payments! – to people not entitled to them, or for a bureaucracy not inclined to take this fraud seriously, or to expand the government medical bureaucracy and thus expand the opportunity for this type of graft.
We didn’t agree to pay for dead people to get millions in retirement benefits.
We didn’t agree to pay all those taxes so President Obama could pay off political cronies and unions in the name of “stimulus” that didn’t actually do anything to stimulate the economy. (You could say it didn’t help “the rest of us”.)
~~~
Justifying bad behavior in the name of the “Greater Good” is surely as old as humanity. Claiming some other tax-paying citizen “owes” you in the name of some “Social Contract” is just the latest version of this fig leaf.
It’s ironic that a system that rewards people acting in their own interests and for their own benefit is “selfish,” even though it leads to prosperity, while trying to dishonestly work people up in a frenzy of envy and jealousy to justify your taking of things you haven’t earned is considered the height of altruism and social conscience.
Interesting article Orrin. It would have been interesting to see a comparison to Rousseau’s theory of a social contract.
Funny, I just took the mandatory Constitution Day training at work and they reference the social contract (in Rousseau’s terms) as one of three tenants that form the foundation of the Constitution. Strange.
By the logic of this post, Orrin, then even a flat tax would be a dangerous act of class warfare. Let me explain:
You seem to suggest that the social contract is a sort of fee-based exercise, where everyone gets a set of personal benefits from the government (protection, roads, etc.) in exchange for their taxes. And you emphasize that we’re all getting “the same benefit from our tax dollars as the factory owner.” So if that’s the case, how can we ask the factory owner to pay more? Even with a 20% flat tax, 20% of a Wall Street trader’s gargantuan personal income is certainly way more than 20% of $22,350 ($4,470), the poverty level in 2011 for a family of four, or 20% of $15,080 ($3,016), the income of a person working 40 hours/wk every week of the year…at minimum wage. What justification are YOU giving for charging millionaires so much more than $3,016?
Or perhaps you mean to say that everyone should pay their “fair share”–which, since our benefits are all the same, I imagine would involve figuring out how much the government spends and then divvying that up equally among its citizens. Let’s see: total federal, state, and local expenditures for 2010 were roughly $5.2 trillion (bea.gov), and there are about 312 million of us, so makes…about $16,500 per person.
Wait, that’s more than the guy making minimum wage even MAKES! That never-taking-a-day-off, 40hr/wk jerk better grab a second job, or we’ll have to label him a “drain on society.”
OK, OK, I know where my math went wrong…I was using numbers during the Obama presidency. No one should be expected to pay their fair share of a socialist state, right? Let’s go with 2007 instead: George W. Bush’s budget, pre-Recession, that should work, right? Total expenditures $4.5 trillion, so now we each only have to pay…$14,500. Whew, now that guy is a productive member of our society…so long as he can live on the $580 he has left over. And the family of four? Well, their $22,350 doesn’t quite cover the $58,000 they owe, but it is probably their fault that they are poor anyway, so tough luck. But since the median household income was $50,221 in 2009 (Census), we’ve got an awful lot of would-be citizens to evict.
I know what you’re saying…even during GWB the federal government was way too big. OK, so let’s cut the federal government ENTIRELY, leaving only the state and local governments ($2.8 trillion in 2008) and the Department of Defense (about $700 billion, as long as we exclude veterans…we can do that, right?). Darn! Still $11,254 a person.
Well, we can keep cutting, right? I mean, if the alternative is asking people who make more to pay more, we really have no choice. They’re the same benefits, after all, so we can’t rightly expect them to pay more for the same thing. Because, as you say, that is tantamount to signing off on a society that “stops thinking of property rights as fundamental individual rights and starts feeling like they can help themselves to other people’s stuff, destroying said society in the process.” And if we have to dismantle this society in order to save it, then so be it. At least the property rights of those who can still afford to be citizens–and our idealized notions of Locke’s “social contract”–are still intact.
Matt, I don’t think the post is about tax structure. It is refuting philospohical idea the left espouses that successful people in society owe a debt to less successful or unsuccessful people because we have a social contract that “allowed”them to be successful. The problem with that philosophy, as the post goes on to explore, is that it ignores the enormous personal risks that a person takes to become successful; whereas, the unsuccessful or less successful members of the society take no risk at all, and in fact could take those risks but choose not to. Yet somehow they demand to benefit from the success rooted in those risks. By that measure, we should also bail out those who take the risks and fail, and lose millions of dollars. Oh wait, we have done that already (AIG, Citi, etc.)
Hi, “The Wife” (not sure if I’m supposed to use your first name here), I’m pleased to hear from you, and I think it is so cool that you and Orrin share in your engagement with politics. Thanks for the reply.
With respect, I think Orrin’s post is clearly about tax structure, or more precisely, how our philosophical ideas translate into tax structures. The word “tax” appears ten times in the post, and the occasion for the discussion appears to be Elizabeth Warren’s comments with respect to current debates about tax policies. And as much as I would like to further explore some of the assumptions behind the way these lines are drawn—equating high-income brackets exclusively with production and risk-taking, equating low-income brackets with the “laziness” of the grasshopper in the parable, etc.—I chose instead to explore how Orrin’s own stated ideals translate into tax structures. So the question I posed in my first response remains: If we all derive the same benefit from our tax dollars as the factory owner, how can we ask the factory owner to pay more? It isn’t just Elizabeth Warren who is doing so…even the most right-leaning Presidential candidates only go so far as to propose a “flat tax,” which is based on percentage, not on set costs. Orrin himself recently wrote (on 9/8), “I’m actually very happy to hear [Obama] talk about getting rid of tax loopholes. Flat tax for all!” So I took the example of a 20% flat tax, and wondered how Orrin was justifying charging one person (a minimum wage earner) $3,016 and another person (say, someone making $1 million/year) $200,000. And then I explored what it might mean to actually charge taxes based upon one’s personal benefit derived (which, since Orrin said we all get the same benefits from our tax dollars, I took to mean that we should just divvy up the taxes equally), and got the figures I quoted.
If Orrin is unwilling to stand by his stated ideals and demand that all citizens—rich, poor, old, young, disabled, etc.—pay an equal share into the government coffers, I’ll understand. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for evicting more than half the population of the country for nonpayment either. But like he says in his “About First Principles” mission statement, “the very heart of discovering the truth of any principle – political, scientific, or otherwise – is to attack it mercilessly, comprehensively, and continually, all with an eye towards disproving the idea…If at the end of the day the idea still stands, then there it is (until something more correct and hardy comes along). If not, it’s time to rethink things.”
I hate to be in the position of defending Orrin when I know he is probably better and more capable of doing it himself, but I just can’t not respond.
Just because he uses the word “tax” ten times does not mean the post is about tax structure. Taxes define our relationship with our government in the social contract.
The problem with Elizabeth Warren’s thinking is that you can use it to justify a 75 or even 80% tax on the “rich.” Because “the rest of us” helped them get rich by simply entering the contract and paying taxes (though 50% of the “rest of us” do not actually even pay taxes). So they owe “the rest of us,” big time. Orrin takes issue with this way of thinking, not a particular tax structure. Though he does not explore tax structure in this post, I think its safe to say that Orrin is not, by any means, arguing that everyone should pay the same amount of taxes, from the person who makes $3,016 a year to the billionaires. Nor is that the logical result of his taking issue with Ms. Warren’s justification for taxing the rich more.
The justification for a percentage-based flat tax is that (1) everyone should contribute something (we are, after all in a social contract), and (2) the burden of a tax should be equal for everyone. Obviously a tax of $3,016 is going to be a much higher burden for someone who only makes $3,016 per year than someone who makes $100,000.
@The Wife: Of course I won’t take Orrin’s positions as your own, or vice versa, but I’ll be curious to know if he agrees with your two-point justification for a flat tax. The problem isn’t so much that “(1) everyone should contribute something,” with which I think everyone agrees, and in part explains the various *types* of taxes (sales taxes, property taxes, payroll taxes, Medicare and Social Security taxes, etc.). The problem–and I wager that Orrin will agree–has to do with “(2) the burden of a tax should be equal for everyone.” That term “burden” is rather slippery: who is to say what constitutes a burden? When someone making minimum wage pays 20% of their income (again, 20% of $15,080 is $3,016, leaving just $12,064), they are likely going to face some burdensome choices: food, or health insurance? Auto insurance, or gas for the car? And that family of four living at the poverty line ($22,350) would suddenly find themselves with $4,470 less to make ends meet: so should they get heat for their apartment, or take their sick child to the doctor?
Somehow I fail to see how the same 20% rate can be considered an equal “burden” upon someone making $1 million a year. With $800,000 left over, what exactly WON’T they be able to do that they could do before? Indeed, someone might decide that in order to make an “equal burden” upon this person, they would need to take away 98.5% of that million (leaving just $15,000), so that the $1 million/year person would also need to make tough choices about how to sustain himself. No one in the current debate is making such an argument, but as you yourself said of Elizabeth Warren’s thinking, the problem “is that you can use it to justify a 75 or even 80% tax on the ‘rich.'”
And remember, Orrin was talking about the benefits derived from our tax dollars, not the burdens caused by them. So after that $1 million dollar earner pays for 1/311-millionth of the cost of government, then (in Orrin’s words), “How in the hell does he owe me for anything?”
Matt,
“The [incredibly attractive and awesome] Wife” is right, as is her habit – the post was indeed philosophical. It was not to argue for or against a specific tax structure, but rather to attack the underlying, odious philosophy of the assumption that somehow people other than the creator of wealth is entitled to it, or indeed, actually OWNS it, merely by virtue of living next door.
In other words, do you (and your labor) belong to you, with you hiring agents (government officials and workers) to do what you can’t do alone, or do you and your labor belong to the State, with everything you “get” to keep merely a privilege that The Collective (represented by noble gov’t bureaucrats, of course) allows you?
Look – you can have exactly the same philosophical discussion on things other than taxes:
~~~
On taxes, though, I actually think it would be cool if we all paid exactly the same for our government services, leaving us with the true fruits of our relative successes. But since we live in the real world, that’s never going to happen, and it would be silly to not draw a line in a practical way. (This, BTW, is what makes me a conservative instead of a libertarian. Indeed there are some libertarians who would be fine refusing people emergency services if they haven’t paid their bill in advance. To me, though, that brings societal bonds below a minimum level necessary to sustain a government sufficient to protect and promote individual liberty. You can see some older posts for discussion of how a certain level of order is necessary to protect individual liberty, as there is no liberty in anarchy.)
Since we live in the real world, I support a tax structure which meets minimum needs of government, while at the same time maximizes individual liberty and incentivizes the growth of wealth and productivity as much as possible. It also must be “fair”, a word I hate for its ethereal nature, but use for lack of a better one.
A flat tax accomplishes this MUCH better than our current “progressive” structure, which means half the country has no skin in the game and a small minority are expected to pay ever increasing amounts that wind up actually DISincentivizing productivity.
It also has the benefit of incentivizing government to not stand in the way of wealth creation and productivity, since the more people make, the more taxes will roll into government coffers. (When taxes get too high, people don’t view them as legitimate and find ways of not paying them. And the more complex the tax code, the easier it is to avoid paying them altogether – a flat tax has the advantage of simplicity. Indeed, it turns out that no matter where you actually SET the tax rates, your ability to actually collect tops out at about 19% of GDP.)
A far too simple answer to a major issue that whole books have been written on, but that’s it in a nutshell. But to be clear – even a flat tax where government officials see private wealth as theirs to own, collect, and redistribute at will would be quickly considered illegitimate by me and (I hope) most Americans.
Well now I’m really confused, Orrin. In your original post, you said that the difference between a rich factory owner’s bank account and your own is “a result of HIS actions and choices, not society’s,” with the ominous parenthetical saying that a failure to respect this view of property rights leads to “destroying said society in the process.” But now you’re saying that while it would be “cool” to expect everyone to pay the same amount for our government services, “that’s never going to happen” because we live in the “real world.” So to clarify: all that bluster about the destruction of society was the *fake* world? Is this what you mean by speaking “philosophically?”
It sounds kind of like someone who gets caught stealing, and excuses his actions by pointing to someone else (here, Elizabeth Warren) and saying, “Well, she’s stealing *more*!” Either you believe in the social contract you outline—where everyone pays taxes for their own personal benefit, and is in no way responsible for someone else’s share—or you don’t. Which is it? If you are going to espouse this type of social contract, it seems a bit hypocritical to brush aside the clear difference in taxes between a minimum wage full-time worker and someone who makes $10 million/year (which even under a flat tax would be hundreds of thousands of dollars) as something it would be “silly” to defend, or as an acceptable casualty of fending off “anarchy.” Who gets to decide, in this modified social contract, just how much is acceptable to take from the rich? You fault Elizabeth Warren for espousing an “odious philosophy of the assumption that somehow people other than the creator of wealth is entitled to it,” and yet it seems that you are willing to do the same thing.
Reading further through your response fails to clear up this issue. Your paragraph, “Since we live in the real world…” is full of vague terms: “minimum needs,” “maximizes individual liberty,” “incentivizes…as much as possible,” and that word which gives you yourself pause, “fair.” Gone are the definitive statements of the original post, of “fundamental individual rights” and a social contract so straightforward that it gets the word “TRUE” in all caps. What are we left with? A sliding scale of injustice: your attempt to translate philosophy to actual policy (a flat tax) is not in keeping with the social contract you’ve outlined, it is simply “much better” than current policy. Like I said, “Well, she’s stealing *more*!”
That you have to resort to outright falsehoods to distinguish your plan from the current one doesn’t help your case. To say that “half the country has no skin I the game” ignores a host of taxes besides income tax—sales taxes, property taxes, payroll taxes, Medicare and Social Security taxes, etc.—that it would take a miracle for someone to avoid entirely. To say that “a small minority are expected to pay ever increasing amounts” clearly ignores even your own link, which shows the top marginal rate in the 1950s hovering around 90%, and generally dropping in the ensuing 60 years, to where it now sits at 35% (and that isn’t even getting into the difference between marginal rates and effective rates). And it doesn’t help that the conclusion you draw from that data was described as “Lying With Charts” by Seeking Alpha, a business-centered website (http://seekingalpha.com/article/78256-lying-with-charts-wsj-edition). The once-clear line between your beliefs and those you target seem to fall away, in favor of a simple question of degree.
So which is it, Orrin? Are you just going to pay lip service to high falutin’ philosophies like “individual liberty” and “social contract” in order to quibble with Democrats about whether the top marginal rate should be 35% or 39%, or are you going to stand true to your convictions and openly say that making multimillionaires pay more than someone on minimum wage is an affront to our individual rights? I think we deserve to know what is TRUE, and what is just bluster aimed at pitting one class against another.
Matt, this answer is frankly a bit silly, full of straw men and, as President Obama might say, “false choices.” You’re frankly operating on a serious misunderstanding of Conservatism’s philosophical bedrock, and therefore your “Gotcha!” attempt looks pretty goofy to anyone who DOES understand it.
For example, in your last paragraph you claim that either I merely quibble over top marginal rates, or I demand that Bill Gates pays the exact same dollar amount as your local burger flipper. There are, of course, many options in the middle, and the flat tax is one of them.
Philosophically speaking, yes, the ultimate in “fairness” might be for everyone to pay the same dollar amount for the same government services. But the purpose of government is not “fairness” (that word again!), but rather to maximize individual liberty. That’s one of the reasons I think “No tax pledges” are a bit silly, and rather miss the point of Conservatism.
While too much government is, obviously, a serious threat to individual liberty, too little government ALSO threatens individual liberty. That’s why, in spite of they idiotic straw man pronouncements from those on the left that we on the right are “anti-government” in general, no actual conservative or even libertarian is in favor of NO government.
(For example, too many regulatory interferences in the ability to freely contract damages the fundamental ability of two free men to use their property as they see fit, in a way they both feel benefits them. Such interference is rampant these days, like when the government tells me what health insurance provisions I must pay for and the insurer MUST provide, whether either of us want them or not. But without a courthouse to enforce a contract, the liberty enhancing ability to contract no longer is available. Therefore, in order to maximize my own individual liberty, I need government OUT of the health care contract writing business and IN to the Court running business.)
When I talk about “living in the real world,” it means I understand the need to take as many of these variables into account. Sometimes the resulting policy will be imperfect, but such is the state of man. But imperfection doesn’t equate to hypocrisy. For example, take a vegetarian who doesn’t eat meat for moral reasons. He still kills living things to eat them (including a lot of animals, ironically), but draws a line below which he can’t survive, because his continued existence is a higher philosophical imperative. It’s all about balancing, and achieving the maximum philosophical “good” possible given the environment.
You and I just disagree on what that “maximum philosophical good” is. I want to maximize individual liberty. You don’t. You want to maximize the Collective’s power at the expense of the individual if necessary – if in your view the “greater good” is served. (It’s the shifting definition of “greater good” that inevitably leads all centrally controlled socialist utopias into murderous nightmares.)
There are thousands of variables in the broad tapestry of government policy which can and do either increase or decrease individual liberty. Charging wealthier folks more for the same government services may decrease that liberty, but not having enough money to form an effective government that can provide basic services decreases liberty MORE. Therefore, the tax policy which maximizes individual liberty necessarily means wealthier people pay more as a pure dollar figure, as they would under a flat tax. But those are only two variables to consider – many, many more must be weighed by policy makers. It’s a constant balancing act, and that’s why Congress necessarily meets regularly.
But when attempting to strike this balance, the Conservative strives to ALWAYS strike it in a way that (hopefully) maximizes individual liberty. (Sadly, that doesn’t necessarily mean “the Republican.)
Liberals, to the extent they HAVE a bedrock philosophy, don’t. And that’s why Warren’s comments were so insipid and so dangerous. She thinks you and I ought to be functionally the property of the State. I don’t. The real question that pertains to THIS blog post, Matt, is which one of us do you agree with? Because that really is a yes-no, one-or-the-other answer.
Stop for a second, Orrin, and read your original post alongside your last reply. You’ve gone from illuminating the “TRUE” social contract of individual rights to glorifying the “greater good” in the span of a week. What a turnaround!
Let me first get this out of the way: I’m not sure I understand why you’ve chosen to attack what you think of as my own personal sense of government’s role. A careful reader of the posts in this thread will see that I have made no such appeals to an alternative vision. For the purposes of this conversation, it is irrelevant. This is YOUR blog, after all, on a website where you are ostensibly “in search” of the “First Principles” of conservatism. My questions have all been in keeping with that aim; I am not asking you to replace your politics with my own, or to judge your positions using anything other than your own stated ideals. Indeed, I am merely following your own stated mission of putting those principles to the test, to see if there are any places where the “bedrock” of those principles may fracture of warp under pressure. Judging from the yawning gap between your original post and your last reply, I’d say that your political house is experiencing a tectonic shift.
I am not simply faulting you for recognizing the imperfection of applied politics, or the necessity for a nuanced, “real world” view. That would be, as you say, a “goofy” attempt at a “Gotcha!” moment. What I’m trying to communicate is quite the contrary, actually. OF COURSE there are “many options in the middle” between quibbling about top marginal rates and expecting the richest and the poorest to pay the exact same amount. And I am quite willing to have such conversations, and to expect them from my leaders.
The problem is that YOUR OWN ORIGINAL POST takes great pains to draw a bright-line distinction, and tolerates no middle ground or equivocation between the two. There, you make no such mention of the subtle give-and-take of compromise politics, no nod to the realpolitik. Instead, you pit Elizabeth Warren’s notion of a social contract against your own. According to you, the former is a gross misunderstanding of the legal concept of a contract, which ought to invalidate her law degree; the latter is a “TRUE” understanding of the contract that binds us together as a nation. The former is an “insidious” rationalization of “bad behavior,” an attempt to justify the “lazy” taking what isn’t theirs; the latter is a system whose “bedrock” is the “fundamental individual right” of one’s own property.
I’m not sure why you accuse me of creating a straw man…this distinction is quite clear in the original post. I am not caricaturing you as an anti-government loon, I am simply taking you at your word that you hold a person’s work and wealth as their own, and that an individual’s right to their own property is “fundamental.” If you didn’t actually mean “fundamental,” perhaps you should have chosen a different word.
Once you’ve determined that this is our social contract, and that the government has no claim on the wealth of its citizens beyond what they voluntarily give in taxes for their own personal benefit, the questions I’ve pose practically ask themselves. After a rich person sticks in their $16,500 (again, 1/312-millionth the total cost of government, literally their “fair share”), and after the over-50% of the population who don’t make enough to cover their families come up short, where does the rest of the money come from? You are saying (without saying it) that those rich folks who planned to pay only $16,500 suddenly have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars more, and your explanation is that it is necessary for the State, in the interest of the “maximum philosophical ‘good.’” EVEN IF you trumpet that the “good” you are serving is liberty, and your intention is to collect their money in order to “maximize individual liberty,” you are still, according to your own principles, VIOLATING their inviolate, fundamental individual rights in order to do so. What if one of these rich folk say, “No thanks, I’m willing to pay my $16,500 for the roads, police, and fire, because I benefit from these directly, but I’m not paying two hundred grand for some vague ‘liberty’ fund.” Do you throw him in jail for tax evasion? On what grounds? Upon what social contract is he obligated to give more? It sure seems like the only reason you think he should pay more is because your government has a shortfall (possibly due to having to kick the non-paying half out), AND HE HAS THE MEANS. And suddenly you yourself sound an awful lot like the picture you are painting of Elizabeth Warren.
You are right, Orrin: “imperfection doesn’t equate to hypocrisy.” But hypocrisy does. Please kindly explain to the rich person you plan to throw in jail how your justification behind “taking things that don’t belong to us” isn’t the “insidious” version you describe in your first two paragraphs, where the person “claim[s] they are owed it, going so far as to claim an implied contract.” An ungenerous person may even go so far as to suggest that it is even more insidious to tout as fundamental the very individual rights which you then violate at the convenience of the State.
I do not wish to belabor my point at the expense of your bandwidth. It is your blog, Orrin, and as such I invite you to give the last word. Don’t get me wrong, I am perfectly willing to continue the conversation, here or elsewhere (quite enjoying it, actually), but I don’t want you to feel besieged, so if you’d like me to reply to something specifically, please say so explicitly. And more generally, if you wish to restate your understanding of the “social contract” which binds us as a nation, I am all ears.