Thugs and Taxes

Tax journalist and author David Cay Johnston has offered a pretty quaint semi-historical defense of progressive taxation which can be paraphrased as: Independent wealth is predicated on the stability and safety of the city-state (polis, community, law governed collective) therefore the proportional wealth held by one or another citizen has to be justified to the community in general and not the other way round. In ancient Greece, he says, it was recognized that without the polis only thugs would have what they want, therefore within the polis a collective claim to wealth is presupposed and scaled distribution is only tolerated so long as it is merited and not out of hand. This is fine a transient tactic, or quick sell to get people looking critically at the idea of property rights and how they function, but we also must be conscious of what arguments like this implicitly suggest. This is after all a very boiled down social contract argument and like all its far more complex predecessors – from Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau to Fourier and Proudhon – it aims at a proper upholding of the terms or a renegotiation either through discourse or discord. I don’t doubt that a large majority of the followers of these philosophies at one point or another believed a reasonable resolution was possible, but the issue isn’t their intentions but what is implied unintentionally. When you say that before the polis only thugs got what they wanted you are essentially telling thugs or people who identify themselves as such that real freedom comes with retrogression. In other words, thugs will see the polis as a check on their absolute freedom. And since most of the type-A personalities that run the tax evading companies Johnston reports on are these kind of iron will thugs of old in modern dress, or at least see them selves as such, his arguments will not bring them to the table of compromise but will instead reconfirm their efforts to dismantle the polis. The real problem, however, is that many people, not just the aggressive personalities, often are over generous to themselves in fantasy and imagine that they would be benefactors of a little bit of chaos. Hence conspiracy theories: when life doesn’t go as planned it must be a collective agreement that is curtailing your limitless potential. Too often a social contract understanding of society emboldens people to demand more, it doesn't inspire a sense of gratitude.