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No tax, no vote

Political ·Wednesday May 20, 2009 @ 23:25 EDT (link)

In researching this note I was reading about poll taxes, which it turns out mean two different things: the most common in the United States refers to a tax to vote (used in the past to prevent the poor from voting) and before that, refers to a capitation or head tax (i.e. a fixed amount paid by every person). The Constitution forbids a poll tax (capitation clause of Article I and Amendment XXIV)*. This does not mean it is not an excellent idea.

* Determining that while a poll tax is forbidden, an income tax is just dandy is pretty sneaky; you've got to hand it to them.

In the past I've thought about and discussed offline the idea of restricting voting franchise to people that are net tax payers, i.e., if you get more from the government than you pay, you don't get to vote. This could be interpreted strictly as denying voting to government employees, who of course would receive more from the government than they pay (although it could be counter-argued that at least some return commensurate labor; and of course it would be wildly unpopular to disenfranchise the entire military; nevertheless, we are trying to appeal to reason and not emotion). I recently came across these passages in Henry Hazlitt's Man vs. the Welfare State (Arlington House, 1969) that put it more eloquently than I could (pp. 93-4):

Clearly the great problem today is how to keep relief from getting out of hand. But how can we withhold relief from those who would merely rest idly back on it as a permanent way of life, and yet extend it to those who would use it to get back on their feet and once more become productive citizens? This is the baffling problem that I cannot hope to deal with here in detail. Our cities may find themselves compelled to return to some of the safeguards of former days that they perhaps too lightly abandoned—careful tests of needs and means and resources; aid in kind rather than in cash to make sure that the relief meets the particular needs it was intended to meet, particularly of children; a restoration of a residential requirement, to prevent people from moving to a city just to get immediately on its relief roll and to get more than in some other city; an obligation to do some sort of useful work in return for relief until a suitable private job can be found.

But there is a further way to hold down the relief rolls, and outstanding liberals of former days did not hesitate to recommend it. In 1914, A. V. Dicey, the eminent British jurist, asked whether it is wise to allow recipients of poor relief to retain the right to join in the election of a member of Parliament. And John Stuart Mill, writing in his Representative Government in 1861, did not equivocate:

I regard it as required by first principles that the receipt of parish relief should be a preemptory disqualification for the franchise. He who cannot by his labor suffice for his own support has no claim to the privilege of helping himself to the money of others. By becoming dependent on the remaining members of the community for actual subsistence, he abdicates his claim to equal rights with them in other respects.

In fact, Mill went much further, and insisted that no one should have the right to vote unless he paid direct taxes:

It is also important that the assembly which votes the taxes, either general or local, should be elected exclusively by those who pay something towards the taxes imposed. Those who pay no taxes, disposing by their votes of other people's money, have every motive to be lavish and none to economize…. It amounts to allowing them to put their hands into other people's pockets for any purpose which they think fit to call a public one.

In the political climate of today, anyone proposing that the right of franchise be suspended even for those on relief and merely for the time they remained on relief would be derided as having lost touch with political realities. Yet as long as the great and growing army now on various forms of relief and welfare programs retain the right to vote for those who promise them still more of other people's money, we may expect to see relief and welfare programs grow to the point where they eventually undermine the currency and bring on national bankruptcy. The reader will not find it difficult to think of countries where this has already happened.

And again, this quotation from p. 71 is also apropos:

What the guaranteed-income advocates are really saying, behind all their high-sounding phrases and humanitarian rhetoric, is something like this: "Look, we find ourselves with this wonderful apparatus of coercion, the government and its police forces. Why not use it to force the workers to pay part of their earnings over to the non-workers?"

He also expends a chapter (14) criticizing the (so-called) progressive income tax, which I've written about in the past with the conclusion that the fairest tax is in fact a head tax: people (or corporations, for that matter) that make more don't generally use more services, so any income tax, even "regressive" (i.e. a fixed rate, like the flat tax), or a national sales tax (including the fair tax, while better than the current mess, are still proportional to something that has no bearing on services used. The statists have stolen a march by moving the goal posts: far from admitting any more that any tax proportional to income or spending is unfair and punitive, they are even unhappy with the current "progressive" system.

My suggestion is somewhat of a compromise (although it won't seem so in the current climate): divide up government cost into an equal share for everyone (as in the other post). This will be high at first, but as politicians are replaced by new ones that want to reduce spending and allow people to opt out of expensive programs (which they will no longer have to pay for), it will come down. This is the cost to vote ("vote" meaning most likely voting for representation as now). (Better still: let people vote on whether they personally want to contribute or not.)

What about bills that don't involve funding? Shouldn't those on welfare be allowed to vote on them? First, I challenge you to find one (even making minor adjustments to a law moves money around at some level): but if you could, there are several choices. I favor the first: include it with the others: you can participate in government when you contribute to its cost. Another would be some sort of alternate set of representatives (or alternate direct democracy). Extending this, we could go deeper and not allow government employees to vote on government appropriations or military to vote on military appropriations. These are all the worst conflicts of interest: people voting to spend, as Mill put it, other people's money on themselves; they "have every motive to be lavish and none to economize."

One objection is that the young may contribute in future, or the old in the past: but they may not have sufficient funds at the time. From the young (if they're not claimed as a dependent, and it is possible to be of age and a dependent for tax purposes), the government will make loans if they are in school or other useful training, payable when funds are available, possibly with interest suspended while they are progressing towards a degree or certification. Voting should be valued, and a college youth can make a choice to be heard and pay in future, or be silent. For the old, since the cost of voting will be fixed, they can for the most part plan ahead and save for voting in their later years, if they so desire. (They may choose not to, especially if the government has become ideal, that is, libertarian, and is no longer stealing from anyone.)

After the initial sticker shock of a ($X trillion ÷ 200 million or so adults) tax bill, the expectation is that the current crop of bums would be voted out and some real tightwads—exactly what you want when they're spending your money—will be voted in. Programs will be cut, or made optional. An octogenarian, or college student, or disabled person won't find himself owing $20,000 but more like $200 for the few services he needs and has opted into: and if they still can't pay, it's reasonably likely that good neighbors will take up the slack. The idea here is not to charge everyone a whole lot, but to converge to the libertarian ideal of paying for what you use, and to re-empower people and local government to be responsible.

Books finished: America Alone.