A Would-Be Philosopher-King Offers His Optimal Tax Policy

If I had any real power I would tax you all in the following manner:

First, I’d impose a consumption tax such as a VAT on traded goods and services. The consumption tax will have to be progressive, for example by way of a 0% tax on food and other basic necessities and a rate close to 100% for luxuries. A consumption tax encourages savings and investment and does away with the disincentives of income and payroll taxes which it will replace (disincentives to work, earn and hire). It also puts a stop to wasteful conspicuous consumption and status competition, at least at the top end. The sharply decreasing marginal utility at high levels of consumption means that the tax can indeed be strongly progressive, with close to 100% rates at very high levels of consumption. Such a strongly progressive consumption tax will leave incentives in place: a $1 million dollar home motivates just as well as a $200 million home, because people mostly care about how they are doing relative to similar others and all similar others will be subject to the same taxes.

Second: add an inheritance or estate tax because the wealthy, who will save more as a consequence of the consumption tax, will die with larger estates than before. Inheritance is inherently unfair because undeserved. A tax on inheritance not only reduces this unfairness, but does so without distorting incentives. Most other types of taxes have disincentive effects: when an activity such as consumption, investment, employment or pollution is taxed, the activity becomes more expensive. Hence, people will to some extent disengage from the activity (consume less, hire less employees, invest less, pollute less) or find ways to reduce their tax burden (offshore profits or assets, fail to declare income etc.). Disengagement is good in the case of pollution and consumption, but not for investment and employment. An inheritance tax is one that doesn’t have disincentive effects. People will not die less when wealth and assets are taxed after death. This tax is therefore sustainable, in addition to being moral.

It’s a kind of wealth tax. Wealth taxes, including an inheritance tax, promote consumption and are in conflict with the stated aims of a consumption tax (see above). But in the case of inheritance tax that’s a reasonable price to pay. Other wealth taxes – with one exception (see below) – will have to go, precisely for this reason, as well as other reasons: wealth taxes are difficult (they are a percentage of the taxpayer’s calculated net worth – total assets including cash deposits, real estate holdings, investments, trusts and shares in businesses, minus debt – and this net worth is difficult to valuate and easy to offshore); and they raise liquidity problems (the taxpayer may have to sell part of her assets in order to pay the tax, which will increase the supply of assets and drive down their prices, making wealth creation less attractive and possibly undermining the wealth tax). So, although a wealth tax is perhaps a fair tax – wealth is more concentrated in the hands of a very small elite, compared to income – it’s not necessarily a good idea.

Third: add a land value tax. This is a wealth tax, but not really a real estate tax, because the largest part of the value of real estate is the value of the land, not the value of the buildings. It doesn’t cost much more to build a house in Manhattan than to build an identical one in the Midwest. The house in Manhattan is much more expensive because it’s on Manhattan land. A land tax is similar to an inheritance tax: no one built the land, so people will not have less land when it’s taxed. And because no one built it, no one can be said to deserve it. So no incentives arguments against a land tax, and a strong moral argument in favor of it. Just as with inheritance.

Fourth: add some pigovian taxes (taxes on carbon and other externalities such as pollution, congestion etc.).

Fifth: abolish all other taxes, including taxes on investment income or normal income, on corporate profits, on labor/employment etc.

This system yields our tax revenues. A tax system can be justified on different grounds, and I’ve already mentioned a few, namely fairness, incentives (incentives to consume less, to save and invest more, to avoid pollution…) and efficiency (ease of tax collection and tax calculation). But an important justification of a tax system is its general purpose. What do we want to do with the tax revenue? Apart from the obvious goals – public goods such as a police force, a judiciary, a national defense, infrastructure, some regulatory agencies, public education, healthcare etc. – my main concern is welfare, or social security as they say in Europe. And like an increasing number of people I want to propose that we use our tax revenues to fund a universal basic income system which will replace all or most of the existing government support measures such as unemployment benefits, pensions, food stamps etc. I’ve defended the UBI in more detail before so I won’t burden this already longish post any more than necessary.

Now tell me why I’m wrong.

What Are Human Rights? (48): Something That Can Be Bought?

Take a look at this list, helpfully compiled by Michael Sandel:

• In Santa Ana, California, and some other cities, nonviolent offenders can pay for a prison-cell upgrade costing $90 a night. This gives them access to a clean, quiet jail cell, without any non-paying prisoners to “disturb” them – read: rape them.
• Couples believing that their infertility impedes their right to a family life can buy an Indian surrogate mother for $8,000, less than one-third the going rate in the United States. Similar transactions take place between patients in need of organs and willing donors, the latter of course very often poor and desperate.
• In the U.S., patients who want easy access to a good doctor can buy their doctor’s cellphone number for $1,500 and up per year. A growing number of “concierge” doctors offer cellphone access and same-day appointments for patients willing to pay annual fees.
• People wanting to emigrate to the U.S. can do so when they invest $500,000 and create at least 10 full-time jobs in an area of high unemployment. This makes them eligible for a green card that entitles them to permanent residency.
• A single mother in Utah who needed money for her son’s education was paid $10,000 by an online casino to install a permanent tattoo of the casino’s Web address on her forehead.

In all of these cases – and probably in many others I’m not aware of – people pay money or sell themselves – or parts of themselves – in order to have their rights protected, or they get paid in order to help others secure their rights.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s distraught by this. It’s true that rights protection costs money – a lot of money – and a large proportion of what we pay in taxes is used by governments to protect our rights (taxes pay for a police protection, judicial protection, welfare, healthcare, education and other rights). So why shouldn’t individuals be able to bypass the state and use their money to secure their rights when the state or others fail to do so? (By “others” I refer to NGO’s, international institutions, private charities etc.). After all, everyone should be happy with better rights protection, no?

Well, yes, unless we start something that will lead to systematically unequal rights protection. We don’t want the wealthy to have better rights protection than others, or to be able to continuously improve their marginal protection (e.g. a gated community as a defense against unlikely attackers) while the poor are left with almost no protection at all. Slightly modifying the meaning of a standard expression: might shouldn’t be right. The advantage of outsourcing rights protection to the state is that we pool resources and use them where they are most needed. The market isn’t always the best place to allocate rights protection.

Even the rich will consent to this. After all, they may be able to buy some of their rights, but not all of them and not all of the time. Participating in government protection mechanisms will secure their rights when their money can’t.

Another problem caused by individuals buying their rights is that we may see crowding out of moral motivation. If other individuals, companies or governments can get money for securing rights, they’ll stop securing rights for moral reasons. And finally, the concept of rights will be corrupted. Rights are not something which should have to be bought. They are something people have a moral duty to give. Allowing rights to be bought and sold corrupts the value and meaning of rights.

More posts in this series are here.

The Ethics of Human Rights (67): What Kind of Redistribution Does Luck Egalitarianism Require?

Luck egalitarianism is the theory of justice according to which bad luck that falls on people through no fault or choice of their own, is an injustice that has to be remedied. Whatever the merits of this theory, it does broadly correspond to certain widely shared moral intuitions. When you lose a limb in an accident, or contract a terminal illness, you probably feel like “why me?” and ask yourself: “what did I do to deserve this?”, “why should I of all people suffer this fate”, and “why should I be worse off than others through no fault of my own?”. You’ll have the same feelings when you happen to be born in a poor country, with a disability, in a dysfunctional family or in a discriminated cast or class. Such instances of bad luck lead to vastly unequal opportunities. And it does seem to be the case that inequality that is attributable to differences in our unchosen circumstances or abilities is less acceptable – morally speaking – than inequality that is wholly attributable to the responsible choices we make.

Of course, bad luck is unavoidable, but we can do something about the unequal opportunities it creates. This will inevitably lead to some kind of redistribution. The redistribution required by luck egalitarianism means that the lucky among us should transfer to those less fortunate some of the advantages that have come to us through luck. For example, we should pay taxes that are used to make life easier for the disabled. We can’t redistribute luck (for example, we can’t redistribute disease, accidents etc.). Hence we have to redistribute the consequences of luck. We should make the consequences of bad luck less severe or a bit easier to carry, and we should do so by skimming some of the beneficial consequences of good luck.

The redistribution required by luck egalitarianism is asymmetric: something must be done to help the unlucky, and that means taking something from the lucky; but it’s not the case that something must be done to make the lucky less lucky. It’s bad when people are worse off because of bad luck, but it’s not equally bad when people are better off because of good luck. Merit is important in life, and we admire people who are better off not because of good luck but because of what they did and who they are. But this admiration doesn’t imply condemnation of those who are better off simply because of good luck. The latter shouldn’t be condemned but they should part with some of their advantages in order to help those who are worse off because of bad luck. Bad luck is objectionable, and good luck is unobjectionable. But unobjectionable doesn’t mean that we are not allowed to confiscate part of the benefits of good luck in order to do something about objectionable bad luck.

And here we encounter one possible objection to luck egalitarianism: it seems like the theory doesn’t allow taxation of those who have acquired their wealth without any good luck (that is, if there are such people). Normally, most of us would want to impose a duty to help also on those who are better off not because of luck but because of what they did.

Other objections are here. More posts in this series are here.

The Causes of Poverty (68): Rich People Not Giving Enough Money to Poor People

You can criticize trade policy, immigration restrictions, bad governance or any other commonly cited cause of poverty, but you shouldn’t forget the obvious: there are a lot of wealthy people in the world who could, without losing much wellbeing (due to the diminishing marginal utility of money), help to lift every single poor person in the world to a much higher level of wellbeing.

The fact is that they could but don’t. We do have progressive taxation systems and other means of redistribution, we have development aid, we have charity etc., but none of these things yields enough money to lift everyone out of poverty. And there’s not enough public support to strengthen these redistribution mechanisms. Development aid is already unpopular at current levels, and don’t even start to talk about tax increases. The tireless efforts of Peter Singer and company to promote giving also have only a small effect.

The insufficiency of giving and other means of redistribution is hard to understand, in particular given the fact that rich people are generally not very dumb and able to understand the law of diminishing marginal utility. Of course, I know about loss aversion, the endowment effect, habit formation, the importance of status etc. But again, wealthy people should in general be the ones best able to overcome biases, to distinguish the important things in life from the unimportant, and to see how helping others can be beneficial to ourselves, both psychologically and socially (helping makes you feel good, and living a good life amid misery is socially untenable). But perhaps I’m wrong about rich people.

And then there’s something else stopping us from giving more (or allowing ourselves to be taxed more, which is roughly the same thing), namely the stories we tell ourselves. For example, you often hear that it’s better to allow people to look after themselves first, so that they can create the conditions in which they unintentionally help. Allowing entrepreneurs to get rich – i.e. not taxing them too heavily and not insisting that they should give their money away rather than invest it – will be much more beneficial to the poor. Many of the poor will get a job thanks to them, and their products and services will also make the lives of many a lot better.

However, this is not incompatible with giving. True, what you give you can’t invest, but we can allow people to delay their giving until the day that they don’t need to invest a lot more. The example of Bill Gates comes to mind. So we can accept that there is some truth to the story that free enterprise takes care of a lot of poverty, and at the same time insist that there should be more giving.

Another story we tell ourselves goes like this: giving people money isn’t a very good way of helping poor people. Many of them will just waste it, middle men will confiscate it, third world governments will misuse it, people will become to depend on it etc. Well, that doesn’t seem to be completely correct. Experiments with conditional cash transfers are very promising. And even if it’s correct to some extent, that’s just an argument to be smarter when giving money: invest it in businesses, healthcare etc.

And finally, there’s the story about agency: helping people is disrespecting them as self-authors and self-governing moral creatures. You may make them materially better off – at least in the short run because dependence on help may create motivational problems in the long run – but you take away their dignity and make them psychologically and morally worse off. People may not want to be helped, and even if they do it may not be in their best long term interest. The problem with this story is not that it’s false as such; it’s that people may not have a long term if we fail to help, and that starvation or homelessness is also an affront to dignity, and surely one that is a lot worse than receiving help.

More about giving is here. More posts in this series are here.

The Ethics of Human Rights (65): The Deserving Poor and the Spectacle of Libertarianism Eating Itself

It’s a common right-wing complaint, especially among right-libertarians, that the welfare state helps the poor whether or not they have only themselves to blame for their poverty. If there should be a duty to help the poor, it should be limited to the deserving poor (although some libertarians think that even this goes too far since it implies a form of slavery for those who have a duty to help). All the others should suffer the consequences of their own bad decisions – their teen pregnancy, their lack of effort at school, their alcohol problem etc.

One could reply that people’s bad decisions aren’t always their own decisions, in the sense that making good decisions is something you have to learn, and this learning may be difficult in an environment of poverty, especially during childhood. However, let’s bracket this objection, for the sake of argument, and assume that there are indeed some people who only have themselves to blame. They may not be as numerous as those on the right tend to believe, but even if there are only a few we should decide what to do with them – help them or not.

The criticism that our current systems of social security don’t differentiate between the deserving and undeserving poor is sometimes illustrated with an analogy. If we assume that governments fund their welfare system through taxation, and that taxation is a kind of involuntary charity or enforced charity – the government steps in in order to take the money which we don’t give voluntarily to charity – then it’s only right that the government takes every effort to make sure that our money goes only to the deserving poor. If we voluntarily give money to charity, we also want to be sure that it goes to a good cause, and those collecting our money have a duty to spend it well and not waste in on people that aren’t going to use it constructively. Given the libertarian view that taxation is a form of stealing it’s all the more important that the tax money is spent well; you can perhaps argue in favor of stealing if the harm done by stealing is compensated by the greater good that is done with the stolen money, but you certainly can’t if there is no greater good and if the money goes to undeserving poor who are rewarded for their bad behavior.

Isn’t it especially outrageous to misuse charitable funds if the donors cannot legally discontinue their support? (source)

Now, it’s here that the problem begins and that libertarians who follow this reasoning tend to undermine their own libertarianism. If you want to help only the deserving poor, and if you want to be very strict about helping only those people, then you’ll have to accept systematic and wide ranging intrusions into people’s privacy. How else would you be able to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving? You’ll need detailed biographies of all potential welfare or charity beneficiaries, records of their decisions and behavior, of their job applications, their diet, their sexual mores, etc.

You’ll have to accept these intrusions whether or not you believe that charity is the perfect and only solution. If you believe, correctly I think, that charity will never suffice, then you have all the more reason to be worried, since it’s the state who will have to monitor deservingness. Either scenario is anathema to libertarians.

The distinction between deserving and undeserving poor isn’t only difficult in practice. It’s also theoretically fraught with problems. For example, if you assume that you have a system to find out which poor person is an alcoholic and which one isn’t, then you still have to answer the question whether an alcoholic is an undeserving poor person or not. This answer depends on the causes of her alcoholism: maybe the cause is a series of misfortunes combined with a weak character, in which case her alcoholism is obviously not deserved. Perhaps she deserves blame for her weak character was, or perhaps not. One can easily make the case that a strong character and a good amount of effort and discipline depend on our upbringing and the social circumstances in which we are born. And no one deserve those circumstances.

And finally, even if we can identify the deserving both in theory and in practice, and even if we accept the anti-libertarian consequences of this work of identification, then we can still argue against the claim that we should not help the undeserving poor. Perhaps it’s a sign of decency and civilization that we help even the undeserving poor. Maybe the claims of the undeserving aren’t as strong as the claims of the deserving, and maybe we shouldn’t help them as much or as quickly as the deserving. But that doesn’t mean we should let them starve.

More posts in this series are here.

The Causes of Wealth Inequality (22): Non-Progressive Taxation and Weak Transfers

This post applies to the U.S., but I guess the same conclusion are valid for a number of other countries as well. In the case of the U.S., very high levels of income inequality could, in theory, be reduced in several ways:

• offering people better education (better education means better jobs, and more applicants for top jobs means lower wages at the top)
• cracking down on government backed corporate expropriation
• making the tax system more progressive
• increasing government transfers to those at the bottom etc.

Unfortunately, very little of this is happening. Let’s focus on the last two options. The tax system in the U.S. is not progressive at all. As you can see from this graph, taxation in the U.S. hardly influences income shares.

The poor only get a little bit more thanks to taxes, and the rich only lose a little bit. This is all the more regrettable given the fact that the rich have done very well over the last decades.

Higher tax rates for the wealthy and other more progressive taxes such as a higher inheritance tax, a higher capital gains tax, a Tobin tax etc. are politically impossible it seems.

Increased benefits for the poor are equally unrealistic given the fiscal situation and the predominant ideology. Although the poor in the U.S. do profit from the existing benefit system in absolute terms (unemployment insurance for example saves millions from absolute poverty), income inequality barely moves because of it. Income shares after benefits are hardly less unequal than before. This graph shows the influence on income shares of the sum of taxes and transfers, but you get the picture.

Taxes and transfers result in the poor having a bit more and the rich having a bit less, but fundamentally they don’t change the distribution of income.

More posts in this series are here.

What is Freedom? (2): A Right to Self-Ownership?

Libertarians stress the importance of the right to self-ownership. I would argue that it’s an interesting and useful right in the context of human rights more generally, but also one that is a bit of a problem. When we say that people have a right to self-ownership we mean that they own themselves in just the same way that they can own objects. It follows that people have the same rights over themselves and their bodies as they have over objects:

• they are free to use their bodies as they please
• they can claim that others, including the government, refrain from using it
• they can use the government to protect themselves against others trying to use it
• and they can transfer property rights to others.

Self-ownership rights understood in this sense are the core of libertarian philosophy and are believed to justify standard libertarian policy recommendations such as the elimination or reduction of taxation, the freedom to sell organs, use drugs, engage in all forms of consensual sex etc. And indeed, self-ownership can be an attractive right to non-libertarians as well: it can be used to justify the prohibition of slavery and rape, to protect people’s rights to euthanasia and assisted suicide, to solve the forced transplant dilemma, to support the rejection of capital punishment on the basis of a theory of non-instrumentalization etc.

However, useful as the right to self-ownership can be, it’s not without drawbacks. The right can, and in the minds of most libertarians does imply a denial of the obligation to help others in need (apart from an obligation based on prior wrongdoing and assistance based on voluntary agreement). Such an obligation would be a form of slavery. It would mean the forced use of our bodies and labor power for the benefit of others. Libertarians often reject taxation for the same reason. All this seems needlessly selfish and contrary to moral intuition.

It also seems incoherent. Most if not all libertarians accept taxation for the funding of some collective goods such as highways and the police force. It’s not clear how they can accept a limitation of the right to self-ownership for the sake of some types of taxation but not others. Taxation is always the non-consensual use of persons for the benefit of others, whatever its purpose.

If you view the right to self-ownership as an absolute right – or axiomatic – you may wind up accepting some absurd conclusions: you’ll have to claim that it’s impermissible to gently push the arm of a driver holding his steering wheel and heading towards of group of school children, because that would mean using the body of the driver without his consent to aid others in need. Self-ownership therefore can’t be an absolute right, at least not in a non-solipsistic world. Minimally, it should be limited for the sake of the self-ownership rights of others: imprisoning murderers or slave holders means limiting their self-ownership rights for the sake of the same rights of their potential victims. And, on top of that, it’s probably also necessary to limit self-ownership rights for the sake of certain other values. The problem is that it’s difficult to think about a limited right to self-ownership: every limit to that right seems to destroy it completely. Either you own yourself or you don’t.

There are, I think, three ways to react to these problems with the right to self-ownership.

• You can bite the bullet and maintain that the right to self-ownership is the fundamental right and should be absolute whatever the consequences.
• Or you can hold on to the right but only as one value amidst others, and to be balanced against others.
• Or you can abandon it, claiming that it only has a rhetorical value, and that it’s better to focus on the “derivative” rights – such a the right not to suffer slavery – and try to justify those derivative rights independently (e.g. an anti-slavery movement doesn’t need the concept of self-ownership in order to be effective).

As a good value pluralist, I prefer the second option. The rhetorical and unifying force of the right to self-ownership should not be underestimated. If we manage to prune its extreme libertarian outgrowths (such as selfishness and extreme marketization in the form of organ sales or the “right” to sell yourself into slavery), we’re left with a powerful concept that can be of great value in the struggle for individual liberty (which isn’t a libertarian monopoly by the way). But it can’t guarantee liberty by itself. It depends on and is only meaningful together with a theory of ownership of the rest of the world. Imagine that one other person owns the entirety of the world, minus yourself (i.e. you only have self-ownership). That means that when you want to eat you’re a thief, and when you want to move about you’re trespassing. That’s hardly freedom. Self-ownership without a theory about how the rest of the world is owned can be utterly meaningless.

So the question then turns to the way in which nonhuman things and beings should be owned and distributed. Who can own what? Libertarians would claim that self-ownership provides a basis for ownership in general, and they use Locke’s theory of property to argue for that claim (I own myself, therefore also my labor, therefore also the fruits of my labor – since hardly anything in the world today hasn’t been touched by human labor, almost everything can be said to be owned by someone).

However, I argued elsewhere that this is a difficult if not impossible move. Hence, ownership should be justified independently from self-ownership, and should probably include the notion of a “fair share”, whatever that means. Perhaps this notion can be based on another element in Locke’s theory, namely the “Lockean proviso” that we should leave enough and as good for others, or on some form of sufficientarianism (meaning that all should have enough resources for basic subsistence, for a decent life, for a life worth living etc.). Or it could be based on the persuasive claim that the earth is the common ownership of all, regardless of the labor some have put into it. But I’ve already discussed those issues here and here respectively.

Poverty and Privacy

The poor suffer certain specific violations of their right to privacy, and it’s fair to say that in general poverty means less privacy. Being poor often means having substandard housing. Without a proper house, or without a house at all, it’s much more difficult to be private. Furthermore, poverty often implies that people live together in “extended families”, perhaps even with others who aren’t family at all, strictly speaking. And this also reduces privacy in several ways (most obviously the intimate side of privacy).

In addition, being poor means being dependent on government welfare. But in order to benefit from welfare payments, tax credits, subsidies etc. the poor have to prove that they are indeed poor. Hence they have to divulge personal information to the government, and the government has a right to check this information. Some governments even have the right to do home searches in pursuit of welfare fraud.

If you view abortion as an aspect of privacy, then there’s an additional way in which poverty hurts privacy: the poor, because they have less access to birth control, will want to engage in abortion more often, and will therefore have their privacy violated by anti-abortion laws. Because the poor use public transportation more often, they are more likely to be tracked by police surveillance systems. They represent a disproportionate part of the prison population, and prison life obviously isn’t good for privacy. The poor are also more likely to be illegal immigrants, and therefore subject to control by the competent government agencies.

On the other hand, being poor allows people to avoid some types of privacy invasion: they use the internet less and hence are less at risk of internet related privacy violations; the poorest of the poor are less likely to take credit (credit means telling the bank about your income, spending, previous credit scores etc.) or to enroll in fidelity schemes (in which the use of a fidelity card tells the shop what you consume). Perhaps they won’t be taxed as much – or at all – and therefore don’t have to divulge private information to the tax authorities.

Still, on balance poverty is likely to have an adverse effect on privacy. Some even say that the poor are targeted by the government and that they are discriminated in their right to privacy simply because of their poverty. For instance, the way in which governments do home searches in pursuit of welfare fraud would be unthinkable if it were directed at other purposes and other social classes. It seems that the poor don’t only lose their privacy but also their right to privacy.

And poverty often also means the forfeiture of other, non-privacy rights. Simply begging or being homeless can still land you in jail and can get you kicked out of public places. In most countries, the days are gone when poor people were sterilized against their will, excluded from the vote, their children taken away from them etc. But in many parts of the world, poor children are still discouraged from going to school and forced into labor or warfare. Healthcare for the poor is still a problem, even in some developed countries, making it less likely that their health rights are respected. So don’t tell me poverty isn’t a human rights issue.

Human Rights Promotion (2): Who Does Most Harm to Human Rights? The Left or the Right?

I can simplify this question a bit and focus on those rights violations that are caused by government action. Moreover, I’ll focus on governments in developed countries and say that those are generally democracies dominated either by left-wing or right-wing political movements, alternating. Now, if I want to judge whether it’s the left or the right that is most harmful to human rights, I need to define left and right. And that’s tricky. But let’s simplify some more and say that

• the right is generally conservative, concerned about respect for religion and religious rules/morality, in favor of capitalism and free markets, against taxation and government intervention in markets, not very interested in equality or equal rights in some areas (as a consequence of religious morality for instance), suspicious of immigration, in favor of a strong national defense, and focused on law and order;
• the left is worried about capitalism and free markets, in favor of government regulation and intervention in markets, suspicious of free trade, willing to tax and redistribute, and politically correct.

I know, highly simplistic, but I’ll try to make it useful. So bear with me. If we focus on present-day developed nations, which of these two political ideologies is most likely to lead to government policies and legislation that cause human rights violations?

If you look at national defense, you could claim that right-wing governments are most harmful. Although the left is often very supportive of the war on terror, especially in the US (but less elsewhere), it’s the right that is most enthusiastic and most eager to adopt extreme measures. In the name of this war, the US tortured, invaded, murdered civilians, eavesdropped, rendered, and arbitrarily arrested. After every new terror-scare, right-wing spokespeople are quick to demand more rights sacrifices (Miranda rights should be suspended, citizenship revoked etc.). On the other hand, it was a left-wing government in Britain that eagerly supported this war, and Obama seems to be continuing the work of Bush.

If we look at markets, the left is clearly more skeptical about it’s benefits. However, economists – also left leaning economists – generally agree that free trade is good and that many interventions in markets, such as trade restrictions, quotas, subsidies etc. aggravate poverty. And poverty is a human rights violation. Of course, right-wing governments also impose or maintain such restrictions, but arguably left-wing governments are more prone to such vices since they often depend on support of labor unions and other protectionist forces.

On the other hand, the trust in markets expressed by the right can result in a kind of blindness: the right often doesn’t notice market failures and the harm that a slap of the invisible hand can do. As a result, the poor are blamed for their poverty, which is why government assistance in the struggle against poverty is deemed unnecessary, unhelpful and even damaging. The right’s focus on private philanthropy is good but it’s naive to think that philanthropy alone will solve the problem of poverty.

Taxation is a difficult one. Very high levels of taxation are obviously economically inefficient and may lower living standards rather than equalize them. On the other hand, very low rates make it impossible to fund the welfare state, with the same result. Both right wing and left wing fiscal policy can be harmful from a human rights point of view. And there’s a problem of actions vs words here: it’s not obvious that right-wing governments impose low tax rates and left-wing governments high tax rates, despite the respective rhetoric.

If we accept that the right is more enamored of religion, then it’s clear where we should lay the blame for a host of rights violations, such as attempts to undo the separation of state and church, discrimination based on religion or sexual orientation and invasions of privacy. Take the example of 0gay marriage. A focus on religion can also lead to a lack of respect for the sexual privacy of consenting adults, not just homosexuals, but also adulterers, people consuming obscene or pornographic material, or engaging in sodomy. Laws against homosexuality, adultery, sodomy and obscenity usually come from the right. Moreover, the right can show a lack of respect for religious minorities, a result of the incompatibility of different religious claims (“there is only one God”). Opposition to Muslim headscarves for instance is often more prevalent among the right (although there’s also anti-Muslim sentiment in some parts of the feminist or atheist left).

Moving on to another topic. The right’s focus on law and order has led to high incarceration rates, especially in the U.S. These rates have also been inflated by a misguided war on drugs, apparently inspired by a puritan religious morality. Capital punishment is also more popular on the right.

Regarding the left, we can mention some of the harmful consequences of political correctness. PC can lead to exaggerated limits on free speech. Hate speech, for example, is in certain cases a justifiable reason for speech limits, but it seems like some of the limits go too far. An innocent use of a particular word can get you fired, for instance.

Of course, I did simplify. The left-right dichotomy as I have defined it here doesn’t accurately reflect all nuances of political ideology. Some on the left are more pro-free-market than some on the right. Moreover, the dichotomy doesn’t capture all ideologies (libertarianism in a sense is neither left nor right). Also, many governments are left-right coalitions. And, finally, many human rights violations are not caused by governments but by fellow citizens. And when they are caused by governments, they may not be caused by those parts of government that are made up of elected politicians of the left or the right. Bureaucracies or judges can also violate rights. Some violations are not based on left or right leaning ideologies, but on other things such as an extreme desire to regulate etc.

Still, I think that the overview given above is useful. It’s not useful in the sense that it allows us to quantify or compute the respective levels of (dis)respect and to conclude that either the right or the left is better for human rights. It doesn’t. In that sense the question in the title of this post is meaningless. However, the overview above highlights the fact that everyone can violate human rights and that human rights activists should be careful when affiliating themselves with a particular ideology. Neutrality, objectivity, fairness and a lack of double standards are crucial in the struggle for human rights.

The Fable of An Randy’s Libertism

Once upon a time, An Randy made her life. She wrote stories and became famous and wealthy. She attributed her success to her talent, effort and intelligence, and to the near total freedom she enjoyed in her beloved country of residence. Her freedom-loving philosophy permeates her writing, inspires her readers, and has become a social movement with a smallish yet enthusiastic following. Called “libertism”, the philosophy champions heroic individualism, productive and creative achievement, and near total liberty and self-centeredness as preconditions for this achievement. It requires a minimal government, minimal taxation, no redistribution and no welfare. Freedom from government is necessary for creative achievement, and redistribution implies theft of resources that are the product of solitary and well-deserved achievement.

Randy did not believe that her success or the success of similarly talented and disciplined creators is dependent on the receptiveness of an audience. The success of the talented depends merely on their talent, not on fashion, audience preferences, cooperation, marketing, being in the right place at the right time etc. Hence, because there’s no luck or cooperation involved in success, the fruits of this success are the product only of talent and effort. An individual therefore deserves his or her success, and should not be forced to share its fruits.

Libertism views success as an individual achievement rather than the product of a combination of individual achievement, talent, luck and social cooperation. In other words, there’s no real division of labor or joint production. The creators are Robinson Crusoes, producing everything by themselves. Libertism denounces the “socialist” vision in which everything is jointly created, in which every creator depends on a large web of support and in which no creator can do anything without a vast army of teachers, parents, food producers, road workers, bus drivers, doctors, police officers, book printers, librarians, internet providers, etc. Libertism believes the members of the creative class produce their work and achievements only by themselves and by their own efforts alone. Division of labor is necessary only for menial production.

The moral of An Randy’s story: were it not for the silly preferences of a part of the general audience, the feverish cooperation of a number of fanatic devotees and a suitable working environment, she would have had no success at all. Double irony: because she proved, unwittingly, that achievement is essentially a cooperative effort, she also showed that the fruits of achievement should be distributed across all participants; hence, that taxation, redistribution and reductions of income inequality are justified.

PS: no prizes for guessing whom this is really about…

The Compatibility of Freedom and Equality (12): How Coercion Promotes Freedom

Freedom understood as independence and the absence of interference or intentional coercion (especially government coercion) is an important concept. The problem is that it seems to invalidate redistribution through taxation. If the government taxes a wealthy person to transfer some of her wealth to another person living under a fixed threshold of basic resources, then the government intentionally coerces the wealthy person and takes away (part of) her freedom. That’s one of the origins of the traditional view that freedom and equality are incompatible. For people who believe strongly in freedom as the absence of intentional coercion, it’s very difficult if not impossible to accept taxation and redistribution.

On the other hand, there are those who want to maintain the use of government and taxation as a means to guarantee people an equal share of those basic resource necessary for a decent human life. And I’m one of them. How can we reply to those – let’s call them libertarians – who voice concerns about the loss of freedom that’s inherent in redistribution?

1. First, we could argue that freedom, as it is understood here, isn’t the only important value, and that we should put it “in the mix” of the whole of human values, including welfare and equality, and try to balance those values in a fair way. That’s the value pluralism approach, but it’s an approach that won’t be successful to those who don’t believe in value pluralism or who believe that if there are many values, freedom is still the most important one (e.g. many libertarians).

2. Another reply could be that redistribution reduces one type of freedom – freedom from intentional coercion – in order to promote another type of freedom, namely a more positive type of freedom in which not only the absence of coercion is important but also the availability of choices, capabilities and power. Of course, a wealthy person’s choices, capabilities and power aren’t enhanced by the fact that she pays taxes – on the contrary – but when these taxes are used to guarantee a poor person’s basic income for example (or education, or health etc.) then that poor person will have a wider array of choices, capabilities, opportunities, power etc. So positive freedom is redistributed by means of a limitation on negative freedom, and is redistributed in such a way that on average people have more equal access to it. (If a rich person pays $10,000 in taxes for the welfare benefits, healthcare, education etc. of a poor person, then the rich person loses less choices, opportunities and capabilities then those gained by the poor person. Of course, the exact tax rate is important: punitive tax rates may harm the rich more than they benefit the poor).

In a way, this second reply also involves an appeal to value pluralism: negative freedom (one value) is balanced against more equal access to positive freedom (another value), and is – sometimes and in part – outweighed by it.

3. A third reply isn’t based on value pluralism. We could argue that redistribution of income or wealth through government taxation merely limits one person’s negative freedom for the sake of another person’s negative freedom. It’s fairly easy, in fact, to argue that poverty, or the absence of those basic resources necessary for a decent human life, reduces the negative freedom of the poor. The poor are intentionally coerced all the time, for no other reason than their poverty: the homeless are forcibly removed from train stations, gypsies from land where they aren’t allowed to camp, poor migrant workers have their passports taken away by their employers and are forced to repay “travel costs” by working for free, etc.

If the government gave these people a basic income for example, or rent subsidies, they wouldn’t be coerced in these ways. The taxes that the government would collect for this purpose would not simply reduce negative freedom for the sake of another value (positive freedom, welfare, equality etc.). It would reduce the negative freedom of some for the sake of the negative freedom of others (possibly many others depending on the type of taxation system). In other words, it would modify and equalize the distribution of negative freedom. It would increase intentional coercion on some people in order to reduce intentional coercion on (many) others.

Taxation and redistribution do indeed reduce freedom (in one sense of the word) but at the same time they increase freedom (freedom in the same sense as well as in a more positive sense). Conversely, a failure to tax and redistribute could reduce freedom.

More posts in this series are here.

The Causes of Poverty (43): The Welfare State

Yes, that’s right: the welfare state… According to many conservatives, the welfare state is self-defeating and actually makes people poorer. Welfare and social security (and perhaps even private charity) unwittingly work to thwart their own goal – helping the poor – in two different ways. There’s supposed to be a supply side and a demand side to the so-called “perverse effects” of anti-poverty policies.

Take the supply side first. The delivery of welfare by the government and – indirectly – by the taxpayers is economically inefficient. It burdens the primary suppliers of the necessary funds, namely the individual and corporate taxpayers. Because of this burden, companies and individuals lose the incentive to be productive. If they have to pay large amounts in taxes in order to fund the welfare state, they can’t or won’t create the wealth that is the basis for redistribution. In other words, they can’t or won’t create a rising tide that will lift all boats. Ultimately, a tax-based welfare state will eat itself because it burdens the wealth creators whose wealth it wants to redistribute.

I’ve argued against this rejection of the welfare state before, and I won’t repeat myself here. Suffice it to say that the risks to incentives are overstated, as well as the benefits of trickle down economics. (For instance, companies may decide to be more productive in order to compensate for the losses from taxation).

Let’s now turn to the demand side of the anti-welfare argument. Again, the reasoning is based on incentives that ultimately result in a self-defeating anti-poverty system, but this time it’s about the incentives of the recipients of welfare. The argument goes roughly like this. Take unemployment benefits for instance (one part of the welfare state). These benefits supposedly discourage people from working. And when people don’t work, they fail to gain experience and to nurture certain values – such as discipline – necessary in order to escape poverty. Hence, unemployment insurance makes the recipients worse off.

Or take another kind of benefit: financial support for children born out-of-wedlock. This kind of support also triggers the wrong incentives. It encourages teenagers to get pregnant and it discourages adults to marry. Teen-pregnancies and single parenthood both make it more difficult to escape poverty. Something similar happens with scholarships or affirmative action for poor students. These so-called anti-poverty policies actually incentivize students to enroll in education programs that are above their capabilities, forcing them to drop out of school at some point, and hence forcing them into poverty. And, finally, there’s the argument about welfare dependence: when people get money from the government they tend to settle in their role as receivers and fail to take their lives into their own hands. Again the wrong incentives.

This demand side of the anti-welfare argument suffers from two fatal shortcomings. First, the data don’t (always) support it. For example, it’s not true that generous unemployment insurance leads to higher unemployment. And secondly, it’s classist in the sense that it offers an essentialist depreciation of the poor as a class. The poor, according to the argument, suffer from a series of typical deficiencies:

• shortsightedness (in the case of the person being tempted by child benefits and ignoring the long-term costs of teen pregnancy or single parenthood)
• a lack of self-judgment (in the case of the student accepting a scholarship and enrolling in a program beyond her capabilities) and
• a lack of self-control (in the case of the person settling in dependency).

This classism is not only generally incorrect and unfair, but it also obscures the many other causes of poverty. The poor aren’t always to blame for their own poverty, and the welfare state doesn’t force them to make themselves poor. Moreover, and even worse, this classism can be self-fulfilling.

Also, hasn’t the recent financial crisis shown that wealthy people, especially bankers, are equally short-sighted, self-deluded and lacking in self-control? And even if it’s true that those vices are more prominent among the poor (as is claimed here for example), wouldn’t that be a good argument for welfare rather than against it? If the poor can’t rationally take care of their own fate because they are self-deluded and unable to plan for the long term, shouldn’t the rest of us try to help them?

Why Do We Need Human Rights? (22): Private Property Rights, Justifications Based Not On Their Origins But On Their Purpose

Property is the set of rules governing people’s access to and control of things. Three types are traditionally distinguished: private property, common property and collective property.

Types of property

1. Private property

In the case of private property, an individual agent (usually persons, but also families, businesses etc.) has a right to private property if he or she has a right to control the object and to regulate access. Control means sole decisional authority: the individual agent is the only one who has a right to decide what should be done with the object or what should happen to it.

This right allows the owner to decide, to some extent, to do things with the object that affect other people. Private property rights include the right to use property in ways that disadvantage other people, as long as these disadvantages do not include violations of the rights of other people. For example, a factory owner can decide to close her factory. A rich person can decide to buy and own a large house even if some other families would benefit more from living there.

However, a factory owner deciding to use his factory in such a way that it harms the health of workers or of neighboring families violates the rights of these people, and her property rights do not include a right to violate the rights of others. In such cases, rights have to be balanced and the more important right (depending on the circumstances) should prevail.

2. Common property

In the case of common property, the purpose is not individual control and exclusive access, but, on the contrary, equal access to all. Common property of a park or a common grazing field, for instance, is meant to stop certain people using it as if it was private property and as if others were precluded from using or accessing it. If farmers are allowed to use a common field for their cattle, common ownership would imply that no farmer overuses the field and brings so many cattle that there’s no grass left for the cattle of other farmers. Farmers who violate this rule of common property act like the field is their private property because they exclude others from using it. (That’s also called the tragedy of the commons, to which I will return below).

3. Collective property

In the case of collective property (sometimes also called joint property), the purpose is not only equal access to all but also equal control and decisional power. The community as a whole determines, through systems of collective decision making, how the resource is to be used. Each individual’s use is subject to a decision process to be concluded to the satisfaction of each of the co-owners – or of a majority, depending on the type of collective decision procedure. Collective ownership of a farm, for instance, means not only that all farmers belonging to the collective have an equal right to access the farm (as in common property), but also that all farmers have an equal say in the management of the farm. The latter is not (always) the case in common ownership: equal access to a commonly owned park does not (necessarily) imply an equal say in the management of the park.

When does property make sense?

In many cases, talk of property only makes sense under conditions of scarcity. In the case of private property, there would be no reason to demand exclusive control over and access to things if these things were so numerous and abundant that no one else would want to control or access what you want to control or access.

And yet, in the case of intellectual property for example, which is by definition, in our age at least, anything but scarce given the means of reproduction, we still talk about private intellectual property in the sense of exclusive control of access. But in general, it makes sense to view private property as meaningful only in circumstances of scarcity. (Perhaps that’s a good reason not to talk about “intellectual property” at all). The same is true of common property: if the whole wide world were a park, there would be no risk of some people excluding others from accessing it, and hence no need to talk about the common property of the “park”. And the same is true for collective property.

What does property require?

First, it requires rules. It only makes sense to view types of ownership as rule based. Property is in essence a rule. You can’t say that something is your property simply because you have it, hold it, exclude others from it etc. You have property because there are social rules granting you property of something and granting you rights to defend it. People should not rely on their own strength or willingness to cooperate in order to defend their holdings.

Because the state intervenes in the enforcement of property rules and rights, it’s important to have a morally sound justification of those rights. Hence, property also requires a justification. We wouldn’t want the state to use its power for immoral or unjustified ends. I’ll focus on the justification of private property in the remainder of this post because that’s arguably the most common type and the one that most often raises moral issues.

Some of those issues are the morality of taxation and eminent domain, the needs of the poor, the justification of redistribution, the property we’re allowed to own (guns?) or sell (organs?), the things we’re allowed to do with our property (shoot our gun at people? suicide?) etc.

Justifications of private property

What is the point of private property? It must have some moral value, otherwise the moral issues just cited wouldn’t arise in the first place and private property wouldn’t receive legal protection. From the discussion above, we know what private property is, which other types of property there are, which rights property entails, when it is likely to make sense, and what it requires. But we don’t yet know why there should be private property. Some would say that there’s no way for property rights to come about or to be justified because if you go back far enough in time – and sometimes that’s not very far – all “property” is in fact the result of theft of commonly owned resources.

John Locke is famous for his attempted justification of private property. My body is my own and my property, and hence I also own the power of my body. Through labor I incorporate the power of my body in the goods I produce. By working on an object, I mix my labor with the object. If someone wants to take this object away from me, he also takes away my labor, which means that he takes away the power of my body. He therefore uses my body, which is incompatible with my right to possess my own body.

However, justifications like these tend to be very shaky. Hence, I think it’s better not to focus too much on the ways in which, historically or theoretically, a right to private property has/can come about in a world that’s originally equally owned by all. We should rather think about what would happen when a right to private property, taken as a given, would disappear, and distill a justification from that (in other words, trying to look for a consequentialist justification).

We can, in fact, without much trouble, list a number of harms that would result from the elimination of a right to private property. Kant defined property as “that with which I am so connected that another’s use of it without my consent would wrong me”. What wrongs would that be? Here’s a tentative list:

• Private property is a means to protect the private space. Without private property, without your own house or your own place in the world, and without your own intimate and personal things, it is obviously more difficult to have a private life. The four walls of your private house protect you against the public. Without private property, there is no private world (another example of the indivisibility and interdependence of human rights).
• Just as there is no light without darkness, there is nothing common to all people and no public space without private property. So private property protects publicity, commonality etc. Freedom of speech, one of the most public acts, is difficult to imagine without privacy and secrecy, and hence without private property.
• Independence, self-reliance, autonomy, and therefore also freedom, are important values, and these values rely heavily on private property.
• Private property is also important for the creation and maintenance of relationships. You have your own house and your own place in the world, but not in the world in general. You live in a particular world, in a very concrete social context of friends, enemies, neighbors and other types of relationships. A place in the world is always a place in a particular community, even if you have to transcend this community now and again. And it’s difficult to imagine a place in a particular community without you own home and hence without private property.
• Private property is an important tool in the creative design of your personality, especially, but not exclusively, when you are an artist.
• It is obvious that without private property there can be no help or generosity. Generosity and the absence of egoism are important for the preservation of a community.
• Private property prevents the tragedy of the commons, referred to above. If everyone has free access to a piece of land for example, then no one has an incentive to avoid over-usage. Every additional cow an individual introduces for grazing brings full benefits to the individual, whereas the costs of overuse resulting from the additional cows are shared among all individual users of the land. Conversely, the benefits of any individual’s self-restraint will accrue to all the other individuals whether or not they also exercise self-restraint. Individual self-restraint is ultimately useless unless all cooperate, which is unlikely because the benefits of self-restraint for each individual are outweighed by the benefits of overuse. Only private property allows people to reap the benefits of self-restraint.
• The right to private property, and in particular, the right to your own house, is linked to the freedom to choose a residence, which again is linked to the freedom of movement (again another example of the indivisibility of human rights).
• As already mentioned above, you also own your own body. Your body is part of your private property. It is something that is yours; it is the thing par excellence that is your own. It is not common to several people and it cannot be given away. It cannot even be shared or communicated. It is the most private thing there is. Owning your body means that you are the master of it. Other people have no say in the use of your body; they should not use it, access it, hurt it or force you to use it in a certain way. This underpins the security rights such as the right to life, the right to bodily integrity, and the prohibition of torture and slavery. It also implies the right to self-determination, and therefore, the right to die. You carry prime responsibility over your own body and life.

Property is therefore an instrumental value, one which serves the realization of other values.

All these advantages of private property are advantages for everyone. Hence, everyone should have a right to private property, which may imply the need for some kind of redistribution benefiting those people who don’t have enough private property to realize all the benefits of private property (for example the homeless). Hence, the right to private property can be an argument against redistribution, but also one in favor of redistribution.

Private property as it is described and justified here is of course an ideal. The real existence of private property, and its actual distribution in the real world never matches this ideal, as is the case for all human rights. Property is often used to oppress others, and many people can never reap the full benefits of property. In the words of John Stuart Mill, the laws of property and the actual distribution of property have never yet conformed to the principles on which the justification of property rests.

But even in the ideal world, a right to private property is not absolute, nor is it absolutely beneficial, as I stated in the definition in the beginning of this post. Property can conflict with other values. There’s no way to escape value pluralism.

The Causes of Wealth Inequality (13): Deliberate Policy?

Some say that the increase in income inequality in countries such as the U.S. has been the result of deliberate government policy. That’s quite an accusation. It’s not controversial to assume that tax policy under right wing governments tends to be less burdensome on the rich, and that social welfare policy under such governments tends to be more stingy. If you look at it like this, it’s not crazy to argue that right wing policies can aggravate income inequality. But it’s quite another thing to claim that right wing governments use these policies in order to deliberately aggravate income inequality. That accusation is incompatible with right wing ideology, which claims that the preferred policies also and ultimately help the poor (trickle down economics etc.), and that left wing policies supposedly favoring the poor are in fact self-destructive (unemployment benefits create labor disincentives, taxes create production disincentives, etc.). However, it’s possible that this ideology is just a smokescreen for anti-poor policies. But I guess that’s somewhat difficult to prove.

If we look at the tax rates, it’s true that the rates for the wealthy tend to go down under Republican presidents:

In 1979, the effective tax rate on the top 0.01 percent (i.e., rich people) was 42.9 percent. … By Reagan’s last year in office it was 32.2 percent. (source)

However, things aren’t as simple as that:

From 1989 to 2005, … as income inequality continued to climb, the effective tax rate on the top 0.01 percent largely held steady; in most years it remained in the low 30s, surging to 41 during Clinton’s first term but falling back during his second, where it remained. The change in the effective tax rate on the bottom 20 percent (i.e., poor and lower-middle-class people) was much more dramatic, but not in a direction that would increase income inequality. Under Clinton, it dropped from 8 percent (about where it had stood since 1979) to 6.4 percent. Under George W. Bush, it fell to 4.3 percent. (source)

The tax rate for the rich dropped somewhat around 2005 following the Bush tax cuts, but all the tax effects over the last decades taken together don’t really make a good case that tax policy is the major cause of rising income inequality. So it’s even more difficult to make the case that tax policy was part of a conscious strategy to aggravate inequality. The increase in inequality has been too big compared to the possible impact of taxation. That’s corroborated by the fact that pre-tax inequality in the U.S. rose faster than after-tax inequality.

What’s interesting, however, is that pre-tax inequality in the U.S. tends to rise much faster under Republican rule. So inequality can still be the result of policy, but policy expressed in other ways than taxation. Other policies that may have contributed – deliberately or not – to rising income inequality are anti-labor union policies, decreases in the minimum wage, etc.

More posts in this series are here.

Is Taxation Akin to Theft and Slavery?

The notion that taxation is theft and a violation of property rights is quite common, especially in libertarian circles. (A less extreme version of the argument claims that taxation may be a justified limitation of property rights but its level should be kept as low as possible because of concerns for economic incentives).

The classic justification of this rejection of taxation is a reduction ad absurdum: if a state can tax its citizens, how much can we reduce the group of people and still hold that this group can impose taxes on its members?

There are many variations of [this argument], but one begins, for instance, with the example of a man stealing a car, which most people would regard as unethical. It then proceeds to make slight changes to the story, with the identity of the thief gradually shifting from one man, to a gang of five men, to a gang of ten men who take a vote (allowing the victim to vote as well) on whether to steal the car before stealing it; … to one hundred men who take the car and give the victim back a bicycle; to two hundred men who not only give the victim back a bicycle but buy a poor person a bicycle as well. It ultimately challenges the reader to say how big a group needs to be, and what characteristics it needs to have, before the immorality of theft becomes the alleged morality of taxation. (source)

Taxation is not only rejected because it’s viewed as a form of official and legalized theft. It’s also viewed as a form of slavery. Robert Nozick, a famous libertarian, has argued that taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.

Nozick starts from the reasonable assumption that people own themselves. Self-ownership also means that people own their talents and labor power. He then continues with the Lockean argument for private property: we produce goods by mixing our labor power and talents with elements of the material world, and by this mixing we generate ownership of those modified elements of the world. If the government taxes our income, it takes away – or steals – parts of what we own through our labor. But the government doesn’t just steal things from us. Because our labor and talents have been incorporated in the things we own – and we own them because of this incorporation – taking them from us means effectively that the government owns our talents and labor, and hence owns us. Taxation means that the government takes away our self-ownership. And that’s slavery. It also means that the government uses people as means rather than ends, violating Kant’s maxim.

If you’re convinced by this kind of reasoning and agree that taxation is slavery, forced labor and theft, then you’re morally allowed or even obliged to resist taxation and rebel against government. And you’re likely to be a libertarian.

However, you may also want to consider a few counter-arguments.

1. There’s first the issue of value pluralism. Private property and self-ownership are undoubtedly important, but not so important that they trump all other values. Hence, they can be limited to accommodate a balancing with other concerns.

2. The rejection of taxation becomes morally difficult when we consider the purpose of taxation, or better the – substantial – part of taxation which serves the welfare state and the realization of economic rights. Economic rights are primarily a duty of charity, as I’ve argued here. The state, with its welfare mechanisms, should only intervene when citizens don’t (sufficiently) help each other. And it needs taxes to do that. Taxes are the enforcement of the duty to charity. Which is why tax fraud, tax evasion and certainly the principled refusal to pay taxes are particularly reprehensible: the existence of taxes is already a stain on the reputation of mankind, because taxes exist as a consequence of the fact that people deny their responsibilities. Denying the duty to pay taxes is a double moral failure.

However, some libertarians go along with the first part of this argument and accept that people have a moral duty to help others (others who are starving for example). However, they deny that this creates a right. So, ideally, these libertarians would not commit the first prong of this double moral failure, in which case the second prong could not occur. And yet, in the non-ideal world, libertarians – and others – do commit the first moral failure, i.e. do not live up to their responsibilities to help others. Subsequently, libertarians and others who follow Nozick, are doomed to commit the second moral failure as well. What’s more, they can’t even call it a moral failure because according to them starving people don’t have a right to demand our help (the fact that we have a duty to help doesn’t necessarily give them a right to our help). Such a right would be incompatible with self-ownership. It would mean stealing our goods and our labor power and talents. It would mean using us as a means for their survival. In my view, the claim that the duty of generosity doesn’t create a right to generosity is a simple artifact invented to guarantee the supremacy of property rights.

3. Nozicks reasoning about self-ownership and property is shaky, as he himself admitted:

why isn’t mixing what I own with what I don’t own a way of losing what I own rather than a way of gaining what I don’t? If I own a can of tomato juice and spill it in the sea so its molecules… mingle evenly throughout the sea, do I thereby come to own the sea, or have I foolishly dissipated my tomato juice? (source)

4. Given the importance of talents in the libertarian argument, and the refusal to have people’s talents “harvested” for the sake of the minimal welfare of those without talents or otherwise unable to fend for themselves: is it not evident that there’s an injustice involved in the distribution of talents? Nobody decides freely to be born without talents, so the absence of talents is nobody’s fault. Should you be forced to suffer for something that is not your fault? In addition, is there not a small possibility that people are rewarded for the wrong talents and that some talents are not sufficiently rewarded? If all that’s the case, then the claim that the state can’t use the proceeds of your talents for the benefit of others becomes a lot weaker: if those proceeds could just as well have gone to other talents or the talents of others (in part at least), and if your talents are just a matter of luck, why should you have a right to keep those proceeds?

5. And finally, is it not somewhat gross to compare the fate of a taxpayer to the fate of a slave? A taxpayer retains many of the freedoms a slave can only dream of.

Income Inequality (22): Social Mobility in Anglo-Saxon Economies, Ctd.

After completing my older post on the subject – in which I argued that Anglo-Saxon economies don’t do a very good job promoting social mobility despite the focus on individual responsibility and policies that (should) reward merit (e.g. relatively low tax rates) – I found this graph which I thought would illustrate my point.

Although the US and other Anglo-Saxon countries aren’t in the graph, the UK is. And the effect of parental education on child earnings in the UK is particularly large. The children of the well-off and well-educated earn more and learn more than their less fortunate peers in all countries in the world, and that’s hardly surprising given the importance of a head start, both financially and intellectually. What is surprising is that this is less the case in countries which pride themselves on their systems that offer people incentives to do well (low taxes, minimal safety nets etc.).

So one wonders which fact-free parallel universe David Cameron, the new UK Prime Minister, inhabits:

The differences in child outcomes between a child born in poverty and a child born in wealth are no longer statistically significant when both have been raised by “confident and able” parents… What matters most to a child’s life chances is not the wealth of their upbringing but the warmth of their parenting. (source, my emphasis)

Extolling the virtues of good parenting can never hurt, except if you have a low boredom threshold because it’s so goddamn obvious. But making it sound like parents’ wealth or education are “insignificant” is truly grotesque and an insult to those poor parents who have children that aren’t doing very well. And even for those living in the alternative reality where only bad parents keep children back, the Conservative leader’s position in fact, and unwittingly, should lead to left-wing policies, as Chris Dillow points out:

Because of bad parenting – which begins in the womb – some people do badly in school and therefore in later life; they are less likely to be in work, and earn less even if they are. However, we can’t choose our parents; they are a matter of luck. It’s quite reasonable to compensate people for bad luck, so there’s a case for redistributing income to the relatively poor, as this is a roundabout way of compensating them for the bad luck of having a bad upbringing.

High levels of social mobility can compensate for high levels of income inequality: if people can be socially mobile, and if their earnings and education levels don’t depend on who their parents are but on their own efforts and talents, one can plausibly claim that the existing inequalities are caused by some people’s lack of effort and merit. However, the UK and the US combine two evils: low mobility and high inequality, making it seem that whatever effort you invest in your life, you’ll never get ahead of those rich lazy dumb asses. So why would you even try? Low mobility solidifies high inequality.

Just to show that the U.S. isn’t better than the U.K.:

Parental income is a better predictor of a child’s future in America than in much of Europe, implying that social mobility is less powerful. Different groups of Americans have different levels of opportunity. Those born to the middle class have about an equal chance of moving up or down the income ladder, according to the Economic Mobility Project. But those born to black middle-class families are much more likely than their white counterparts to fall in rank. The children of the rich and poor, meanwhile, are less mobile than the middle class’s. More than 40% of those Americans born in the bottom quintile remain stuck there as adults. (source)

The Ethics of Human Rights (29): Should Taxation Be a Tool For Economic Efficiency or For Social Justice?

Taxation is a recurring theme in political discussions between people of the left and right. People of the left see taxation as a tool for social justice. They tend to prefer rather high taxation rates and a progressive taxation system:

• High taxation rates bring in revenues that are large enough to enable the government to spend on programs and transfers that are designed to promote social justice: unemployment benefits, poverty reduction policies, education, healthcare etc.
• Progressive taxation rates are just because they impose relatively (and not just absolutely) higher taxes on people who are more able to pay, and, in addition, reduce income inequality and hence realize another goal of social justice.

People on the right usually favor low tax rates and a non-progressive taxation system (either a proportional system in which everyone pays the same share of their income, or a regressive system in which everyone pays more or less the same amount in taxes). Rather than on social justice, they focus on the economic effects of taxation.

• They reject high taxation rates because they claim that these high rates discourage people and are a disincentive to hard work, effort and investment. Because high rates limit effort and investment, they also limit productivity, innovation, international competitiveness and job creation.
• They also reject progressive tax rates because high tax rates for high incomes discourage those people who work relatively hard (they work hard supposedly because they earn a lot) and who are most likely to innovate, to be productive and competitive and to create jobs.
• However, they don’t necessarily favor regressive taxes because they are equally hostile to high tax rates for low income people, albeit for other reasons. High taxes for low income people discourage them from entering the labor market and hence inflate unemployment. Still, they claim that the worst damage is done by high taxes on the higher incomes, which is the reason they reserve particular scorn for progressive taxation systems. Because high tax rates for the wealthy punish the most productive elements in a society, the whole of society suffers. More productive people will limit their productivity because they don’t want to fall into a higher tax bracket, and the money they pay in taxes can’t be invested in the economy. High tax rates, especially for the rich, have an unacceptable cost in terms of economic efficiency. Keeping taxes low, on the contrary, and allowing wealthy people to use their money in the economy, will ultimately benefit everyone (this is the so-called Trickle-Down theory).

Of course, this distinction between left and right is a caricature. Most people on the left are also concerned about economic efficiency, and most on the right are not insensitive to questions of social justice. The extremes are hardly ever encountered in real life: no one wants to limit taxes to such an extent that economic efficiency is promoted but no money is left for justice, and no one wants to put tax rates at such a high level that there is ultimately no more economy to tax. (The latter concern is expressed in the famous Laffer Curve arguing that beyond a certain level of tax rates government revenues in fact decrease instead of increase. At very high rates there is no longer any incentive for a rational taxpayer to earn any income and hence tax revenues will decline while tax rates increase. However, it isn’t clear what “very” in the previous sentence actually means and where exactly the tipping point is situated).

Personally, I believe that the concerns of both right and left are justified and need to be balanced, and that too much focus on either the element of efficiency or justice is detrimental to the other element. On the one hand, there’s only so much money a government can raise without wrecking the economy, and justice isn’t only about spending money (there can even be perverse effects such as unemployment traps, welfare dependency etc.). On the other hand, there’s only so much an efficient economy can do to realize social justice all by itself and quasi-automatically (remember the invisible hand…). To quote Matthew Yglesias’ sarcastic comment on the skyrocketing incomes of the U.S. top 400 earners in the decades leading up to the 2009 recession:

As is well-known, the Top 400 are considerably more talented than the rest of us. And [the] decline in their tax rates has created exciting new incentives for them to apply their talents. And that, in turn, is why the 2000s were a so much more economically successful decade than the 1990s, not just for the Top 400 but for the rest of us as well. Thanks to their skyrocketing incomes and falling tax rates, we’re currently [during the 2008-2009 recession, FS] all enjoying the fruits of prosperity, rapid growth, and low unemployment. Thanks rich guys! (source)

A similar sentiment is expressed in this clip from the Daily Show (skip to the 4th minute or so).

I believe taxes in the U.S. are relatively low and can be raised without too much harm to economic efficiency. The resulting government revenues could then be spent on improving the social safety net and promoting social justice. It’s difficult to imagine for a European that a country such as the U.S. doesn’t offer health insurance to millions of its citizens. Also, unemployment benefits are quite stingy in the U.S., both in terms of eligibility and duration: only one third of the unemployed qualify for benefits and only for 26 weeks (extendable during recessions if the Republicans don’t object, as they infamously did beginning of 2010).

The system of unemployment benefits could easily be improved without perverse effects or harm to economic efficiency. And there are other areas of possible improvement as well.

However, as a European in Europe, I think there’s a strong argument that the social safety net in Europe (at least in some countries) has harmed European competitiveness, labor market participation and innovation.

Still, is there evidence of this? What do the data say about high tax rates harming economic efficiency, in Europe and in general? Is the conservative case against taxes as strong as it seems? I’m afraid not. There’s some evidence that the effect of reasonably rather than extremely high rates on economic efficiency is minimal at best. Here’s more evidence from Lane Kenworthy about the U.S. and other affluent countries (always keeping in mind that correlation doesn’t imply causation and that the absence of a large negative effect of high taxes doesn’t preclude the possibility that lower taxes would have had a large positive effect). One measure of economic efficiency is economic growth. If we plot economic growth rates for the U.S. against tax rates for the wealthy we see that higher tax rates lead to more growth. But of course there can be catch-up effect: higher rates producing their effects only years later. That’s taken into account in these graphs, which also show that an international comparison doesn’t prove that countries with higher tax rates have lower growth.

If we have a look at the data about the effect of high tax rates on unemployment (another conservative concern), we also see that we shouldn’t panic about taxes.

Now, if there is no good reason not to tax at a moderately high level, based on concerns about economic efficiency, the question remains whether there is a good reason to tax based on social justice reasons. Given the caveat that social justice isn’t all about government spending (I argued <a href="http://here that it is primarily about something else) and that such spending can in some cases have perverse effects (see above), I do believe that some spending is necessary in some cases, and that relatively high tax rates are necessary to produce the revenues required for this spending.

Again following Kenworthy, I believe that relatively high tax rates are acceptable and even necessary to create the revenues required for social justice policies, but that progressive tax rates in themselves don’t do the job of reducing income inequality, contrary to what is often claimed as a justification for progressive rates. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t reduce income inequality (it’s quite high in the U.S.) – there are good reasons to try. It just means that progressive taxation in itself won’t do the job. The important thing is to have high tax revenues which can then be spent in transfers and services that reduce income inequality and achieve other goals of social justice. Yet, I still think a progressive system is required, not because of its supposed effects but simply because it is just in itself, compared to proportional or regressive systems. A person with more income can afford to pay, not merely more in an absolute sense but more in the sense of a larger share of his or her income.

Measuring Poverty (7): Different Types of Poverty

I already mentioned the obvious but consequential fact that poverty measurement depends on the choice of the type of poverty you want to measure. Definitional issues are always important, but when it comes to poverty the choice of a definition of poverty determines who will benefit from government benefits and who won’t. For example, in the U.S. you’re poor when you’re income is below a certain poverty line. If that’s the case, you’re eligible for certain benefits. So poverty is a function of income.

1. Insufficient income

Usually, and not only in the U.S., poverty is indeed understood as insufficient income (preferably post-tax and post-benefits). Measuring poverty in this case means

1. determining a sufficient level of income (sufficient for a decent human life); this is usually called a “poverty line” or “poverty rate”
2. measuring actual income
3. counting the number of people who have less income than the sufficient level.

There are some problems with this measurement system or this choice of type of poverty. Actual income levels are notoriously difficult to measure. People have a lot of informal income which they will not disclose to people doing a survey. Likewise, there is tax evasion and income in kind (market based or from government benefits, e.g. social housing), and material or immaterial support by local social networks. None of this is included correctly if at all in income measurement, leading to an overestimate of poverty. Another disadvantage of income based measurements: they neglect people’s ability to borrow or to draw from savings in periods of lower income. Again, this overestimates poverty (although one could say that it just estimates it a bit too early, since borrowing and eating up savings can lead to future poverty).

2. Insufficient consumption

Because of these problems, some countries define poverty, not by income levels, but by consumption levels. Measuring poverty in this case means

1. determining a sufficient level of consumption (sufficient for a decent human life)
2. measuring actual consumption
3. counting the number of people who consume less than the sufficient level.

However, this measurement isn’t without problems either. As is the case for income levels, actual consumption levels are difficult to measure. How much do people actually consume? And what does it mean “to consume”? Is it calorie intake? Is it financial expenses? Or something else perhaps? Consumption levels are also deceiving: people tend to smooth their consumption over time, even more so than their income. If they face a financial crisis because of unemployment, bad health, drought etc. they will sell some of their assets (their house for instance) or take a loan. If you determine whether someone is poor on the basis of consumption levels, you won’t consider people dealing with a crisis as being poor because they continue to consume at the same levels. However, because of loans or the sale of assets, they are likely to face poverty in the future. They may also shift their diet away to low quality food, taking in the same amount of calories but risking their health and hence their future income. Similarly, they may be forced by their crisis situation to delay health expenditures in order to smooth consumption, with the same long term results.

And even if you manage somehow to measure consumption, you’re still faced with the problem of the threshold of sufficient consumption: that’s hard to determine as well. Consumption needs differ from person to person, depending on age, gender, occupation, climate etc.

3. Direct physical measures of real consumption

Rather than trying to measure total income or consumption, you can choose to measure consumption of certain specific physical items, and combine that with some easy to measure elements of standard of living, such as child mortality or education levels. It’s possible to argue that poverty isn’t an insufficient level of overall income or consumption, but instead the absence of certain specific consumption articles. People are poor if they don’t have a bicycle or a car, a solid floor, a phone etc. Or when their children die, can’t go to school or are undernourished. These items or indicators are relatively easy to measure (for example, there’s the Demographic and Health Survey). While they may not tell us a lot about relative living standards in developed countries (where few children die from preventable diseases for instance), they do provide poverty indicators in developing countries.

The OECD has done a lot of good work on this. They call it “measuring material deprivation“. It’s the same assumption: there are certain consumer goods and certain elements of living standard that are universally considered important elements of a decent life. The OECD tries to measure ownership of these goods or occurrence of these elements, and when people report several types of deprivation at the same time, they are considered to be poor.

Take note that we’re not talking about monetary measures here, contrary to income and overall levels of consumption. Sometimes, all that has to be measured is a “yes” or a “no”. Which of course makes it easier.

Unfortunately, not easy enough. This type of poverty measurement has its own drawbacks. Measures of material deprivation often fail to distinguish between real deprivation and the results of personal choices and lifestyles. Some people can’t have a decent life without a car or a solid floor; others voluntarily choose not to have those goods. It’s likely that only the former are “poor”. Furthermore, since these measurements are often based on surveys, there are some survey related problems. The really poor may be systematically excluded from the survey because we can’t find them (e.g. the homeless). These surveys measure self-reported poverty, and self-reported poverty can be affected by low aspirations or habit. People may also be ashamed about their poverty and hence not report it correctly.

Conclusion

There isn’t a perfect system for poverty measurement. And that has a lot to do with the fact that poverty is an inherently vague concept. It really shouldn’t be a surprise that people choose different definitions and types, and hence different measurement methods that all provide different data. There’s no “correct” definition of poverty, and hence no correct poverty measure.

More posts in this series on the difficulties of poverty measurement.

The Ethics of Human Rights (28): Private Charity vs the Welfare State

In a previous post, I wrote about my personal views regarding the best ways to help the poor. I favor private philanthropy or charity over the welfare state. Some of the reasons are:

• The welfare state imposes certain costs on the economy, thereby damaging the prospects of the future poor.
• Closeness and affinity imply a greater ability to help. And he or she who can do more, should do more (can implies ought). Citizens are better placed than the government to help poor people in their community/family because they better understand the needs.
• Spontaneous mutual assistance fosters community spirit. Allowing poverty reduction to take place at the level of citizens’ relationships will strengthen feelings of belonging.

When all this fails – as it often will – and only when this fails, can a state intervene and can the welfare mechanisms and redistribution systems based on taxation begin to operate (these merely enforce deficient private philanthropy).

However, some claim that the welfare state crowds out private charity. If you don’t care about private charity and want a government monopoly on care for the poor, you won’t mind if there is crowding out. And if you don’t care about private charity or about government assistance to the poor, you won’t mind either. But I guess most people agree with me that both charity and the government have a part to play (although they may not agree with my chosen priorities). So it’s good to see that

government welfare programs [do not] appear to displace an equivalent amount of private charity. Private giving does not vary inversely with the size of government programs and there is little evidence for a “crowding out” effect. Many private charities, in fact, rely on government funding to some extent. Private charitable giving to the poor, defined in narrow terms, runs in the range of $10 to $15 billion a year [in the U.S.], and few observers believe that this sum is capable of significant augmentation in the short run, regardless of government policy. Tyler Cowen (source)

More posts in this series are here.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (19): Ideology

From Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society:

Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.

That’s the basis of trickle down economics which is a theory about how inequalities ultimately benefit everyone. It’s also the basis of tax schemes such as a flat tax that limit forced redistribution, because the invisible hand will redistribute wealth or make it trickle down automatically.

And, when trickle down is discredited and when it turns out to be difficult to prove that inequality is a universal value, we hear that inequality isn’t as big a problem as it seems, and that this is the land of opportunity where even people who are on the wrong side of inequality can make it through hard work and discipline. Even Obama seems to believe this, as is clear from his inauguration speech. That’s a classic case of the anecdote turned into a “scientific” law. Data show that social mobility isn’t what the American Dream dreamers think it is. Implicit in this story is that existing inequalities are the sole responsibilities of individuals who haven’t made diligent use of the many opportunities this land has generously provided them. Discrimination, injustice, greed and lack of compassion are obscured as causes of inequality.

In reality, inequalities are indeed greater than could possibly be defended rationally, in the words of Niebuhr. The defense based on trickle down economics has failed, as has the defense based on the claim that inequalities are the sole result of individual choices and a lack of response to opportunities (this defense completely rejects effects of discrimination, which seems to be misguided).

However, it’s not because inequalities are greater than they should be that all inequalities are wrong. Some inequalities are unavoidable or even valuable. We do want Einsteins and Picassos. Society should reward merit. We all benefit from the recognition of exceptional individuals. Nietzsche for example rightly protested against the modern habit of cutting everyone down who dares to stick his head up. Equality of outcome is in many respects distasteful. And apart from the valuable inequalities, there are unavoidable inequalities. Some inequalities that are the result of the “lottery of birth” are impossible to correct: some people are born with more talent than others or with talents that are more appreciated in the economic or cultural market; and there will always be people who are born in privileged families.We wouldn’t want to engage in genetic engineering in order to redistribute talent, and neither would we be willing to redistribute children across families (at least not for the purpose of equality of opportunity).

Other aspects of the lottery of birth, however, are more difficult to defend. Why should the good luck of being born in a wealthy family with educated parents guarantee you a better education, better healthcare and better economic prospects? But of course it isn’t just the contingency of your place of birth that determines your opportunities and you future place in society. Some people are pulled down by discrimination or bad luck. We justifiably don’t accept that people’s prospects in life are fully determined by their family, luck or discrimination.

Again, equality of opportunity is different from equality of outcome: most of us don’t think it’s a good idea to strive towards equality of outcome in most spheres of life. We’re quite happy to accept that some people earn less money, have less vacation time, have lower social status and recognition levels and have more uncomfortable, dangerous, or physically draining work etc. What we don’t accept is that those outcomes are predetermined by the family they happen to be born in, by discrimination they suffer or by other instances of bad luck.

The Ethics of Human Rights (27): The Human Rights of Future Generations and Poverty

I’ve argued many times before that poverty is a human rights issue, so I won’t do that again. For those who are not convinced, just assume arguendo that I am right, otherwise the rest of this post won’t make a lot of sense. I’ve also presented my views on the types of duties produced by the human right not to suffer poverty, and on the moral agents that carry those duties: is it a face-to-face thing, or does the government have a role to play by way of redistribution and the welfare state? Etc. You can read about this here and here for instance, so that’s something else I won’t repeat.

I do believe the welfare state is an important institution because it can fill the gap left by deficient private charity. But my view is that private charity should come first and should be promoted. The welfare state should be a fallback option rather than the starting point. So I guess I don’t think it’s as important as people from the left usually think it is. In order to bolster my view, I can point to some problems with the welfare state. In fact, it can be argued that the welfare state is another case of a self-defeating human rights policy, in the sense that it reduces poverty but at the same time produces poverty. Tyler Cowen, in a very interesting paper, has argued that while the welfare state does indeed reduce the levels of poverty of those people currently living (at least if we focus on the level of the state and forget the global impact of the operation of a welfare state in a particular country), it also has a negative impact on the poverty of future generations.

The argument goes as follows. It’s reasonable to accept that economic growth lifts people out of poverty and that the welfare state lowers the rate of economic growth, perhaps not by much annually but small reductions of economic growth over several years may amount to a large cumulative reduction. Now, how does the welfare state lower the rates of economic growth? There are at least four effects:

[1] A welfare state will cause some people to substitute welfare dependency for private work, thus lowering the number of individuals in the active work force or causing them to work less hard. … The poor could be engaging in more productive exchange with other individuals in the economy, but to some extent they desist, for fear of losing welfare benefits. …

[2] The taxes used to support the welfare state discourage taxpayers from working or otherwise creating economic value. …

[3] The extensive welfare states of Western Europe typically are bundled with labor market protections and interventions. It is not politically or economically feasible to give the non-working significantly more risk protection than the working. Western European welfare states therefore tend to create a privileged class of working “insiders,” with high real wages, high benefits, and near-guaranteed positions of employment. This practice, of course, lowers the number of new jobs that are created, limits labor market mobility, and raises unemployment.

[4] [The welfare state] causes the economy to develop new technologies and new ideas at a slower rate. … A welfare state will plausibly have a negative effect on innovation. By withdrawing individual labor from the productive sector of the economy, the rate of discovery is likely to fall. Both the poor and the taxpaying non-poor will work less when a welfare state is in place [see 1 and 2 above]. If we think of research and development, broadly construed, as one kind of work, we can expect the rate of growth to decline. Even if the poor do not participate in ideas production directly, they do so indirectly. To provide a simple example, to the extent it is harder or more costly to hire good janitors, and other forms of cheap labor, fewer research laboratories will be opened. … The welfare state permanently discourages various individuals from contributing to technological development and thus lowers the rate of economic growth in lasting fashion. (source)

One can argue about the importance or even the existence of these four effects, and there may even be counter-effects (welfare recipients may move in the underground economy, unemployment may lead to better parenting and hence better education etc.). But even if the effects are small, it’s sufficient to spread them towards the very long term future in order to produce a lowering of the economic growth rate and an increase in future poverty. Given that the future contains an infinitely large population, the welfare state will always produce more poverty than it eliminates (given that the current population and hence also the current poor are a limited number). That would mean that the concept of the welfare state is doomed. And if that’s the case, it would seem I have proven too much (I merely wanted to buttress my argument that the welfare state should come second, after private philanthropy).

However, I don’t think it’s obvious that we should value the rights of future people the same way as the rights of existing people. After all, these future people may never come into existence. If we try to protect their welfare by giving up the welfare state, we will harm real people for the rights of people who may never exist. Furthermore, the future may bring a novel solution to the poverty problem.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (11): The Relative Cost of Freedom and Dictatorship

When dictatorial governments come under international pressure to improve the human rights situation in their countries, they often react by stating that they govern developing countries and don’t have the resources that are necessary to make improvements. Such statements have some plausibility. A judiciary, a well-trained police force, a functioning system of political representation etc. all require funding.

However, to some extent this explanation is no more than an excuse: you don’t need money to stop persecution of dissidents, to lift restrictions on the media, to allow demonstrations etc. On the contrary, you save money by doing so. You don’t need a large police force or paramilitary force; you don’t need strong government controls of every aspect of society and the economy; you don’t need to bride your citizens into acceptance of the state etc. But obviously the goal of dictators isn’t to save money and make the country better off by investing that money in the economy.

On the other hand, it remains true that the adequate defense of freedom, rights and democracy requires money, which is probably why rich countries usually score higher in freedom indexes. And, consequently, governments can save money by limiting freedom and by oppressing people.

So, both oppression and freedom cost money, and both a reduction of oppression and a reduction freedom save money. The question is then: what is, overall, the cheapest? A dictatorship or a democracy? And how can we know? Well, one possible indicator could be government spending as a percentage of GDP. If democracies have a systematically higher percentage, one could say that freedom costs more than oppression (on the condition that there isn’t a third variable explaining why democracies spend more).

However, one look at the data tells you that there isn’t much of a correlation between freedom and government spending, or between oppression and government spending. There are some countries that oppress a lot with not a lot of money – “not a lot” in relative terms compared to GDP. China and Saudi Arabia for example. And there are others that do need a lot of money (a large share of the economy) to keep the bosses in place. Cuba and Zimbabwe for example. But perhaps that is because their GDP is so low, not because they need a lot of money to oppress. In other cases, such as Saudi Arabia we may think they don’t spend a lot on oppression but we are fooled because their GDP is relatively high. And anyway, even dictatorships use some part of their state budget for things that aren’t quite so bad.

Likewise for freedom: freedom comes “cheap” in the U.S., and is “expensive” in Sweden. Between quotation marks because government spending over GDP is a very imprecise measure of the cost of freedom or oppression, for the reasons just given. It’s not because a country’s GDP doubles thanks to higher oil prices that the cost of freedom also doubles. Freedom (like oppression) costs money but not money as a fixed percentage of GDP.

Alternatively, you can also look at the tax burden. Here, the data show that countries that impose the highest taxes are also the ones that are most free (Scandinavia obviously ranks high on both accounts). But is that because freedom costs so much more than oppression? Perhaps the answer is “yes” if you include in “freedom” the things that make freedom possible, such as good healthcare, education etc.

But perhaps a more interesting and useful question would be: what cost considerations or economic incentives would produce a move towards democracy or away from democracy? It’s clear that a crisis of some sort – 9/11, a war, or, more appropriately in the current context, an economic recession or depression (see the Roosevelt cartoon below) – encourages democratic leaders to abridge certain rights, freedoms and democratic procedures. In the case of an economic crisis, the claim is that freedom and proper democratic procedures are just too expensive economically. A swift resolution of the crisis requires strong centralized intervention.

It’s also widely accepted that one of the causes of the demise of the Soviet Union was the unbearable cost of oppression. I think it’s better foreign policy to try to make oppression as costly as possible, rather than trying to make freedom as cheap as possible. Freedom tends not to be very cheap, I guess. And when it is, it’s probably not really freedom.

Measuring Equality of Opportunity

People on opposite sides of political debates often agree on very little, but they do agree on the importance of equality of opportunity. There is almost universal agreement that people should have at least a starting position that guarantees an equal chance of success in whatever life projects one chooses, for those willing to invest an equal amount of effort. More specifically, equality of opportunity is often defined as an equal likelihood of success for all at age 18 (in order to factor in possible inequalities of opportunity determined by education).

Equality of opportunity is by definition an impossible goal. The lottery of birth means more than being unable to choose to be born in a wealthy family with caring parents who can finance your education and motivate you to achieve your goals. It also means that you can’t choose which talents and genes you are born with. Genetic differences are no more a matter of choice than the character and means of your parents. And genetic differences affect people’s talents, skills and maybe even their capacity to invest effort. So, as long as we can’t redistribute beneficial genes or disable harmful ones, and as long as we don’t want to intervene in people’s families and redistribute children, we can’t remove the impact of genes and parents.

However, we can do something. Equality of opportunity may be impossible but there is less or more inequality of opportunity. Or concern should be to provide as much equality of opportunity as possible, and to expand opportunity for those who are relatively less privileged. This means removing things that hold some people back (e.g. discrimination, unemployment, bad schools etc.), and – more positively – helping people to cultivate their capabilities and expand their choices.

How doe we measure if these interventions are successful? It seems very difficult to measure equality of opportunity. All we can do is measure some of the elements of opportunity:

• We can measure unequal income and infer unequal opportunity from this. People with low income obviously have less opportunities than other people. However, not all opportunities can be bought and maybe low income isn’t the result of a disadvantaged upbringing or bad schools, but of bad choices, or even conscious choices. Can we say that a child of a millionaire who chose to be a hermit suffered from unequal opportunity? Don’t think so.
• We can measure unequal education and skills (educational attainment or degrees, IQ tests etc.). However, someone who comes from a very privileged family but with low or alternative aspirations may score low on educational attainment or even IQ.
• We can deduce unequal opportunity by the absence of opportunity enhancing government policies and legislation. The Civil Rights Act was self-evidently a boost for the opportunities of African-Americans.
• We can measure social mobility and assume, correctly I think, that very low levels of mobility indicate inequality of opportunity.
• Etc.

Whatever actions we take to enhance opportunity, it will probably always be relatively unclear what the net outcome will be on overall equality of opportunity. Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything. And when we do something, we should also distinguish clearly between things we can do and things we can’t to, or things we feel are immoral (e.g. genetic redistribution or child redistribution). We know that parental attitudes, genetics, talent, appearance, networks and luck have a huge impact on individuals’ chances of success, but those are things we can’t do anything about, either because it’s impossible or because it’s immoral. But we can teach people skills and perseverance, to a certain extent. We can help the unlucky, for example with unemployment benefits. We can regulate firms’ employment policies so as to counteract the “old boys networks” or racism in employment decisions. We can impose an inheritance tax in order to limit the effects of the lottery of family. Etc etc.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics (30): Failing to Correct for Inflation

Inflation is often a significant part of growth in any time series measured in dollars (or other currencies), or – in other words – it’s an important part of an increase over time in data expressed in dollars. So when you compare data for the current year, month or whatever with the same data for some period in the past, you may just see inflation rather than actual growth or increases. By adjusting for inflation, you uncover the real growth. You may even discover that growth hides decline. Here’s an innocuous example of the consequences of failing to adjust data for inflation:

Over the last month, newspapers and film Web sites have proclaimed Avatar the highest-grossing film in American history. … Moviegoers in [the U.S.] have now spent about $700 million on tickets to Avatar. … No. 2 on the all-time list is Titanic, which brought in about $600 million. Avatar surpassed Titanic in late January. The problem with these numbers is that they aren’t adjusted for inflation. … When you adjust movie grosses for inflation, as Box Office Mojo does, you see that “Gone With the Wind” remains the top-grossing movie of all time, with $1.5 billion in box-office sales (using today’s dollars). (source)

This won’t do much damage. The problems start when unadjusted data are being used to push a political point or legislation. For example, one can claim that it isn’t a good idea to raise gasoline taxes because gasoline prices are already very high compared to the old days, but this claim loses much of its strength when you adjust the prices for inflation and it turns out that they are actually rather average, historically.

Of course, you can make mistakes while trying to adjust for inflation, and there are several techniques available, none of which will provide the same numbers. But any adjustment, especially for comparisons over long periods of time, are better than no adjustment at all.

There’s a cool inflation adjusting tool here (only for U.S. data I’m afraid).

Economic Human Rights (32): The Economic Cost of Taxing the Rich

Taxation is linked to human rights in several ways:

• It’s usually correlated with government accountability and hence democracy (i.e. political rights). States that don’t tax their citizens don’t have an incentive to be accountable. And citizens who have to pay taxes usually demand representation in return.
• Taxation is a means to reduce income inequality, and income inequality creates a number of human rights problems.
• Taxation is, in part, intended to fund a social safety net, which in turn is a means to protect certain economic human rights.
• And tax money is also used for education and healthcare, two human rights.

I personally belief that a progressive tax is best in light of the last two concerns. In a progressive taxation system, higher earners pay a larger percentage of their income on taxes. Compared to a regressive taxation system (people with higher incomes pay less in percentage of their income, as in the case of a consumption tax or VAT) or a flat tax (the tax percentage is the same for all income groups), a progressive tax reduces income inequality: it makes incomes more equal in a direct way because it reduces the income of higher-earning families by a larger percentage than the income of lower earning ones; but also in an indirect way because this system – under certain conditions – yields more tax revenues which can then be spent on poverty reduction and the safety net. Also, it seems to be a good example of a just and fair system. The strongest shoulders should carry the most heavy burden. Someone earning a low income can end up in poverty after paying a small percentage in taxes; a wealthy person will perhaps not even notice paying a relatively large sum in taxes.

The counter-narrative states that high tax rates discourage people; they are a disincentive to hard work and effort. High tax rates for high incomes discourage people who work relatively hard (they work hard supposedly because they earn a lot). Because high tax rates punish the most productive elements in a society, the whole of society suffers. More productive people will limit their productivity because they don’t want to fall into a higher tax bracket, and the money they pay in taxes can’t be invested in the economy. Taxing the rich therefore has an unacceptable economic cost. Conversely, low tax rates for the rich produce benefits for all (this is trickle down economics, read also about the Laffer curve).

But this narrative doesn’t quite stand the test of data. As is clear from this link, high tax rates don’t slow down economic growth, and low tax rates don’t speed it up. This paper also supports the claim that moderate, as opposed to dramatic, increases in marginal rates don’t have any impact on the willingness of the wealthy to participate in the economy. They won’t go Galt. Atlas won’t shrug, except to signal indifference.

The top income tax rate was 91% (beginning at taxable income of $400,000) … [in] the period from 1951 through 1963. Those were the golden years of the U.S. economy, in which the average annual rate of productivity growth was 3.1% (compared with about 1.5% after 1981). Of course, the growth might have been even faster had the marginal tax rates been lower, but the coincidence of high rates and high productivity raises challenging questions for those who believe that high marginal tax rates carry an unacceptable cost. (source)

To be fair, marginal tax rates are a crude measures of tax burden. There’s a difference between marginal tax rates and effective tax rates.

• A marginal tax rate is the tax rate that applies to the last dollar of the tax base (taxable income or spending, usually income). It’s not the rate at which all your dollars are taxed. It’s the maximum rate you’re paying on any of your dollars of taxable income.
• An effective tax rate refers to the actual rate, i.e., the rate existing in fact, for the entire income, after tax deductions and credits and taking into account lower rates for lower income brackets (see here). It’s your total tax obligation (including your income tax and any other additional taxes and/or credits), divided by your total taxable income.

But even if we look at the effective tax rates of the rich, we see that this has steadily decreased over the decades, with little or no positive effect on overall economic performance.

And when there’s no positive effect of decreasing tax rates, there’s probably also no negative effect of increasing tax rates. To the extent that the wealthy (and productive, although those groups obviously don’t overlap completely) respond to changes in the tax system, their responses focus not on increased/decreased labor, productivity or investment, but on tax avoidance (see here).

Income Inequality (20): Social Mobility in Anglo-Saxon Economies

I know that talking about national or international economic models should be avoided because it’s highly simplistic, but I’ll do it anyway because I want to show that people who do sincerely talk about such models make some assumptions about them that are, in my view, incorrect. The Anglo-Saxon economic model, when compared to the mainland European model, is believed to focus more on individual responsibility than on social support. It imposes lower taxes and delivers a less developed social safety net. It’s more “liberal” (in the European sense of the word, meaning less social) and free market oriented. (Anglo-Saxon means English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States etc. but there are large differences between the UK and the US, the UK being less “Anglo-Saxon” than the US; and some mainland countries – like some Eastern European countries – are more “Anglo-Saxon” than they are “mainland”. This goes to show that we’re being simplistic; see also here).

The mainland model is often believed to be better at poverty reduction, job security, social services, and income equality. The Anglo-Saxon model on the other hand is said to be more flexible, less state dependent and more competitive (because of lower taxes and less labor regulation) and suffers less unemployment (because of the less generous social safety net; see also here).

For the same reasons, the Anglo-Saxon model is also believed to be less equal and more open to social mobility – social mobility being defined as the difference between the socioeconomic status of parents and the status their children will attain as adults. When the focus is on individual responsibility and when people can keep a larger share of their income after taxes, they are incited to do well, to work hard, to develop their talents, and to innovate. This not only creates a more competitive economy, but also one in which people can be socially mobile and rise in status and wealth. Countries that impose high taxes and offer generous safety nets don’t give the same incentives.

However, we see that the UK and the US aren’t characterized by relatively high levels of social mobility:

A father’s income determines his son’s to a greater extent in Britain than in any other wealthy nation, with half of a high earner’s “economic advantage” being transmitted to their children, a study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has found. … In Britain … background determines a person’s success to a far higher degree than in almost any other rich country. “Education is not as important for social mobility in Britain as for other countries. Class, to be honest, is the most likely explanation,” said Romain Duval, head of division in the Paris-based OECD’s economics department. (source)

Something similar is the case for the US.

It appears that the United States has less intergenerational social mobility than many other industrialized countries. (source)

It’s true that the UK and the US (especially the US) are highly inegalitarian, and increasingly so, but high levels of income inequality do not necessarily go hand in hand with high levels of social mobility. In fact,

social mobility between generations tends to be lower in more unequal societies. (source)

So if you care about social mobility – and I think you should because high levels of social mobility indicate equality of opportunity, something no one objects to – then you should care about reducing inequality rather than promoting it through “Anglo-Saxon” tax and welfare systems (to the extent that there is something like it in the real world).

Income Inequality (19): What To Do About It?

What to do about income inequality? Assuming of course that you agree that income inequality is a problem. How can we do something about the problem without destroying the incentives behind economic growth (assuming that much of economic growth is driven by financial rewards for effort, creativity, innovation etc. and that taking away resources from wealthy successful people takes away their will and creativity, hence driving down growth and making everyone, including the poor, worse off).

One thing that everyone thinks of is taxation, more precisely <a href="http://progressive taxation: this reduces the income of higher-earning families by a larger percentage than the income of lower earning ones. “Spreading the wealth around”, if you want. This makes incomes more equal in a direct way, but also in an indirect way because the tax revenues can be spend on poverty reduction (unemployment benefits, healthcare or education subsidies etc.). (An inheritance tax can also help, because it promotes social mobility and discourages income inequality that is not the result of economic incentives, and because a lack of social mobility is correlated with income inequality).

The problem, however, is that taxation is hardly ever progressive, even if it looks like it is:

Taxation in affluent countries does little to alter the market distribution of income. The reason is that taxes on income and corporate profits-which are progressively structured, reducing the incomes of high-earning households by a greater percentage than those of low-earning ones-are only part of the tax system. [But] their progressivity tends to be largely offset by the regressivity of payroll and consumption taxes. … Payroll and consumption tax rates usually are “flat”: the rate is the same regardless of individual or household income. Payroll taxes tend to be regressive because they apply to earnings rather than income, and wealthy households tend to get a smaller share of their income from earnings than do most households in the middle of the distribution. Also, payroll taxation often features a cap; in the United States, for instance, earnings above roughly $100,000 are not subject to the social security payroll tax. Consumption taxes apply to spending rather than income. They are regressive because lower-income households by necessity spend more of their income than their higher-income counterparts, so more of their income is subject to the tax. Lane Kenworthy (source)

Redistribution, then, does not occur through or because of the tax system itself, but through the systems of public spending.
Some interesting graphs
here. So it’s the amount of taxes, rather than the system of taxes, that enables governments to redistribute and reduce income inequality.

The Causes of Poverty (28): Family Structure

Almost 30 percent of children [in the U.S.] now live in single-parent families, up from 12 percent in 1968. Since poverty rates in single-parent households are roughly five times as high as in two-parent households, this shift has helped keep the poverty rate up; it climbed to 13.2 percent last year. If we had the same fraction of single-parent families today as we had in 1970, the child poverty rate would probably be about 30 percent lower than it is today. Isabel V. Sawhill and Ron Haskins (source, source)

These numbers seem to correspond to intuition. It’s harder for one person to raise children than it is for two. And the risks of ending up in poverty are therefore higher. However, some caution is needed when linking poverty to family structure. Also, perhaps family structure isn’t so much the cause of poverty as its effect. And then there’s the fact that some countries, such as the Nordic European ones, have low marriage rates and high out-of-wedlock birthrates, yet they are much more egalitarian and have lower poverty rates than the U.S. (source). Part of the reason for this is the more generous welfare systems (and higher taxes ) in Nordic countries. Another part is the fact that

in the Nordic countries it’s quite common for committed couples raising children to just not be married. In the US a child whose mother isn’t married is typically growing up without his or her father being present, which isn’t the case in Sweden or Norway. (source)

“Born out of wedlock” doesn’t necessarily imply “single parent”. It’s family structure, and the presence of two parents – not necessarily “biological parents” or parents of a different sex – that helps families and children avoid or escape poverty, not formal or legal marriage status.

Unmarried biological parents in northern Europe are more likely to stay together to raise the kid than married parents in the US. (source)

This quote isn’t intended to imply that unmarried couples are better than married ones. Again, what matters isn’t marriage as such but family structure. And the focus on family structure isn’t intended to imply that all single parents are bad. Even if there’s only one parent, descent into poverty isn’t destiny. It also depends on the parent. Poverty isn’t a mechanical result of a certain family structure, but family structure does count in many cases (a poor single mother, even with the best intentions and efforts, will perhaps do worse than a celebrity divorcee). Having two parents is extremely helpful.

Yet we shouldn’t forget that poverty has many causes and family structure is just one of them, and most likely not the most important one. Hence it’s very well possible that a society with extremely high rates of single parents and births out of wedlock experiences less poverty (including child poverty) than another society where the large majority of children are raised by two biological parents and the large majority of marriages doesn’t break down.

Here‘s a graph indicating that living with only one parent certainly doesn’t condemn children to poverty.

Economic Human Rights (29): Unemployment Benefits in the U.S. and Elsewhere

Strange as it may seem to some, unemployment benefits are a human right, and rightly so in my opinion. Poverty makes rights impossible, and unemployment benefits save many from poverty, especially during a recession in which unemployment isn’t just a phase between two jobs. Read for instance art. 22, 23 and 25 of the Universal Declaration:

Article 22: Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security.

Article 23: Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

Article 25: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Three times! They must have meant it.

Compared to many other industrialized countries, the U.S. usually adopts a very critical attitude towards social and economic rights in general, and hence also to the right to unemployment benefits. Which is apparent from its relatively stingy system.

At just under $300, the average weekly benefit is less than half the average private-sector wage. Mississippi’s maximum benefit of $230 is not much more than the federal poverty threshold of $200 for an individual. (source)

And it’s not just the total amounts of the benefits:

Compared with the systems in other industrialised countries, the American unemployment-insurance (UI) scheme pays lower benefits for less time and to a smaller share of the unemployed. … States often require beneficiaries to have worked or earned an amount that disqualifies many part-time and low-wage workers. They also disqualify people seeking only part-time work – even though many people now work part-time for family reasons. Benefits typically last for only six months, more than enough time to find a new job in normal times but not in recessions. (source)

This isn’t only a human rights issue. Especially in a recession it can mean making things worse. When people lose their jobs, you don’t want them to lose a large part of their purchasing power since economic recessions are made worse by falling consumer spending.

However, making the system of unemployment benefits more generous would almost certainly require higher taxes. And although the U.S. is a low-tax country (compared to other industrialized countries) that seems pretty utopian right now (given the already hysterical fears about the fiscal consequences of the healthcare proposals).

The Failure of “Trickle Down Economics”

Trickle Down Economics, also called Reaganomics (due to its association with the policies of Reagan and Thatcher) or supply-side economics, is the theory according to which policies destined to alleviate poverty and redistribute wealth are unnecessary and even counterproductive. The rich should be allowed to become even more wealthy, by imposing very low tax rates on high incomes (or a flat tax for example) rather than using the tax system to redistribute wealth. The result will be that their wealth will “trickle down” towards those who are less well off.

When government policies favor the wealthy — for example, via tax cuts for upper-income classes — the increase in wealth flows down to those with lower incomes. That’s because the rich are more likely to spend the additional income, creating more economic activity, which in turn generates jobs and eventually, better paychecks for the less well-off. Michael S. Derby (source)

All boats rise on a rising tide. Redistribution is counterproductive because it will take away the incentives to do well, and hence also take away the possibility of wealth creation and subsequent automatic wealth distribution through “trickling down”. All this is reminiscent of laissez-faire and the invisible hand theory.

Reagan’s trickle down policies in the U.S. can still be felt today:

According to the Tax Policy Center, the top marginal tax rate in the U.S. stood at 70% when Reagan was elected in 1980, falling steadily to 28% by 1989, before it began to rise modestly. The top marginal rate now stands at 35% against a peak of 94% in 1945. (source)

These tax cuts were implemented with the support of the Democrats in the House, which explains why they have been upheld all these years. The result of this was, unsurprisingly, a higher concentration of wealth in fewer hands:

In the period since the economic crisis of the early 1970s, US GDP has grown strongly, and the incomes and wealth of the richest Americans has grown spectacularly. By contrast, the gains to households in the middle of the income distribution have been much more modest. Between 1973 … and 2007, median household income rose from $44 000 to just over $50 000, an annual rate of increase of 0.4 per cent. … For those at the bottom of the income distribution, there have been no gains at all. … incomes accruing to the poorest 10 per cent of Americans have actually fallen over the last 30 years. John Quigging (source)

This is already part of the refutation of the doctrine. Obviously not all boats have risen on the same tide. But if you don’t believe this, there’s a paper here and a blogpost here arguing against the doctrine in a more intelligent way. Maybe “spreading the wealth around” a bit and imposing some tougher taxes on the rich isn’t such a bad idea after all. I mean, the “tricklers” have had decades to prove their point, and failed; maybe now it’s time for the “spreaders” to have a go.

Income Inequality (15): Progressive Taxation

Yes, I know… another post (and a long one) on income inequality, something which isn’t even a human rights issue, strictly speaking. I repeat, the most important thing to me is the provision of basic necessities, not the unequal distribution of these necessities. The fact that someone is poor and homeless is a more important problem than the fact that some people earn more or have bigger houses. Human rights address the first problem, not the second. When human rights address the problem of inequality, it’s usually not income inequality but other types of inequality (unequal rights, discrimination, unequal representation or access to information etc.).

What’s the problem?

However, as I stated here, income inequality IS a problem. It can destroy the cohesiveness of a society when it surpasses certain limits. People lose their self-esteem when they see that they are relatively worse off (even though not necessarily poor), especially when their position in society isn’t completely their own fault, which is often the case. People’s income, even in supposedly meritocratic societies such as the U.S. and the U.K., depends heavily on their family and social environment, and not only on their own achievements. Income inequality therefore becomes a problem of justice, social justice. And it can also become a problem for democracy, in which case it becomes a human rights issue (democracy is a human right). On top of that, people tend to be healthier and to live longer in more egalitarian societies.

And finally, this paper shows that

increased income (or wealth) generally does not increase … happiness significantly, and to the extent that it does, relative income plays a greater role than absolute income. In light of this … redistribution, via a progressive income tax, will increase people’s utility (happiness) by improving their relative incomes.

What can we do?

So, there are many good reasons to reduce income inequality, or at least slow down the trend of increasing inequality. There are also many ways to do this. Progressive taxation, rather than regressive taxation or a flat tax, is one way, as stated in the quote (and here/here). Public social spending is another way, as are some measure to increase social mobility and reduce the correlation between parents’ income and that of their offspring (e.g. an inheritance tax). Better funding for education, and helping lower income people gain access to education (by way of vouchers or scholarships etc.) is also good policy.

In the current post, however, I want to focus on one aspect of policy, namely taxation. I want to defend progressive taxation against regressive or flat taxation, not because of reasons of economic efficiency – although these are important – but because it is a policy which can reduce income inequality.

What is progressive taxation?

Progressive taxation (an idea going back to Adam Smith if not before) means that those with a higher income pay a relatively larger share of their income on taxes, and that this share rises progressively when income levels rise. Earning more means paying more taxes, both in absolute terms (the amount of taxes paid) and in relative terms (the percentage of income paid on taxes). A concept often used to describe this is “increasing tax burden”, but that is misleading, as Ezra Klein has pointed out. A person paying more taxes both in absolute and relative terms, doesn’t necessarily carry a bigger burden:

A strong person carrying a 50 pound bag may feel less burdened than a weak person carrying a 20 pound bag.

Even if the 50 pound is larger compared to the body weight of the strong and healthy person than the 20 pound is to that of the weak and sick person. Klein again:

The average after-tax income of the average person in the middle income quintile is $52,100. That’s down from about $60,700 after an effective tax rate of 14.2%. In the top quintile, the after-tax income is $184,400, down from $248,400 after a 25.8% effective federal tax rate. The rich person certainly pays more, both in absolute terms and as a share of income. But is his burden greater than the middle-income taxpayer left with $52,100? It’s hard for me to see how.

A progressive tax system can also be defined by comparing it to the so-called flat tax. A flat tax usually means that everyone pays the same tax rate. As a result, rich people pay more taxes in absolute terms, but the same taxes as poor people in relative terms. Proponents of a flat tax system say that it stimulates economic growth because it takes away less money from the wealthy, who can then invest it in the economy. Such higher growth in turn leads to more revenue for the government, and hence more means to benefit the poor, for instance. A flat tax also leads to more revenue because lower tax rates for the rich means that they will be less inclined to cheat or avoid taxes, and because its simplicity eliminates loopholes and deductions.

However, these advantages, to the extent that they are real, don’t address the inherent injustice of the system.

How do you make taxation progressive?

The “progressivity” of taxes can be achieved in different ways:

1. The most obvious way: a higher income means a higher tax rate.
2. Rather than increasing the tax rate together with increases in the taxable amount (usually the wage or other types of income), one can also choose to increase the taxable amount for wealthier people while leaving the tax rate identical for everyone. Wealthier people would then have a larger “tax base”. For example, they may have less exemptions, deductions, tax credits etc., or they may have to pay taxes on luxury goods that only they can afford to buy. With one and the same tax rate for all, we still are able to introduce progressivity. This looks a bit like the flat tax.
3. Or one can decide to have, like in the previous case, only one tax rate rather than rates rising with income levels, and exempt from taxes all income below $50,000 or something. This as well is a progressive tax, because people with higher incomes pay more taxes, both in an absolute and a relative sense.

Progressivity can not be achieved by moving the tax system away from income and towards sales taxes, VAT or consumption taxes. Such taxes are by definition regressive, because they impose a relatively higher burden on lower income taxpayers, who, after all, spend a larger proportion of their wealth and income on consumption, and therefore pay a greater share of their income on taxes.

Other options?

As mentioned above, progressive taxation is only one way to reduce income inequality, and perhaps not even the most useful one. Yglesias and Kenworthy have shown that it’s not the tax system as such but targeted government spending that equalizes things. The important thing is to have a tax system that generates enough revenue to spend on counter-inequality measures (such as education, benefits etc.). Whether this system is progressive or not is secondary. According to Kenworthy, countries with higher tax revenues but not necessarily more progressive tax systems achieve more inequality reduction.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (5): The Aid Curse, or the Negative Effect of International Development Aid on Democracy

Via Bill Easterly’s blog, I discovered this paper on the so-called “aid curse“: just as dependence on natural resources has a negative effect on the quality of a country’s governance and democracy (a phenomenon called the resource curse), so has international development aid (or official development aid, ODA), especially in countries which depend heavily on aid (and in which aid represents a large percentage of GDP).

This is surprising, because one of the aims of international development aid is to bolster the quality of governance, directly through aid targeted at this objective, or indirectly on the assumption that better education, health care etc. will ultimately lead to better governance.

It seems now that there is a correlation (and perhaps even a causal link) between high levels of aid and low levels of democracy. The explanation is that foreign aid , like the revenue of natural resources, provides an opportunity for governments and leaders to appropriate funds illegitimately. And, because they benefit from aid, they will try to exclude other groups from power. This obviously destroys democratic institutions or makes it more difficult to establish them.

Foreign aid also reduces the need for a system of taxation. And without such a system, it’s a lot more difficult to construct a well-functioning government, and it’s less likely that forces for representation take root (historically, the principle of “no taxation without representation” has promoted democracy). When a government doesn’t depend on taxes for its revenues, then it will have less incentives to seek accountability.

The levels of democracy in countries decrease while the levels of aid (as official development aid – ODA – over GDP) increase.

None of this proves that we should give less aid to developing countries. Probably the opposite is true. What it proves is that aid is more than just sending money. Donors should check what happens to their money, should target the money, and should bypass the “sticky fingers” in government as much as possible. To some extent, donors should also make aid conditional on democratic reform because this reform is the way to avoid aid inefficiency. However, when doing so, they should be careful not to put the cart before the horse: one of the goals of aid is precisely democratization.

The Causes of Poverty (7c): Globalization

Does globalization erode social safety nets? Economic theory and intuition suggest that as economies become more globalized, the ability of governments to undertake redistributive policies and to engage in social spending erodes. After all, a large part of the tax base – corporations, financial intermediaries, and skilled workers in particular – become internationally mobile and can evade taxes needed to finance those public expenditures.

… the lack of an obvious decline in the overall tax take in major advanced economies, has led many observers to think that the hypothesized decline of the welfare state has not in fact taken place. [However], as technological progress and multilateral trade liberalization have made borders less of a barrier to economic activity, the scope of redistribution policies has become smaller. Dani Rodrik (source)

This doesn’t mean that globalization necessarily leads to more poverty. Redistribution on the basis of taxation is only one way to fight poverty. In this post I discussed some of the ways in which more free trade and hence more globalization can reduce poverty.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (3): The Resource Curse

Why do countries with lots of natural resources tend to do worse than countries with less resource wealth, both in terms of economic growth and in political, social and human rights terms? We see that countries which own lots of natural resources such as diamonds, oil or other valuables that are found in the ground, are often relatively poor, badly governed, violent and suffering from gross violations of human rights.

There are many possible causes of this curse (also called “the paradox of plenty”):

1. Lack of economic diversification

Other economic sectors tend to get neglected by the government because there is a guaranteed income from the natural resources. These sectors therefore cannot develop and cannot become an alternative when the resources are taking hits. The fluctuations of the international prices of the resources can cause extreme highs and lows in national economic growth. This is bad in itself, but also makes it difficult for the government to do long term planning, since the level of revenues cannot be predicted. Dependence on one economic sector means vulnerability.

Another disadvantage of concentrating the economy on one resource sector, is that these sector often provide few jobs, especially for local people. The oil industry for example needs highly specialized workers, who are mostly foreigners. On top of that, these sectors do not require many forward or backward connections in the economy (such as suppliers, local customers, refiners etc.), which again doesn’t help the local job creation.

Even if the government tries to diversify the economy, it may fail to do so because the resource sector is more profitable for local individual economic agents.

Resource dependent countries also see their best talents going to the resource industry which pays better wages than the rest of the economy or the government sector. As a result, the latter are unable to perform adequately. See point 4 below.

2. Corruption

Corruption tends to flourish when governments own almost the entire economy and have their hands on the natural resources. More on corruption in a future post.

3. Social division

Abundance of natural resources can produce or prolong violent conflicts within societies as different groups try to control (parts of) the resources. Separatist groups may emerge, trying to control the part of the territory most rich in resources. This is often aggravated by existing social or cultural division. Division may also appear between parts of the government (e.g. local government vs central government, or between different parts of the central administration).

The resources therefore may cause divisions and conflict, and thereby cause deficiencies in government, economic turmoil, and social unrest. But the resources may also prolong conflicts because groups which manage to take control of (parts of) the resources may use these to arm themselves or otherwise gain influence and power.

4. Government’s unaccoutability and inefficiency

Countries which do not depend on natural resources are often more efficient in taxing their citizens, because they do not have funds which are quasi-automatically generated by resources. As a result, they are forced to develop the government machinery in an efficient way, hence a reduced risk of government break-down. The citizens in return, as they are taxed, will demand accountability, efficient spending etc.

Conversely, the political leaders in resource-dependent countries don’t have to care about their citizens. They create support by allocating money, generated by the resources, to favored interest parties, and thereby increasing the level of corruption. And if citizens object, they have the material means to suppress protest. They don’t appreciate an effective government administration as this carries the risk of control, oversight and other anti-corruption measures (see point 2). So they have an interest in bad government.

It is obvious that bad government, rights violations and economic stagnation have many causes. The resource curse is only one. There are countries which are blessed with resources and which do well at the same time. And there are mismanaged countries that don’t have any resources. As in all correlations, the causation may go in the other way: bad government can create dependence on exports of natural resources.

“When a country’s chaos and economic policies scare off foreign investors and send local entrepreneurs abroad to look for better opportunities, the economy becomes skewed. Factories may close and businesses may flee, but petroleum and precious metals remain for the taking. Resource extraction becomes ‘the default sector’ that still functions after other industries have come to a halt.” (source)

What to do about it?

Leif Wenar has argued that a strict application of property rights could help reduce or correct the resource curse. When dictators or insurgents sell off a country’s resources to foreigners or multi-national companies, while terrorizing the people into submission, they are in fact selling goods that they stole from those people. They have no right to sell what they don’t own. The natural resources of a country belong equally to all the people of that country. Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states:

All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources.

And

“the people, whose resources are being sold off, become not the beneficiaries of this wealth but the victim of those who use their own wealth to repress them”. Leif Wenar (source)

One could take legal action in western jurisdictions to try to enforce the property rights of the citizens of resource cursed countries and to charge multinational corporations with the crime of receiving stolen goods.

Western countries, investors and consumers could also boycott companies that invest in resource-cursed countries, or try to pressure campaign them to get out of these countries, or they could stop to invest in these companies.

When people finally get a grip on their resources, they open the path to better government, a better economy and better protection for human rights. Perhaps then they will not have to die trying to recapture a tiny part of the resources that are their lawful property, as happened in many cases in Nigeria, for example, where people often try to tap some oil from the pipelines channeling their property to the west. In doing so, they risk their lives. As a consequence of their actions, the pipelines can explode.

What Are Human Rights? (15): Constitutionally Universal

The theme of this post is the often difficult relationship between citizenship and human rights. This relationship is difficult because human rights, which are explicitly rights for all people everywhere, without distinctions of any kind, seem to require citizenship, and hence a distinction between groups of somehow differentiated people, for their protection. Without citizenship, it is argued, human rights remain a wish rather than a reality, potential rather than effective. Indeed, we often see that non-citizens such as refugees, asylum-seekers or stateless people suffer more rights violations than the citizens of the countries in which they happen to find themselves, even if these countries are comparatively well functioning democracies.

I want to argue that there are no legal reasons to consider citizenship as some kind of necessary condition for the protection of the rights of people within the territory of a state. Or, to put it negatively, that there are no legal reasons to treat the rights of non-citizens with less respect than the rights of citizens, or to accept violations of the rights of non-citizens with more ease than violations of the rights of citizens. There has to be, in other words, equality of protection between citizens and non-citizens. Citizenship therefore should be irrelevant for the protection of the human rights of the people within a given state territory. The state should be blind in this respect and treat non-citizens as if they were citizens. Non-citizens should have the same legal, judicial and other means to stand up for their rights.

The legal argument is based on Article 2, paragraph 1 of The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states the following:

“Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in the present Covenant, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status”.

The widely held but mistaken belief that the rights of non-citizens residing in a state are, perhaps inevitably, more precarious than the rights of the citizens living beside them, goes back to the historically important role of citizenship in the practice of protecting human rights. Theoretically, citizenship is irrelevant to human rights. These rights are the equal rights of all human beings, equally and unconditionally. It is not justified to say that one should be white, male, citizen or whatever to be able to enjoy the protection of these rights. Universality, equality and unconditionality are perhaps the main characteristics of human rights. That is where they got their name. They would not be called human rights if this were not the case.

Although theoretically these rights come with no conditions attached, in reality and in practice there are many necessary conditions for their effective protection: a well functioning judiciary, a separation of powers, a certain mentality, certain economic conditions etc. Too many to name them all, unfortunately. But the one we should name and explain is citizenship. Historically, it was because people were citizens of a state that they could use and improve the institutions and judicial instruments of the state, including the executive powers, to enforce their rights. It is this historical contingency, the fact that people have always found their citizenship very useful for their human rights, which has led many to believe that there is some kind of special link between citizenship and human rights which makes it possible and acceptable to treat the rights of non-citizens with less respect. That rights are only accessible to citizens. That the rights of man have often been the “rights of an Englishman” in the words of Burke.

“The survivors of the extermination camps, the inmates of concentration and internment camps, and even the comparatively happy stateless people could see … that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger” (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism).

The state, although it does not grant rights, has to recognize them and make them real, but not only for citizens. The constitution, the main instrument for recognizing human rights, should and nowadays often does explicitly guarantee rights for humans, and not merely rights for citizens. Everybody within the territory of the state, not only the citizens of the state, can then enjoy the human rights protected by the constitution. Citizens as well as non-citizens can then go to court and challenge unjust laws or acts of state. Both categories of people have legal personality. This is often called the constitutional universality of rights.

The protection of the economic rights of non-citizens is an even more contentious matter. Should non-citizens have the same healthcare protection, social security, education etc.? In principle yes, but some countries may have such a large number of non-citizens in their territory that the economic viability of their social security system comes under threat. The tax payers ability to fund the system is limited, and non-citizens normally don’t pay taxes.

What is Democracy? (24): A Short History of Democracy

1. Ancient Greece

Democracy is a Greek invention, created by some of the ancient Greek city states, in particular Athens. Athenian democracy was a direct democracy. Citizens – not including women, children, slaves, resident foreigners, i.e. the majority of the population – gathered together to discuss and decide on the policies of the state. Within this minority (the proportion of which is difficult to estimate but some put it at 10% of the total population), participation, equality and freedom was unrivaled. The quintessential description is given in Pericles’ Funeral Oration, still today one of the basic texts in democratic theory.

The word “democracy” combines the elements demos (which means “people”) and kratos (“force, power”). Kratos is an unexpectedly brutish word. In the words “monarchy” and “oligarchy”, the second element arche means rule, leading, or being first. It is possible that the term “democracy” was coined by its detractors who rejected the possibility of, so to speak, a valid “demarchy”. Whatever its original tone, the term was adopted wholeheartedly by Athenian democrats. People in the ancient times wondered if the Athens could ever survive this devastating lifestyle. (Wikipedia)

Indeed, Athenian direct democracy required much personal effort of those participating. The meetings were long, frequent and intensive. It has been said that without the slave-economy and the imperial subjugation of other cities, this experiment would not have been possible. More on direct democracy.

Athenian democracy had some of the characteristics of representative democracy. Some decisions were taken by chosen representatives, such as judicial decisions. However, the choice of officials was not by election but by lot.

2. Medieval taxation

One of the historical origins of the representative system is the principle that prohibits taxation not based on laws approved by the people who pay the taxes (“no taxation without representation”). At the time when this principle came into force, the taxpayers were mainly the wealthy members of the new middle class or bourgeoisie.

These people demanded representation in return for their money and used this representation to control the expenditures of the government. If the government wished to spend a lot of money on a stupid and unnecessary war for example, then the representatives would refuse to vote in the laws required to spend this money. Still today, budgetary control as a means for the people to check if government spending is worth paying for is an important function of parliaments.

Parliaments and representation owe their existence to taxation. The increasing costs of warfare, administration and infrastructure made the kings of the late Middle Ages dependent on the money of the wealthiest class of the moment, which happened to be the new middle class. Now and again, these kings were forced to organize meetings (for example the so-called “States-General”) where the representatives of the cities and the middle class could or could not agree to finance certain government projects. If they agreed, they did so because their interests would be served by the project. They always agreed by way of covenants, contracts or laws, whereby they not only authorized spending but also received certain rights and privileges in return. Because they paid, they were able to enforce certain reforms, at first only local and specific privileges, but later also more abstract rights, which had the advantage of being applicable in very different situations.

 

These meetings were gradually institutionalized into what we now call parliaments. Parliaments therefore existed before modern democracy. Starting out as an instrument for budgetary control in the hands of a part of the population, they gradually acquired more power compared to the executive (in most cases compared to the king) and they gradually engaged in legislation.

3. Contemporary evolutions

The most important evolution in modern times was the extension of the franchise. In the early period of the modern state, democracy implied the right to vote only for a small portion of the make upper class population. Gradually, more and more groups gained equal political rights: workers, women, and in some contemporary democracy, even resident aliens. This has been called universal suffrage.

The two world wars and the end of the cold war were considered victories of the democratic states over dictatorial ones. The end of colonization, however, although theoretically a victory for democracy, was in reality a mixed blessing for many new third world states, with the notable exception of India.

An analysis by Freedom House argues that there was not a single liberal democracy with universal suffrage in the world in 1900, but that in 2000 120 of the world’s 192 nations, or 62% were such democracies. (Wikipedia)

Also important and promising is the advance of corporate democracy.

4. Communes

Throughout history, and in many different countries and circumstances, small groups of people organized themselves democratically. Examples are the workers in the Paris Communes in the 19th century, the Swiss Cantons, the New England towns, the Italian medieval cities, the Early Bolshevik Soviets etc.

Economic Human Rights (4): Taxation

What if different kinds of equality contradict each other? For example equality before the law on the one hand (laws must be equal for everybody and should not discriminate) and material equality as promoted by economic rights on the other hand.

Material equality is often promoted by way of taxation based on legislation. The purpose of taxation is the redistribution of property. The problem is that redistribution only benefits one group of people and harms the interests of the rest of the population. Taxation laws do not seem to be equal for everybody and do not have the same result for everybody. It seems as if they discriminate against certain people. A wealthy person can claim that laws must be the same for everybody and that a law which forces one person to give and allows another to receive is illegitimate. A law against murder does not, at the same time, force one person to abstain from murder and allow another person to murder. So why should a law on taxation be allowed to discriminate?

First of all, there is no reason to believe that the principle of equality before the law is an absolute principle. It must be possible to make trade-offs between principles. If one principle – for example equality before the law – does serious harm to another principle – for example material equality – then it may be acceptable to sacrifice or limit one principle for the sake of another. Sometimes, one has to make a choice and one has to establish priorities. This goes both ways. Too much attention to material equality can be counteracted by way of the principle of equality before the law.

However, it may not be necessary to limit the principle of equality before the law. Taxation laws do not discriminate, at least when we define discrimination as giving something to one person and denying it to another without good reason. Economic rights indeed give something to one person and not to another. Even more so, they take away something from one person in order to give it to another. However, the former person is not denied the thing that is given to the latter. He or she has and continues to have the same thing as the one given to the latter. The consequences of taxes are equal for everybody because they make sure that everybody has the same minimum of material means. Taxation laws do not cause discrimination or inequality. On the contrary, they are designed to eliminate discrimination and inequality, not only at the level of material well-being but also at the level of political influence, because material inequality causes political inequality.

We have discrimination when a law only benefits one group of persons and when there is no good reason why other persons should not benefit. It is clear that there is no good reason why wealthy people should benefit from taxation laws in the same way as poor people, except of course when they themselves become poor. Everybody can be in a position in which he or she needs taxation laws.

The right to free speech does not benefit everybody in an equal way either. Some people gain more from this right than other people. A colored person suffering from discrimination needs this right more than a white, middle-class person without political worries. However, there is no reason to claim that this right contradicts the principle of equality before the law.