Somewhere in the social media sphere I recently discovered some start-up or something that had suggested the idea of a fund that people in a community could pay into, with the fund then used to improve that same community. And of course, I saw it with the snarky caption “Techbros invent taxes.” And I was both amused, and sad, because yeah. It’s kind of like that. Probably the only difference is, in the techbro vision of it, some investors somehow profit from this, probably from the administration of the fund, which then basically sounds like skimming or embezzlement.
Now, to be clear, I’m not a “tax everything all the time” kind of person, but as the title of this post suggests, I am the sort of person who recognizes the necessity of taxes. And overall, I think most everyone does too, though often they might not realize it. Too often I think the people who get fed up with it are getting distracted by what are effectively small potatoes, grabby headlines of public money being wasted. A government-funded study on whether or not water is wet, for instance. Fascinating philosophical question, but might be an absurd thing to write a whole grant for. Though I’ll also note here that the reporting on these absurd wastes of money tend to be absurdly reductive, such that if the full scope of the thing were accurately described, the spend might actually make sense.
But I digress.
It’s not just that taxes are a necessary evil, they play a key role in promoting civilization as a concept, and help bind people together in a community. For the latter, taxes provide for the maintenance of public spaces, for instance. And to be extremely basic about it, they provide for things like libraries and public parks. These aren’t just “nice to have” items, they’re kind of crucial to building community. No, every community with a park doesn’t leverage it to its fullest to build community… but everywhere there is a tight knit community, you can bet there are public spaces where the community comes together.
On an even more basic level, there’s simply the roads and sidewalks. These kinds of things could never actually work as private concerns, or pay-to-play concepts. And without this kind of publicly-owned benefit to the general public, there’s no space in which community can develop. Otherwise the entire world is subdivided into privately held parcels where you have to pay each time you want to enter or cross another parcel.
“But without taxes, I’d have money to save and put into savings for this kind of thing!” you say. (I really had considered writing this as a Socratic dialogue, but that felt like too much work.) And I say, sure, you could have savings set aside for the sidewalk toll and the dozens of privately owned toll roads you’d have to drive down to get to the grocery store, but that starts to sound like some kind of bleak dystopia. And while we might complain now about the horrible and uneven upkeep of roads, for instance, I have the distinct feeling that the patchwork nightmare of nothing but privately owned roads would make one long for the days of having to swerve to avoid a few crummy potholes.
Because without taxes, not only would the construction and maintenance of the roads be up to the whims of the owners, but there would be no funding for the establishment of any kind of standards, much less the enforcement of them.
And honestly, let’s not even get started on the idea of privately-funded police, or fire departments, or national defense. Because that’s all been tried and it’s been such an unmitigated disaster that the only rational response was to raise taxes and create those things as public services. I mean, if you want to imagine such a thing, just apply the current nightmare of health care and health insurance in the United States to fighting structure fires. Such an absurd nightmare.
From a historical perspective, which is often how I like to look at things, I’m fascinated at how the hatred of taxes (and their kissing cousin regulations) seems to really gain steam in a world only made possible by taxes and regulations. I find it a sobering demonstration of how complacency can breed contempt. So much gets taken for granted, our thoughts get disconnected from the notion of even having to maintain civilization or the infrastructure around us, and we’re given to wonder darkly about what must be happening with the money taken out of every paycheck.
And the answer is, well, look around you. You can see the investment everywhere. And it is an investment, in the future, in the community, in ourselves.
This has been one in a series of evergreen posts that I’ve got around here because it’s the kind of things that I think all the time and come up periodically in discussions. If my thoughts ever change on a topic like this, I’ll update accordingly, or provide a link in this post to my new thoughts on the matter.