So both sides tend to agree that one has some kind of right or entitlement to one’s pre-tax income. Well-meaning public intellectual Alain de Botton encourages us to think of taxation as charity: we give up what’s ours for the greater good of our society. Most on the economic left start from the assumption that it is all things being equal a bad thing that the state takes our money from us, but hold that this prima facie bad is justified by the public goods which taxation makes possible. Again and again the economic right stoke resentment at the state allegedly taking what’s ours by force, and use this resentment to build support for a programme of small government.īut even those who believe in relatively big government tend to share this understanding of taxation as the appropriation by government of ‘our money’. When austerity hit the arts in 2011, Dr Steve Davies of the pseudo-think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs argued on Channel Four news that the 20% cuts to the arts didn’t go far enough: art funding should be entirely abolished on the grounds that it’s unfair to take people’s money off them by force to pay for something they may not want.
Many political arguments start from the assumption that taxation is the government taking ‘our money’ off us.
0 kommentar(er)
