i defend the progressive state to a libertarian friend of mine.
so i've been having an ongoing series of pretty lively conversations/arguments/friendly but impassioned debates with my good friend andy. i'm a progressive democrat; he's a libertarian (i'm volunteering/donating for obama, him for paul, so i suppose the two of us combined are andrew sullivan). andy and i, we get into it, what with our parallel new york ethnicness demanding much hand gesturing and interrupting and raising of voices. after a particularly lively conversation in central park (that also accompanied a large dose of caffeine) i found myself unable to sleep at all. so i instead wrote a harried, furious series of e-mails that amounted to a fairly ambitious manifesto, not only the sum of my refutations of his central arguments but also something of a back-to-basics defense of the very idea of a progressive state, both in its political and economic organization.
what i'm publishing here is a revised holistic document that is almost all the content of those e-mails, mostly left unchanged. some typoes are corrected, some personal/tangential remarks deleted, arguments fused, errors fixed, and restructured for readability. but their personal letter structure preserved, and still almost identical to the original hours-long outpour of what i hope is both an rigorously analytic and viscerally emotional defense of mankind's greatest political achievement since the very formation of the united states. here's hoping i'm not crazy:
there is a brilliant novel that describes in detail the system you advocate - in which individuals collectively fund their defense and have every other aspect of economy/society/culture/life managed by a free, open, and completely unregulated market. it's atlas shrugged, by ayn rand. i don't know if you've ever read it, but there are long passages devoted not only to the theoretical/political/economic/moral defense of such a society, but to portraying its workings in great detail.
there is one fundamental difference between the world rand describes and the one we live - everyone who lives in her society is superhuman, both in the somewhat less important sense of having extraordinary talents and abilities and in the crucial sense of being perfect moral agents. the point being that having all the aspects of life that most western democracies fund and manage in the public sphere - infrastructure, currency, justice system, welfare (ie unemployment insurance, essentially), health care, education/research, retirement insurance, and other public services - won't be provided at all to people who aren't wealthy enough to pay for the entirety of their share of the cost, which in most of these cases is far too high for most people. how could education possibility be available to all citizens, even if a well-educated populace is generally beneficial to the whole society (and if one believes availability of education should be considered a basic right of all people)? that would require essentially what it requires now - collective investment in these ventures, run at cost, with individuals paying what they are capable of contributing.
except without anyone compelling people to do so, that would require the individuals who have the most wealth (in the u.s. the top 10% possess 80% of all financial assets and the bottom 90% hold only 20%) to all simultaneously decide that they should and will donate a large share of their money to private education charities. the odds of that working is pretty low, because unlike in atlas shrugged, most people are not perfect moral agents, and greed tends to generate wealth and vice-versa. those with wealth are reluctant to give much of it up, and without progressive taxation (which redistributes wealth downward), regulations of the market, and widely-available public services, you'll see a world much like the world of 100-150 years ago, when none of those things existed - a world where a miniscule number of people held an enormous share of the wealth (yes, even more so than now) and more importantly where there was almost no middle class - simply a vast proletariat class working day by day in a subsistence existence with poor quality of life and almost no possibility of social mobility.
no government is perfect (because it too is made up of people), but this one has managed to see that just about everybody in this country is educated through the age of 16, has a home, is well-fed, has access to at least some form of emergency health care, and even has access to some luxuries. most people in this country have televisions and cellular phones, which is a result not directly of government investment but the broad economic security provided for all the market agents thanks to government services such as management of satellites, airwaves, etc. hell, amazon.com is a prime example of the potential of free markets, but it could never do what it does without fedex. fedex, in turn, is essentially a public/private hybrid at this point - the usps provides something like a fifth of fedex's total annual revenue in exchange for outsourcing all its overnight and high-priority mail. but i just checked both websites - to send a package overnight from my house to beverly hills would cost half as much through usps than fedex's least expensive overnight delivery service. just one example of how the market and the public sphere can work together to provide the best possible services to the broadest number of people. but many attempts at privatization have gone wrong - such as numerous attempts at energy privatization, or privatization of prison services or even the military (blackwater - duh) - because using an improperly regulated private service led to greed and selfishness winning out, with that service being used in an exploitative manner. everybody needs heat to survive in new hampshire in winter, and if a private monopoly controls it and charges $50,000 to heat your home every winter, then you'll see a whole lot less people with good heat, even if that's the ideal sell price for a private heating company.
read up on the original american progressive movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s - the new deal was simply the radically reformist institutionalization of principles and ideas that american progressive movements had been advocating and progressing for decades. for example, take women getting the right to vote in 1920. money and power are matter and energy - two versions of the same thing. those who have them are loathe to surrender either. and for centuries men were loathe to give women the vote, first and foremost because it meant that men would go from controlling 100% of the government to 49%. just like that, every male voter would be half as powerful, and the male bloc would have an equally-sized competing bloc.
in the same way, people who have lots of money don't want or like to give away that much of it to other people without receiving some good or service for themselves in exchange; but unless a certain minimum amount of money is invested in certain services, they won't be available to everybody. but given that at least some income and wealth inequality is a permanent condition of any system which doesn't enforce total or near-total equality (ie, not communism or a fairly strong socialism), not everybody is going to be able to afford to pay an equal share of every single one of these services! which is why you have to have the people that have more money pay more than those who don't, and why that requires a publicly-managed system that collects and redistributes/invests those revenues (the collective investment fund) in a way that is compliant with the democratic market, ie one person one vote, not simply who already has the money and the power. people invest their money in their own interests, so if the vast majority of a societies wealth is controlled by a few people, then that wealth will be spent and invested in such a way that is only in accordance with the interests of those individuals.
once you reconcile with two more basic facts - markets don't always provide the best services (private health care firms, for example, have strong incentives to deny care even to those who legitimately need it and frequently do so); and those with the most wealth and power benefit most from the system because they have the most wealth and power of anyone in the system (duh) - it doesn't really make sense to suddenly decide to revert to a system that was far worse for the public good than the one we have. look at everything this country has accomplished economically and technologically in the last quarter-century - little to none of that would have been possible without the secure and open economic playing field provided by the government, which gives people the freedom and safety to maximize their personal economic utility. plus, keep in mind that all the money people aren’t spending on public services (for example, spending thousands of dollars every year on grade, middle, and high school) allows them to invest that money in the private sector, either by purchasing more goods or investing in financial markets.
taxes and government are good for the private sector in so many ways - take cell phones. every person is only going to want or need one cell phone and buy essentially equivalent plans (the differences are minimal on the scale of millions), so the profitability of the cell phone industry is based not on the wealth of it's consumer base but the raw size. so the more people who can afford cell phones the better, which is why it's good that most americans don't have to pay more than a few thousands dollars every year for the vast array of public services provided for them, because that way almost all americans can afford cell phones. but the more economically successful americans can afford more luxurious versions of these items (like iphones or blackberries or razrs). without a vibrant public sector, maybe only 30% of americans would even be able to afford cell phones, and those revenues may not justify the massive infrastructure investment necessary to have national cellular phone coverage! the final summary being - a having a public sector which tries to maximize economic security and opportunity creates the optimal conditions for a vibrant private sector. they're in harmony, not conflict.
but let’s trial run your system – let’s dump all spending except defense and debt, and institute a flat tax. the data (2006 #’s):
total us households: 114.4 million.
us household median income: $48, 201.
total gov't revenue/spending: $2.2/$2.7 trillion (ergo, $500 billion deficit).
total gov't defense spending - $512.1 billion, plus $68.4 billion on veteran's benefits, so $580.5 billion total (this is ignoring governmental salary, which would be much smaller in your system but not insignificant).
let’s say interest on the debt hits $250 million. so total gov’t expenditures are $830.5 billion.
that's $7,260 per household per year if everyone pays equally – a flat income tax.
now. 28.22% of american households earn less than $25k a year. let's set that as the tax exempt line you proposed, to be nice (ignoring the issues of the income "dead zone" that would be created and the social issues of dividing society into the "payers" and "non-payers"), since the us poverty rate is around $20k for a family of four. that only leaves us with 82.1 million taxpaying households. that's a tax burden on each household of $10,115. and that's just for defense and the debt. so 3/4 of american households are paying more than $10k a year, which for the lower third of taxpayers ($25k-50k) is 20-40% of all annual income - solely to be defended from outside invasion. ok.
now look at the us as it is now. considering not just our tax rates but also general deductions, a family of four that makes $50k a year pays probably $1-2k in taxes. a family of four would need to make just over $100k a year to pay at least $10k in federal income tax.
and gets the same half-a-trillion dollars of defense. and quarter trillion interest payments.
and social security.
and welfare.
and medicare.
and free education for everyone.
and public transportation/infrastructure.
and a justice/prison system.
and conservation of vast amounts of natural space.
massive investment in scientific and technological research.
investment in every state and local gov’t in the union.
and a whole, whole, whole lot more.
and, no, not all of these things operate at maximum efficiency or benefit to the consumer. but it has proven, over the last 75 years, to be a system better at providing both broad economic security and general civil rights to the majority of its citizens. no matter how fierce a critic one is of the "system" here, and i consider myself to be among the fiercest, i cite noam chomsky as agreeing with me that america is the greatest country in the world and has been since world war ii. that's why it's worth preserving in its basic structures, even as much of it needs strong-to-radical re-evaluation. it's a good way to govern.
there are lots of countries that have systems like yours - where the nation's public treasure goes entirely towards defense/police and compensation of government officials. it's called autocracy/oligarchy/plutocracy/totalitarianism. because what happens when you repeal most of a nations laws is that a small handful of people get very rich and powerful very quickly and basically commandeer the levers of the state. then they get to keep all their money and power while using the military and police to regulate the population and to conquer overseas. this of course still happens to some extent in every society, but it's greatly reduced here to some extent because we have both liberal republican democracy in terms of our political organization but also a government that takes wealth from the richest members of society and re-invests it for the collective benefit of society. and the fact that you can advocate for repealing all the laws and structures that are instituted for the very purpose of preventing small, powerful, and completely self-interested groups from taking over our economy and government is because you are privileged. if you lived in a third-world military dictatorship, you almost certainly wouldn't believe in what you believe in now because you would be forced to live with the actual consequences of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
what you are advocating for, is, in fact, poverty and corruption:
-poor access to affordable health care
-inadequate nutrition in childhood
-weak rule of law
-lacking infrastructure
-no available education
-government corruption
-overpopulation and lack of access to birth control methods
-no democracy
which your system isn't, really, since there's no such thing as domestic policy ergo the only choices in the hands of voters are military leaders, but the first military leader is going to have an enormous incentive to just take power permanently by joining with wealthy interests, which happens all the time.
and you're going to have massive population migration problems anyway because nobody is going to want to stay here after you simultaneously massively raise their taxes and take away all their public services because only 15% of us households make more than $100k a year, so you're raising taxes on everyone but the richest fifth, and you're giving the biggest hike – the whole $9-10k - to the people who make $25-50k - the people who can least afford it! at the same time that you're doing away with schools and universities and public roads and sanitation and college grants and public parks and insurance for health, unemployment, retirement, and all kinds of consumer protections and regulations. why would anyone want to live in this country? and who in their right minds would vote for the candidate of both]massive tax hikes and no government services or protections? even if he's the republican nominee, ron paul could never win the presidency because what he believes in is very bad for most people whether he realizes it or not. and in the broader sense, liberal democracy that progressively collects revenues and invests public treasure for the broad national good remains, to this day, the worst form of government except every other form that has ever been tried. and until you start designing governments for other species, those results are unlikely to change.