This tweet, now over a month old, seemed to be causing concern amongst the libertarian right twitosphere last night:
My thinking on this issue is, undoubtedly, partly my own. Some derives from the work of philosophers Liam Murphy (no relative that I know of) and Thomas Nagel. I have not got time to write much on this today, but York University philosopher Martin O'Neill did so for Tax Justice Network in 2009 in its Tax Justice Focus. This is the article, in three parts, or read the original here. As Martin says, the idea that we own our pre-tax income is just that: an idea. That does not mean it is true, and the contrary is, in my opinion, correct. We actually only own our post tax income: the tax we owe must belong to the state. If it were not then we could not enjoy society as we do.
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Sorry to be flippant, but your tweets do pop up in the most unexpected places. I was twittering and watching Have I Got News For You on TV when one of your tweets popped up about Charlotte Church. Something to do with being distracted by her and accidentally fancying here or something.
Ah, well, I suppose it shows you are actually human. And have a good taste in TV.
Interesting article. I do tend to agree that the legal framework set up by the state to allow incorporation, property rights and taxation are interwined.
Have you seen the:
PUBLIC ACCOUNTS COMMITTEE
TAX AVOIDANCE SCHEMES
THURSDAY 6 DECEMBER 2012
AIDEN JAMES, TIM LEVY and PATRICK MCKENNA
JENNIE GRANGER, JIM HARRA, LIN HOMER and EDWARD TROUP
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmpubacc/uc788-i/uc78801.htm
What about for those of us who are not vassals of the state?
No one is
There is a yawning gap in this argument, and that is the blurring of the distinction between corporations and individuals vis-a-vis the state. A democratic state must be accountable to its citizens, including for the way in which it levies and utilises the tax it collects from, on behalf of and with the consent of those individual citizens. That’s where the ‘myth’ comes from. As individuals we DO own our pre-tax income and must be able to call the state to account for the way it organises, funds the collection of, spends and redistributes tax, with our consent. ‘No taxation without representation’ is, for individual citizens, and ex-ante right. The same is NOT true, as this article correctly argues, for corporate bodies which have no such ex-ante right but are only accorded a ‘social license to operate’. Corporations and individuals are not, and should not be, on the same taxation/legal footing. Behind much corporate rights lobbying and neo-liberal government connivance is the attempt by corporations to acquire the same ex-ante rights as individual citizens. In the USA, their Super PAC rules for party political funding are a big step in this direction. But to argue that the individual citizen does not own his/her pre-tax income ignores a fundamental right of citizens in a democracy to call their government to account for its fair and effective collection and use, including its collection from corporations that only operate under a ‘social license’. Yes, Starbucks’ and Amazon’s corporate pre-tax income ISN’T theirs, but my personal pre-tax income IS mine. I pay it for the shared facilities I expect and use, and for the greater social good. For that, the government is accountable to me. But I don’t owe it to the government. I owe it to my fellow citizens, and as an individual citizen I have a right to demand that my government employ its tax on my personal gross income fairly and wisely to the benefit of my fellow citizens. In the struggle to keep corporations to their license, arguing that my personal income tax isn’t actually my money puts personal taxation before the basic social democratic tenets of representation and accountability.
Alan
If your personal incomes is yours it is only so subject to the lien the state has on it to pay tax owing
In that case, given that the lien reduces your ability to enjoy that income since part is due to another person, your unencumbered incme is your after tax earnings. The rest belongs to smeone else
Richard
Richard,
Thanks. If personal taxation can be characterised as what you call a ‘lien’ it only comes into existence when I reach the age of majority and have a vote as well as an obligation as a fully functioning member of society to pay tax. It is not simply financial in nature. It is the fact that it’s my money as a voter to begin with that obliges the state to account to me for its myriad uses, social, military, political, educational, health etc. etc.. It is not an a-priori right of the state. It’s part of a democratic state’s two-way contract with its citizens. Otherwise it’s not a democratic state. States where the citizen has slabs of his/her own income taken with no obligations on the part of the state to those individuals are called totalitarian (see below). Personal taxation is not a ‘lien’, because it is not some one-way obligation incurred at birth, but is the right of a democratic state only in so far as such a state meets its corresponding obligations to the individual taxpayer/voter. Personal taxes have democratic ‘representation’ and ‘accountability’ strings attached. Corporate taxes must not! Otherwise what obliges a democratic government to be accountable to its individual citizens for how it employs those personal taxes? Corporate taxes really are and must be ‘liens’.
Can I respectfully suggest having a look at Thoreau’s ‘Duty of Civil Disobedience’ http://constitution.org/civ/civildis.htm ? Ghandi is also of relevance.
As for the corporate world’s attempt to acquire for itself similar rights to those of individuals to hold the state accountable for the states’ use of their taxes there is resistance, even in the US: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/united-states/corporate-america-put-on-notice-about-political-funding-203938.html
Finally, I do enjoy what you call a ‘lien’. I entirely enjoy the fact that I contribute a full and fair share of MY earnings to the common good, so long as, and only so long as, MY government employs it on MY behalf fairly and in a socially just and responsible way. Otherwise I might as well move to, oh say North Korea, Byelorussia or Equatorial Guinea. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/hardtalk/9779155.stm and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20731448 get a job with Amazon or Google or join the Tory party.
Corporate, neo-liberal, Tax Payers Alliance and right-wing Tea Party style attacks on taxation per-se, by conflating the corporate with the personal are not just anti-social, they are anti-democratic. That conflation is where their real danger lies!
This is very much linked to the phrase “taxpayers’ money” used by the media in reference to public funds. Infurating…..
Indeed
Both you and Hum seem to fail to see the distinction between the private taxation of voters and corporate taxation. The corporates and neo-liberals want to claim the tax they pay entitles them to influence, or even set, state policy over and even against, the democratic mandates of individual citizens. The Tax Payers Alliance and right-wing Tea Party/UKIP types (the libertarian right twitosphere) want to claim the tax they pay is theirs and excessive, because they want to shrink the social-democratic state and believe in irresponsible, exploitative capitalism. I claim the tax I pay is mine because I object to corporates being put on the same democratic footing as the private voter and object to the shrinking of the sociaI-democratic state for the sake of capitalist ideology. I insist that the state be accountable to me and my fellow citizens for personal taxation’s fair and socially responsible use once I’ve entrusted it to them. The state collects and uses my tax money in a democratic mutual trust. Otherwise none of us has any say over how many nuclear weapons or nuclear submarines they buy from munitions firms, how many expensive wars they fund with OUR taxes, how many corporates they let off their liabilities or how many tax havens they tacitly condone. Arguing as you do undermines my personal right to object to the state under-taxing the rich and trans-national corporations and/or strangling the welfare state, because you claim that it’s not my money, it’s theirs to do with just as they wish, with or without a mandate from individual citizens like me. That’s just plain dogmatic and anti-democratic. What have you guys got against holding governments financially as well as socially and politically accountable to the individual citizen? If governments aren’t accountable and don’t see it as taxpayers’ money used under a democratic trust/mandate then how on earth do we object to more MPs’ duck-houses, second-home allowances, cosy deals with private sector social providers and PFIs or even Iraq type wars? I earned it, and I have a right to a say in how they spend it! That does not make me part of ‘the libertarian right twitosphere’. I just believe (often forlornly) in financially accountable, representative democracy, a position it is becoming very difficult to sustain between competing dogmas, the libertarian ideologues who want there to be no taxes at all and the frankly totalitarian reasoning that I have to pay whatever is demanded but have no say in how it’s spent because it was never mine in the first place, maybe even before I’d earned it through genuine toil. If it isn’t my money then the state owns me and my labour.
I’m sorry – the fact you owe someone money does not mean they own you or your labour
Your after tax income is yours to enjoy in the modern democratic state
That’s all you can own
What is your problem with that? Your argument makes no sense, whilst mine does not undermine democracy or the social contract: boting remains just as important, indeed, it validates the claim made
I am lost by your argument
I guess I’m not making myself understood. My argument is about democracy, not just about tax. I don’t want to ‘own’ my tax. I pay it willingly. But I insist, as did Thoreau and Ghandi, that the state and its agencies be accountable to me and my fellow citizens (and not to corporations) for what it does with it, nor should they succumb to right-wing ideologues and destroy the social contract by reducing tax to an altogether socially-ineffective level. That accountability can only be maintained if the state remembers where the money came from. So for me, along with an obligation on my part to pay that portion of my earnings the state takes, comes an obligation on the state’s part to account to the voting citizenry for how it is used. Telling me the tax due was never actually mine at all is very unhelpful in a social-democratic sense. It damn well was when I earned it, but after I’ve willingly paid it I want politicians not to see it as theirs except in trust, and to be well aware of where it came from, that I earned it and I paid it, and that I’m democratically entitled to watch what they do with it. The American War of Independence was fought partly on this principle. If I don’t own the taxable part of my earnings at least initially then they do own part of my labour.
In a democracy the state is accountable to its citizenry, not the other way around. That applies just as much to the way tax is levied, collected and used as to any other function of the state.
The ‘it was never yours anyway’ argument gives the state carte blanche to unaccountably do whatever it wants with revenues, as they all too frequently already do and, I’m sorry, that does have the potential to undermine the social contract, by letting politicians and HMRC ignore their fiscal responsibilities while taking the ambitions of paid corporate lobbyists and the anti-social urgings of the ‘libertarian right twitosphere’ seriously. Should I assume you’re comfortable with politicians and civil servants maintaining those politically unaccountable stances?
I agree it’s about democracy
Democracy decides what part I woe
I accept the charge because it’s been decided democratically
But let’s be clear: the vote is not part of this. My children pay VAT. That’s due democracy or bot in their case
I just don’t get your logic: they don’t do what they want (I hope) precisely because of democracy
But that doesn’t change the fact they own the money and we don’t
But that’s my whole point. Too often they do do what they want. If, as you maintain, politicians are right in their perception that they ‘own’ tax revenues, and we never did even though we originally earned those revenues, why do we make such a fuss about duck houses, Euro-binges or expenses scandals? If it’s theirs, by your logic, they’re entitled and not accountable to us, and we, as the citizens who earned the money in the first place, have no say at all how it’s spent for good or ill. We just sit around hoping they either do good or get caught. No wonder they are so often wildly extravagant, downright mean or plain corrupt. I guess we have very differing conceptions of effective democracy.
PS: Whose taxable earnings do your children pay VAT on purchases with, theirs or yours?