The frequent commentator on this blog who uses the name Schofield suggested this morning, in response to today's video, that:
Not being willing to pay tax is a form of “sociocide” a rupturing of the social fabric because a government's ability to create money from nothing in order to spend on reserves for the payment settlement system, deal with emergencies, and optimise the economy requires a return flow in the form of taxation in order to avoid triggering strong inflationary pressures. Rich people who try to avoid paying an equitable share of taxes should therefore be called “sociocidal”!
I did some quick research and noted that the term "sociocide" is not new. The philosopher and sociologist Johan Galtung suggested it in the 1980s when explaining that there are many ways to destroy a society.
Violence is the obvious one.
Genocide is another, with its focus on the elimination of peoples.
He suggested that sociocide meant the destruction of the social fabric that makes collective life possible.
The question is, might the abuse of tax systems by the wealthy belong in that category? That idea seems worth thinking about for a number of reasons.
First, tax is not just about money. It is the way in which we agree to make our societies work. It is the mechanism by which we share resources so that the things we need - health, education, infrastructure, security, care - are available to all. Tax is the glue that binds us into reciprocal obligations, a recognition that our well-being depends upon one another. I once described this as 'The Joy of Tax'.
Second, when the wealthy avoid tax, however they achieve that goal, they opt out of that shared responsibility. They are not just protecting “their” money. They are deliberately undermining the system of reciprocity upon which the possibility of society depends. They intentionally weaken the capacity of governments to act in the public interest. They increase inequality by shifting the obligation to pay tax onto those who cannot avoid it. And they spread cynicism, signalling that obligations only apply to the powerless. "Only the little people pay tax", as Leona Helmsley once said.
Third, the result is corrosive. Communities are fragmented. Trust in institutions collapses. Collective services are starved of resources by those politicians who think tax pays for them. And resentment flourishes as people see that the rules apply only to some, while the wealthy make themselves exceptions. In that sense, tax avoidance eats away at the core of social life.
That is why I think it might be appropriate to call tax avoidance by the wealthy sociocidal. It is not merely a technical problem or a matter of loopholes and supposedly clever lawyers and accountants who abuse them. It is a deliberate assault on the bonds that hold us together.
If we are to rebuild societies fit for the future, naming this behaviour for what it is can be important. Those who undermine the common good in the pursuit of private gain are not innovators or wealth-creators. Nor are they astute financial planners. They are simply destroying the very possibility of society itself. And if that is not sociocide, I am not sure what is.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
You sound like a deranged nut job
I post this because this appears to be the level of comment many of my opponents seem to reach – which shows what we are up against.
This sort of thuggish response (on many issues) is another way to destroy society. The so-called social media have been taken over by propagandists representing various interests and are proving to be a perniciously corrosive force.
Agreed
If this is the same Ray Rossi who founded the punk movement with Malcolm MacLaren all those years ago, it’s undoubtedly intended as a profound compliment.
I was thinking on this while reading the comments on your YouTube poll on taxing the rich. That there are so many objections by normal people on taxing wealth is baffling. No doubt many are paid agents trying to convince people that the issue is debatable, like the climate change misinformation campaign, but like climate change deniers, many actually believe it. Some like the status to the country they believe the rich bring, but many others believe they themselves will become wealthy. They watch the videos and listen to the podcasts about stock markets and passive income and fall for the myth that they can make it in this economy too, with hard work. Their only ambition is to be wealthy, as they believe that is all there is to life. They don’t acknowledge that those who only want to work for a living and have a comfortable life are bearing the burden of taxation, a situation that won’t change unless these turkey’s stop supporting Christmas and attacking concepts like fairness and equity as liberal nonsense. Most of the aspiring rich will never make it. They are better off supporting a fairer society, so that the work they do is worthwhile.
Looks like you touched a nerve. You must be on the right track. Ha!
I would argue the sociocide goes much further than tax policy. (Though admittedly tax is a key part of the problem.) Think about the onerous demands on labor from business. Labor is expected to be mobile, to go wherever business requires labor to be, even if it means displacing people thousands of miles e.g. Southeast Asia to the Middle East. How can labor have a society, a culture, in such a case? And even in a less egregious example, think of the families with houses around San Jose, for example. The suburban houses there, once valued in the tens of thousands, are now valued in millions. The children of those households must earn millions over their lifetime to have a reasonable expectation of staying in the neighborhood where they grew up. So inevitably many leave. Families split apart. Generational divides and disputes become exacerbated. Public schools get defunded to protect their parents’ wealth (and of course the wealth of businesses and institutions like Stanford). Then privatized education steps into the gap. Conveniently, this privatized education teaches a more illiberal curriculum which biases youth against the interests of society.
This entire cycle serves the purposes of entrenched wealth very well. The more society is torn apart, the less cohesive labor can be politically.
I find myself darkly amused when billionaires complain about people not having kids. If you tear apart society, it’s hardly a wonder that people don’t want to pop out kids.
Hey Ray Rossi is it the magic money tree jibe you really want to make? Because if it is you’d better back up your jibe by telling us how you think money, or currency both physical and electronic if you like, is really created in this country. If you can’t you’re just offering a child-like superficial opinion not worth the time of day!
Wow, such insight.
Not half as much as you do, Ray.
In response to @Ray Rossi you sound like a very sane perceptive commentator
Nick Hanauer himself a self proclaimed plutocrat points out here
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/
over a decade ago – and he has gone on to say more the current economic regime has the capacity to end rather badly
Have you talked to Nick?
One of the main propaganda arguments the “sociocidal” use to minimise their share of paying taxes is one that Richard’s been posting on this week namely the argument the government must balance its books like a household or a business. This is a puerile argument if you think about it because in reality most households and businesses run liabilities on their books in the shape of bank loans, mortgages, overdrafts, shares, and corporate bonds. So of course does a sovereign government create liabilities when it creates money from nothing to deploy for reserves for the payment settlement system, deal with emergencies, and optimise the economy.
This is where the “sociocidal” class wheel in another argument that the government doesn’t have the means to settle or balance out its liabilities like the private sector, Thatcher’s “government doesn’t have any money of its own it has to use yours!” Of course the sociocidal never makes clear to the public how money, or currency if you like, is created for society if it can possibly help it. This would make clear that a sovereign government like the UK’s and licenced banks (given legal power by the government) do create money from nothing so in the case of the government it can always take care of its liabilities because it can always tax as much as it needs to given its various responsibilities! All of this explanation makes it clear if you don’t want your country’s social fabric rupturing or damaged check out whether the party you fancy voting for holds sociocidal beliefs especially the above double whammies. Sadly, however, all of them appear to do so. In consequence a new political party that understands all of the above is badly needed in the UK if the country is to avoid becoming backward!
Agreed
We are governed by a technocracy that is caught in a conflict between truth and the nobile lie which has got them into power. Their mobile lie is no longer fit for purpose. It has been discovered and if we want to maintain our democracy something will have to change. Milton Friedman would happily trade democracy to maintain the economy. I am not convinced of such trade and I say no.
Milton Friedman could never look reality in the face. Does market capitalism have a weakness? Yes it tends to promote sociocide, the rupturing of the social fabric, unless carefully regulated by governments that know this.
Correct
Correction.
People like Ray Rossi are nothing – they are like slugs in the sun, troopers, expendable.
The real people we should be concerned about are those we hear nothing from who pervert our democracy with their money, have our politicians in their back pockets and do deals with them that sell the rest of us down the river. And we don’t know they’ve done anything until after the fact. And then it is too late.
That’s where the battle is. That’s where the problem is.
Working secretly like this has been tolerated for far too long in our so-called democracy.
A related article in the Guardian today by Juliette Garside ‘ How Spain put up wealth taxes – without chasing away the billionaires’.
Selected extracts from my daughter’s school coursework many years ago “… we shall examine whether as per Stiglitz (Stiglitz, 2018) that globalisation has not only failed to deliver on its promises but has contributed to increased inequality not only in the developing nations but also in the developed nations. This is principally due to the way that globalisation was managed and the way that globalised trade was managed for corporate and financial interests. This essay applies the ‘Follow the Thing’ (Cook, Undated) methodology to Nike and, more specifically, the associated commodity chain of my £105 Nike Pegasus trainers to examine and expose why globalisation has created unequal geographies.
The “Follow the Thing” methodology highlights that the Nike business model is focused on the generation of ever greater profits and returns to shareholders at the expense of workers rights, their incomes and the environment.
The Dutch Ministry of Finance estimate that 77,660 (well-paid) jobs linked to US multinationals developing tax mitigation structures would be lost if they had to close some tax loopholes (Bowers, 2017). Nike’s estimated annual tax evasion figures correspond to the cost to pay living wages to 287,000 workers in Vietnam and 241,000 in Indonesia (BASIC, 2018). And, “If Nike had paid the same amount of dividends in 2017 as they did in 2012, or maintained the level of marketing / sponsorship spending, the resulting proceeds would have allowed for living wages to be paid throughout their entire supply chain in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Cambodia.” (l’étiquette, 2018).” Or, from a similar time https://transparency.eu/just-tax-it/
Corporate tax dodging enriches the already wealthy who then go on to tax dodge in their own personal interests. Apologies Ray Rossi but my teenage daughter has more understanding than you clearly have. A proper functioning wealth tax is not only necessary but beneficial to society…as Richard has intimated.
Thanks
If that’s what teenagers are learning and producing in school, then it’s also no wonder the same people wheel out the ‘exams are getting easier’, ‘education isn’t what it used to be’ tropes too. I wish I’d had the option to study that kind of thing at school!
In a nutshell a rich elite effects “sociocide” by using the double whammy of “the erroneous government must balance its books like a household or a business” and “the equally erroneous government has no money creation powers of its own.”
Agreed
That’s one of your best!
Thanks to Schofield 🙂
I think this gets precisely to the heart of the economic, financial problems driven by the destructive neoliberal dishonest, destructive, mindset.
15 minutes research and writing….
Funny how that works sometimes. I’ll look up a term about which I have weak understanding (such as “empathy horizon”, which I just looked up to clarify my understanding) and it takes a paragraph; but other times I’ll go (and did) “wtf is a Gettier Example) and I’m in a 2-year lonb rabbit hole.
OK. Maybe not 2 year, but you get the drift.
I do. That’s why I enjoy thinking.
A familiar inscription is engraved on the exterior of the IRS Building in Washington D.C.
‘Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society’
Something expressed by many people in many ways in a new country where the role of government and tax where hotly debated.
The following uncomplicated description of taxation as the ultimate insurance to secure social order is from 1848, before the Civil War: ‘it is that proportion of the citizen’s property which he yields up to the government in order to provide protection of all the rest’.
Taken from some fascinating research into the quote origin
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/13/taxes-civilize/
This is very reason why the ‘just concerned local people’ are waving St George’s flags and union Jack’s outside hotels containing asylum seekers. The wealthy influence rotten to the core politicians, the repugnant (and ever more extreme) Tory press, and the loudest voices in the media. Hence the message is, ‘don’t look at us over here avoiding paying our fair share, look over there at those evil immigrants’.
A time honoured, centuries old tactic I know, but reading the absolute rubbish the people that support Reform, ‘innocent ordinary protestors’, and senior right politicians come out with, it really, really, still works.
The fact that the consequences of these greedy individuals actions will be absolutely dire, yet they care not one jot, is another reason to both despise and fear them.
Not all rich people avoid tax, not all are downright nasty, indeed a number of them are as worried as we are. Oddly though, given the slavish worship of wealth by the right, their voices aren’t being heard…
Agreed. The American administration’s comments on the UK becoming less free were very telling in their targeting. Southport riots? Silenced protesters. Crackdown on misinformation online? Censorship. Jailed environmental protestors? No comment. Banning of Palestine Action? Nothing mentioned. Only the groups useful to the billionaire backed far right are being oppressed, the ones who can create divisions. And of course, anti immigration rhetoric is just concerned citizens, but wealth inequality is either just fashionable nonsense or liberal hysteria. Is all very clear to those willing to see it. Letting humans drown in the channel is fine, but rebalancing tax is absurd.
Agreed
What models are out there that would take Schofield’s crisp formulation further to understanding better which tax rate is optimal? Linearly progressive? Or maybe quadratic? There are so many functions out there in math and at the end the tax code has to agree on some formula. Any guidance?
I disagree.
We have had maths in the optimal tax theory of Ramsey and Mirrlees – which optimises in ways, that contrary to their claims, are the epitome of all that is anti-social.
No thanks to maths. Use the logic of Rawls instead, I suggest. It can handle the complexity in a way maths cannot embrace, and which is anyway only used as an excuse to impose pre-conceived judgement. The assumptions always dictate that.
If you think you can have taxes without math you are wrong. The tax code contains formulas, even if they are written in English. Money and taxes are (not just but also) numbers.
After more than 45 years doing maths I know a bit about it.
I also know it has no place in optimal tax design.
We could start by banning % increases and make all adjustments in absolute amounts. Jack Jones was spot on with his £5 a week rise. It meant a lot to the people who needed it and nothing to those who didn’t. I’d hazard a guess that equal % rises have made a huge make contribution to the increase in inequality we have seen in the last 40 years.
I think that there is a common delusion with some of the wealthy and some of those that describe themselves as ‘self-made’.
They seem to live in delusional state whereby they believe that they have not used or have no use for anything created by ‘the state’ or the wider society.
The Eton graduate may never have attended a state school or needed to use the NHS. What they fail to understand is that most of the people on whose backs their family’s wealth was created did use both state schools and the NHS. Many of those teaching in fee paying schools were educated and trained by the state. Something as straightforward as the road network is another state provision they forget about. Even if most of the time they are ferried from location to location in private helicopters they first had to get to and from the helicopter. Who built the helicopter? How did the components get to the factory? OK there are many flaws in my examples for the pedant to attach to but the idea is sound.
How many of the self-made, for instance, acquired their wealth quickly from the state as a result of various calamities. Visit Cumbria and you will be able to drink coffee in any number of ‘Foot and Mouth Cafes’ that sprang up following government compensation schemes. How many people like the baroness bra woman who were simply in the right place at the right time to cash in on the PPE explosion? I am not saying that government support/compensation schemes are wrong, far from it. What I am saying is that those who do well by them should retain a little humility, perhaps even have a long think about any negative attitudes they may have towards benefits.
In refusing to pay the proper amounts of tax these people are saying that they do not care for or have no need of the state or the wider society. Who is it that educates the workers that make them rich?
These people live a half life so that they might deny that it is a half light that cannot illuminate their delusion that permits their perpetual pretence.
Margaret Thatcher’s statement, “There is no such thing as society,” made in an interview with Woman’s Own magazine on September 23, 1987 makes her the mother of sociocide. Her bonfire of banking regulations and treasonable transfer of publicly owned assets to financial racketeers certainly made her the enabler of it.
Indeed she blundered about damaging the economy whilst all the time thinking she was the bee’s knees! And so it continues to this day. Next up Reform which studiously practices dog-whistling the public on various issues which avoid it spelling out its economic and monetary policies.
There’s no election for another 4 years. Why commit to policy now?
Labour managed to get into power without having a credible strategy, when in opposition, all they did was criticise the party in power.
That’s what they Labour in May 2024 as well
And look where it got us
Wow, 40 years on and the left-wing nutjobs are still (deliberately or ignorantly, you take your pick) mis-quoting Thatcher, to try and pretend she said something very different tp what was actually said.
Incredible.
She said exactly what she meant.
And delivered on it.
She was abusive.
So are you.
Is it a necessary condition for believing her?
From the glossary;
‘Poll taxes are correctly seen as regressive and so unjust’
I remember when vat was first introduced at 10% and our lawyer advising us,
‘that’s fair enough boyos, it’s nae worth messin wi’.
It’s not the tax itself, it’s a just tax level .
It’s both.
I have copy/pasted and shared this post on my Facebook page. I hope a few of my friends read it. The term ‘sociocide’ is well worth knowing.
Thanks