by Micah Tillman
As much as I find the recent government bailouts revolting, I can’t get as outraged as some. They’re not using my money. Any money that came from me stopped being mine on April 15th.
So bail away, dear government. It’s your money to waste as you like. (Though I would appreciate it if you didn’t ruin the world in the process.)
Too often, people see the government as a kind of estate manager. The trust’s assets belong to us, but the government has power of attorney. Or however those things work.
But that’s not how it is with government and taxes. April 15th is the day you pay the government not to incarcerate you for another year. You purchase “protection” (á la the mafia), you don’t make a deposit in some collectively-held, governmentally-managed fund.
Or, to put it less-positively, taxation is more like theft than investment. Is it really outrageous that thieves would waste the money they stole? They obviously didn’t have much of a sense of ownership, stewardship, propriety, etc., in the first place.
“Give me all your money.”
“Okay. Here it is. Don’t spend it all in one. . . . Wait! Especially don’t buy candy with it! Save it for our kids’ college fund!”
Furthermore, the idea that “taxpayer money” really belongs to “us,” to “the taxpayers” smacks of collectivism. “We” don’t own the money anymore than “we” own the “airwaves” (or the off-shore oil fields, or the national parks).
At most, each of us owns some minute fraction of the money.
But to say we “own” even a fraction is meaningless. You probably never saw “your” tax money. (It was taken out of your paychecks before the checks were even printed.) And you certainly haven’t ever gotten to use it.
If you can “own” something you’ve never seen, never used, and can’t control, then you’re talking about “ownership” in a sense that is . . . well, meaningless. The distinction between owning and not owning becomes a distinction that makes no difference, as the saying goes.
And don’t give me the, “It’s ours because it’s controlled by our representatives” line. “Representatives” in politics are not like “representatives” in estate-management.
Besides, my “representatives” in Congress aren’t even from the same party as me, much less the same section of the ideological spectrum. They do everything I don’t want them to do.
They may represent the majority in my state, but I’m not a member of the majority. (And if you’re reading this, you’re probably not in the majority in your state either.)
The idea that politicians are using “our” money to bail out corporations and that they are doing this as our “representatives” is a useful idea. For politicians. It keeps you hanging on to the illusion that government is “We the People,” and therefore that you really should be cooperating with it.
But the ideas of collective ownership and representation are simply tools for the pacification of a populace. We’re not living under a tyranny (or monarchy, or whatever it is that representative democracy is supposed to be the alternative to) so long as the money being spent is still “ours,” and the people spending it are our “representatives.”
Getting angry that your representatives aren’t representing you properly because they’re misspending your money (to the tune of billions – even though you’ve never paid a billion in taxes), therefore, is a sign that you buy the propaganda.
But you don’t fight the Man by thinking the way the Man wants you to think. Nor do you combat collectivism by talking like a collectivist.
I will admit, however, that the recent bailouts remind us of all the reasons we have to be angry about our government. Let’s just not get angry for the reasons they want us to get angry.
Let’s make sure our outrage doesn’t play into their hands.
We don’t want the distinction between revulsion and sympathy to be one that makes no difference.
Micah Tillman is a lecturer in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America.