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Friday, August 10, 2012

All This Romney Tax Talk Is A Teachable Moment for Democracy in America

The ongoing issue of Mitt Romney's refusal to release his tax records (as all candidates for President have done, including very conspicuously his own father) has brought the topic of taxation to the forefront of everyday political discourse in the United States in a way that we are not exactly accustomed to and in a way that provides the occasion for a teachable moment.

For well over a generation now (at least since Reagan inaugurated the reactionary Movement Republican Counter-Revolution against the New Deal and Great Society), the extent of our tax conversation has seemed to be always only an infantile and literally ruinous competition between candidates boasting about which one will lower taxes more. As if there is anything particularly edifying or confidence inspiring about the spectacle of would-be representatives and leaders howling in public about how civilization is something we should be eager to pay less and less and less for, or possibly nothing at all for, even as our trust in pillar institutions plummets and our material and normative infrastructure crumbles around our ears.

Anyway, the framing of the tax discussion provoked by Romney's secrecy seems to be interestingly different, at once implying that there is something uncitizenly in the effort relentlessly to evade taxes, especially in one to whom the nation has provided such an opportunity for extraordinary success, and also drawing attention to the ways in which the tax code has become an instrument of exacerbating anti-democratizing wealth concentrating, providing legal dodges for the richest of the rich to evade their responsibilities in ways unavailable to people who work for a living on whom costs, risks, and demands are heaped ever more ferociously even as their positions in society are rendered ever more radically insecure and unfulfilled.

Still, American default assumptions on the question of taxation remain deeply reactionary and frankly delusional. And it is in this context that I want to re-iterate again -- as I occasionally do here -- several basic propositions on taxes that are at odds with conventional wisdom on this subject, and which seem to me indispensable to a properly democratic understanding of governance. To begin:

Taxes are not theft, but a precondition for the constitution and intelligibility of the claim to ownership on which notions of theft depend in the first place. Neither are taxes some kind of involuntary charitable contribution, since the basic rights secured through taxation cannot be regarded as matters of charity else they are not rights in the first place. Taxes are not, however annoying they may seem, burdens on our freedom, so much as indispensable enablers of freedom -- and hence they are a precondition for the constitution of the political possibility of the "voluntary" on which notions of the involuntary depend in the first place.

Taxing more those who benefit more by their personal recourse to the shared inheritance of knowledge and culture, by their disproportionate burden on the environmental commons on which we all depend for our flourishing, and to the affordances of collaboratively maintained infrastructure, institutions, norms, trust, legitimacy, and security is not the least bit unfair, so much as the straightforward recognition of the fact of the dependence of minorities on majorities, of the radical inter-dependence of the apparently great with the apparently modest as vulnerable, responsible, responsive and co-creative individuals in the shared world, peer to peer. Thus, progressive taxation uniquely recognizes the interdependence-in-difference which is the insight on which notions of fairness depend in the first place.

Taxes pay for the administration of basic needs by means of which civil society ensures the scene of consent to the demands of our historical circumstances and daily intercourse is non-duressed by the threat of deprivation, inequity, or insecurity. In actually democratic polities, taxes are not coercive interruptions of free commerce, but suffuse commerce with the consent without which it cannot be free in the first place. Taxes ensure sufficient equity among citizens so that the diversity also valued by democracy does not disable the shared commitment to democratic processes, the preservation of democratic institutions providing nonviolent alternatives for the resolution of disputes and the ongoing reconciliation of the diverse aspirations of the stakeholders with whom we share the world. And when taxes are coupled to representation itself ("No Taxation Without Representation") this definitively democratic innovation ties the maintenance of government as such -- an organization invested with, even if it is not essentially or exhaustively characterized by, the legitimate recourse to force with all the authoritarian dangers inhering in that state of affairs -- inextricably to the maintenance of its democratic legitimacy and hence to a measure of accountability in its exercise of force.

Violence inheres in the diversity of political stakeholders as a permanent possibility, and while the state has historically functioned as an expression and amplification of that possibility far more often than not, as an instrument of domestic exploitation and foreign aggression, it is crucial to grasp that the reality and possibility of the democratization of the state gives the lie to any facile anarchist identification of the state form with violence as such. Just as the democratizing innovations of periodic elections and a general franchise and eligibility for office create non-violent and accountable alternatives to gang violence and civil war, just as the democratizing innovations of professional policing and civilian control of the military create non-violent and accountable alternatives to gangsterism, protection rackets, and military juntas, just as the democratizing innovations of habeas corpus, force of precedent, opportunity of appeal, trial by jury, and an independent judiciary create nonviolent and accountable alternatives for the adjudication of disputes, just as the democratizing innovation of declarations of basic human rights creates nonviolent and accountable alternatives to mob rule and institutionalized bigotry, so too does the democratization and progressivization of taxation create alternatives to its historical role as an exercise in elite expropriation by transforming taxation into an instrument ensuring the ultimate popular accountability of governance as such, and circumscribing its expenditure to the funding of the administration of law, peacekeeping, common goods, and general welfare through which non-violence and consent are maintained (and through which the very terms of non-violence and consent are themselves are ever re-negotiated).

This is why the commitment to non-violence truly implies the commitment never to smash but always to democratize the state. And indispensable to that commitment is grasping and celebrating the role of progressive taxation in the democratic state.

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