TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Jonathan Cohn thinks there is a moral case for increasing taxes on the rich, and this is his argument:

The other, albeit related, flaw in the conservative argument is that it fails to acknowledge the debt wealthy people owe to society. As Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly argue in their 2008 book, Unjust Desserts, the proverbial self-made man is not exactly self-made. He (or she) is benefiting from the accomplishments of past generations, not to mention the support of public institutions (like the National Science Foundation) and services (like schools) that foster innovation and lead to greater productivity.

You can take this argument too far, obviously. Then again, nobody is suggesting the rich to give up all the extra money they make. All anybody is asking is that the rich pay more in taxes–in effect, that they reinvest in society by a little more than they do now.

Let me first point out, before refuting his argument, that it’s interesting Cohn says this argument can be taken “too far”—meaning that it can be used to justify immoral actions against the rich. This is so because if we take Cohn’s argument to its conclusion, then most rich people don’t deserve any of their wealth, and a very high tax rate would be justified. Cohn finds this objectionable, apparently, and thus doesn’t push it that far, but he acts like he’s being charitable. (“no one is asking the rich to give up all the extra money they make,” he says; you can almost here the muttered words under his breath, I’m so kind and forgiving.) But that is his argument, and that’s what it justifies; if he believed in his argument, he would push for taking all but a very slim margin of their wealth.

In fact, this argument applies just as well to the poor and middle class as well. The poor and middle class benefit very much from society—their jobs are the result of demand from some consumers desiring goods or services, and they can only have those jobs because some other people before them created the infrastructure to allow it. If you’re working at a car manufacturing plant, you really owe your job to the people who created the car, who created the factory, who figured out how to mine iron ore and make steel, who designed the car, who designed the manufacturing equipment, and who provided the capital for all of this to be done.

All they are contributing is their labor and, in light of all the work people in the past did to allow them to have that job, that’s a very small contribution. Cohn’s argument, whether he likes it or not, also justifies taking most of the poor and middle class’s income as well. Not only does it justify it, but it says it is morally right—it isn’t really their income, and so we are being immoral if we do not return it to its rightful owners.

But somehow I doubt Cohn would make that argument, but he is, and he needs to deal with those implications if he wants to use it.

Robert Nozick, though, provided the best refutation of this line of argument in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. He wrote:

You may not decide to give me something, for example a book, and then grab money from me to pay for it, even if I have nothing better to spend the money on. You have, if anything, even less reason to demand payment if your activity that gives me the book also benefits you; suppose that your best way of getting exercise is by throwing books into people’s houses, or that some other activity of yours thrusts books into people’s houses as an unavoidable side effect. One cannot, whatever one’s purposes, just act so as to give people benefits and then demand (or seize) payment. Nor can a group of persons do this. If you may not charge and collect for benefits you bestow without prior agreement, you certainly may not do so for benefits whose bestowal costs you nothing, and most certainly people need not repay you for costless-to-provide benefits which yet others provided them.

So the fact that we partially are “social products” in that we benefit from current patterns and forms created by the multitudinous actions of a long string of long-forgotten people, forms which include institutions, ways of doings things, and language (whose social nature may involve our current use depending on Wittgensteinian matching of the speech of others), does not create in us a general floating debt which the current society can collect and use at will.

Nozick is arguing that when people before us did these things that gave us these benefits (note that people, individuals, created these benefits, not “society”), they did so for their own reasons, not for us or because they were expecting payment from us. They did not enter into a contract with us, saying “we will do this if you pay us x dollars,” and so no one has a right to now demand payment on a debt that never existed.

Perhaps we do owe something back to society—that’s perfectly justified to say—but that doesn’t mean that the government has a right to forcibly take wealth from people because of it. That is a personal decision to be made freely by the individual, not an existing debt that must be paid. Cohn is wading into dangerous waters with this argument, because almost any taking of wealth by government can be justified by his argument. But it’s so convenient to make in justifying something he wants to do—increase taxes, spend more—that he can’t help but make it.