Fairness revisited

In last week’s column, I addressed the disconcerting perversion of the meaning of fairness that has poisoned the public discourse and noted that the true meaning of the term is in need of reclaiming, especially when it comes to taxation.

While I disputed the notion that a progressive (or even a “flat”) income tax is fair and asserted that only a head tax would be a truly fair form of a mandatory income tax, I neglected to acknowledge that a “truly fair mandatory income tax” is a contradiction in terms and that, although less unfair than a progressive or “flat” tax, a head tax would be far from ideal (because the forced seizure of legitimately earned income can never be fair, regardless of how uniform the infliction of the penalty).

By extension, of course, I failed to propose an alternative form of financing government that would be truly fair.

Although there are a number of difficulties associated with the formulation of a truly fair method of financing government, and although I don’t propose to dispense with all of them here, I am nevertheless confident that the challenge is surmountable and worth tackling.

At the very least, it should be possible to delineate a basic requirement such a method should fulfill.

Specifically, such a method of financing should rest on voluntary payments of sums of money to the government. Any system that instead relies on coerced payments of any size or number necessarily rests on the assumption that people do not actually own their property or do not have any right to the fruits of their labor and that government has a primary right to all of those things and is at liberty to take any portion of them if it so chooses.

It should be noted that the hope of financing government – especially one so vast and bloated as the United States’ federal government – through voluntary payments would not be feasible today. This is because the expenditures of this and so many other governments are so vast, and government activities are so far beyond the scope of the proper role of government that mandatory taxes are necessary for financing their expenses.

This, of course, does not mean that mandatory taxes are in any way justifiable.

It merely means that they are a necessary consequence of the expansion of government into areas where it doesn’t belong. This situation is analogous to that of a person who continually lies in order to perpetuate the belief that his initial lie was in fact truthful.

The fact that subsequent lies are necessary in order to cover up the first one in no way justifies the continuation of the habit (or the initial lie).

In addition, just as someone who has peddled falsehood after falsehood can neither right all of his wrongs nor regain the trust of all to whom he has lied in one fell swoop, so our government will neither be able to right the wrong of its repeated transgressions nor become lean, mean and constitutionally sound overnight.

Rather, it will take many years of scaling back government and eliminating whole swathes of the bureaucratic apparatus before our government will be capable of being financed voluntarily.

Until then, pushing for government’s return to its constitutionally enumerated powers and pushing for reductions in the unfairness and coerciveness of taxation is a good place to start.