The Aqueduct?

The libertarian pretzel-benders strike again? (Me and my buddies’ll damned well chip in and build us our own effing aqueduct. The principles — and necessary amounts — of capital accumulation for public purposes be damned.)

How much more tiresome could the petty ressentiment of the “successful” be? None, none more tiresome.

The argument Tabbarok’s making seems clear enough:

If you’re having an argument between people in favour of more taxes (to be spent in some socially useful manner) vs. people in favour of less taxes, then a case where it was beneficial to not tax something, or tax it less (e.g. a tax break) is not a point for the “more tax” side.

I don’t see the confusion. Rampall and Bartlett are lumping “tax break” with “government benefit”, and Tabarrok disagrees that they’re the same thing and decries that sort of thinking as hostile to liberty. You don’t have to be a libertarian to agree. The idea that everything the state allows is a “benefit” has no basis in classical liberal thinking, of which modern libertarians, liberals, and conservatives are all heirs. We disagree over the particulars and spheres – and that’s what should be going on here – but the basic idea should be shared among us all.

What does it matter whether someone _felt_ they benefited from a program? The question isn’t whether they felt it but whether they benefited. If they’ve benefited, then their feelings they haven’t merely reflect their own ignorance or sense of entitlement.

I don’t see much to disagree with in his argument.
If you drive on roads built with government money, or your education is subsidised by the government (a grant to you or to the school, whatever), then yeah, you are benefiting from that government program. In this defined situation, the existence of government is making things better for you.*
If the government would normally take $100 in taxes from your wages, but says, “oh, you’re paying a mortgage? then we’ll only take $50”, to describe this as a ‘benefit’ is bizarre. You are still losing $50 to the government. You are suffering less than your non-mortgage paying colleague, but you are not ‘benefiting’. You are still worse off than you would be if there were no government.*

* and all this assumes that you can isolate out ‘roads’, ‘schools’, ‘taxes’, and ‘tax breaks’ as if they were not related, but that’s implied by the question. The survey respondents were not asked if the very existence of the US government made them better or worse off. They weren’t asked if they benefited from the existence of the US army.

Metaphysics should be added to econ prelims.

But you’re $50 worse than the guy who doesn’t pay any taxes.

If two thieves are sentenced to prison but one of them gets time off for good behaviour, has he benefited from the judicial system? He’s better off than his partner in crime, but he’s not better off.

(which is not to say that I agree with the whole propertarian belief system, but even a stopped clock… [if that clock has some sort of digital display and only ever shows a time accurate to within a minute])

“If two thieves are sentenced to prison but one of them gets time off for good behaviour, has he benefited from the judicial system? He’s better off than his partner in crime, but he’s not better off.”
Are taxes theft? If they are theft than you are right if they are not than I do not see how your argument makes any sense.

MPAVictoria – In my example I talked about two thieves going to prison. I didn’t say they were wrongly imprisoned, or that it was unjust that they be sent to prison. It doesn’t matter for the analogy.
What Tabarrok is complaining about is the assumption that paying $100 in taxes is the natural state of affairs, and if the government decides that you don’t have to pay so much you are better off. But why is it the natural state of affairs? The government is taking your money, but you should be happy because they’re taking less this time?

If the 529, interest deductions, and tax credits were taken off the list, that argument couldn’t be made. People who receive student loans, social security, Medicare etc really do benefit from a government program, and it takes wilful blindness for them to say otherwise.

MPAVictoria…
Pierre Proudhon, anarchist extradrdinaire, argued, that (private) “Property is theft” (in What Is Property?: An Inquiry Into the Principle of Right and of Government; http://www.amazon.com/What-Property-Inquiry-Principle-Government/dp/1146754213/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1310408801&sr=8-2 ), because private property cannot exist without government intervention, initially on the side of the powerful, to turn the commons into private property. But no one much reads Proudhon these days, mores the pity.

“What Tabarrok is complaining about is the assumption that paying $100 in taxes is the natural state of affairs, and if the government decides that you don’t have to pay so much you are better off. But why is it the natural state of affairs?”
Because civilization costs money

“The government is taking your money, but you should be happy because they’re taking less this time?”
Yes, you are getting a benefit by paying less than the proscribed rate of someone at your income level. The government is giving you a tax benefit to encourage you to buy a house or save for retirement.

Mike Konczal on the decades-long conservative/libertarian movement to develop through “tax expenditures” “private-sector coalitions” to crowd out “public-sector coalitions.”

Or, for that matter, any other middle-class economy of scale that complicates surplus extraction.

“The number of dependents is another one. Mortgage interest is another one. Being/not being blind is another one.”
These are all tax benefits. I fail to see the confusion.

Because civilization costs money — Well, hell, this isn’t the first time I’ve typed out tedious paragraphs only to see MPAVictoria sum up in a sentence what I was trying to fumble toward, and it probably won’t be the last.

In the comment thread over there, it was pointed out, in two examples, where tax deductions don’t actually benefit tax payers that qualify for them: House prices and education costs are higher because of the tax breaks. Is this true? Is it true for tax breaks in general?

Also, it is of course true what MPAVictoria says that “civilisation costs money”. Many libertarians are in denial about this (is this definitional?), but there are other, non-libs that would argue what aspects of govt. spending is necessary. Who decided? How much democratic input?

Really, “civilization costs money” is clever?

“Really, “civilization costs money” is clever?”
Probably not. It does however have the advantage of being true.

see my first comment
all this assumes that you can isolate out ‘roads’, ‘schools’, ‘taxes’, and ‘tax breaks’ as if they were not related, but that’s implied by the question. The survey respondents were not asked if the very existence of the US government made them better or worse off. They weren’t asked if they benefited from the existence of the US army.

If you take the line that “you benefit rom govt, govt costs money, therefore you benefit from paying money” thn the whole survey is meaningless. “Do you bnefit from government programs?” resolves to “Do you live in this country (or any other country which could be plausibly said to benefit from the existence of the US govt)?” and “Do you think the world is better off for the existence of govt?” Tax breaks, public schools, Medicare – all beside the point, just govt yes or no.

The survvey only makes sense if you uderstand it as referring to specific government actions – and not ‘invading Iraq’, or ‘signing NAFTA’, but providing services to individual citizens. And on that reading of the question, someone who gets a grant to go to college is clearly benefiting from a government programme. Someone who doesn’t get that grant could be said to be benefiting from the existence of a society in which some people get grants to go to college, but that’s a pointless reading of the survey. If Bob pays $50 instead of $100 in tax, that is only a benefit if you think Bob owes that $100 to the govt and he is being let off.

Well, this is just another example of why it is painful to attempt to have useful conversations with libertarians. From Tabbarok’s perspective the government is just taking wealth from people and he is blind to what happens to it afterwards. His first response would probably be to say that it is destroyed. Next, he would say that it is redistributed. But you would probably never be able to get him to acknowledge the most obvious of facts, that the distribution of property rights that we observe is a highly unnatural state (not to mention the incredibly high level of average wealth we enjoy) and must be enforced by government action, which your taxes partly pay for.

There is probably a chance to have a debate about whether these people are really benefiting from a government program or not when they get these tax breaks. The argument I would like to make is that having a government which taxes and spends large amounts of money has substantial benefits for virtually all of the citizens of a country (except perhaps those serving long prison sentences rightfully or not). Many people do not really believe this and I would like to persuade them otherwise. Whether they are getting a ‘benefit’ or not from their tax deductions is a semantic point. The problem is that I don’t see how I would construct the argument that this is a good example of how the government spending money is helping them out. I dunno, does anyone disagree? Do you see the problem with trying to use policy like this to explain how government programs spending money can be helping everyone?

I had to read this pot a few times because it was hard for me to believe it was the product of an honest failure to understand the point Tabarrok was trying to make (as opposed to disagreeing with the post and its normative implications).

Tabarrok’s point is very simple: Letting someone keep their own program is not a government “benefit,” and therefore taking advantage of a tax credit or deduction is not “benefitting” from a government social program. It’s a basic point premised on a classical liberal/libertarian baseline. A government program is something the government creates that would not exist absent government, and a “benefit” is likewise a departure from this baseline. Therefore lower taxation, even if selective, is a not a “benefit” bestowed by government.

The “fiction” is that government is providing a benefit to people by letting them keep more of their own money — not whether money is actually taken and spent on things, perhaps including aqueducts, and not (as Tabarrok makes clear) whether there are those who benefit from such expenditures. There is also nothing at all in Tabarrok’s post which is inconsistent with a belief that our tax code would be better were it not “pockmarked with various and sundry breaks, giveaways and loopholes over one lacking these features.”

JHA

This all started out as a attempted ‘gotcha’ by Mettler. Now many people have tried to make this a ‘get your government hands off my Medicare’ moment showcasing American ignorance. But it isn’t. It’s just a misuse of language. In common use, not many Americans would consider tax structure a ‘government social program.’

Thus, the first level response to Mettler (and others) should be: why are you trying to make Americans look ignorant by pretending tax structure is commonly considered a ‘social program?’ No one uses ‘social program’ in this way.

Tabarrok’s response is really a second-level response, attempting to make a principled distinction between tax structure and transfer programs. It’s pretty obvious that this distinction can be made with reason. I personally deeply dislike most of the gimmicks in our tax structure, and tend to lump these along with subsidies and some regulations as ‘things that cost money and often distort behavior in unproductive ways.’ But it’s not like it’s incomprehensible to distinguish a tax credit for health insurance from a direct transfer payment.

Adler – that doesn’t make sense.

If the mortgage deduction, to take one example, wasn’t there, the relative cost of home-ownership would be much higher than it is. Functionally, the deduction is no different from handing you money to pay your mortgage.

Surely a subsidy is a benefit?

Jonathan – are you suggesting then that there is some fundamental and natural difference between (a) the government deciding to give me a $5,000 grant to help pay for my child care, and (b) the government deciding to give me a $5,000 tax break to help pay for my child care? (forgetting temporarily that most tax breaks are likely to help rich people more than poor people). I’ll point out that this is a distinction that e.g. Tyler Cowen fails to make when he describes tax breaks for charitable giving as a subsidy for the arts and for religion.

It’s a completely successful gotcha — the way people think of a government social program is totally incoherent. You could structure a government social program that was exactly identical to the home mortgage deduction, and yet people would count it as a government social program, and not a tax break.

The various social programs we’ve embedded in the tax code are in the tax code precisely because it allows the anti-government elements of our polity to claim that they’re NOT social programs, as we see from the people in this thread who argue (with a straight face, apparently) that using the income tax code to create something-that-isn’t-a-subsidy-because-it’s-in-the-tax-code for certain people is completely different from writing checks to those people.

IIRC, The mortgage interest deduction is just about the last holdover from when we used to allow all sorts of personal debt interest to be deducted (just as businesses can deduct interest as a business expense). It’s a massive market distortion (the single largest I can think of), and privileges a home purchase relative to all other forms of personal expenditure, because we as a nation believe that home ownership is a social good which should be subsidized. It is absolutely a social program.

Steve Atwell @ 49:

I believe something of the same thing applies to the notion of “liberties”, which inflects the whole particularistic Anglo-Saxon conception of “liberties” as “rights”, as it has devolved since the Middle Ages in the common law tradition. “Liberties” were initially special grants, exemptions from the general oppression.

Could Tabbarok be thinking that a tax exemption merely gives his money back to him, whereas a social program gives it to someone else — someone who has no right to it? Peering as best I can through the libertarian fog, I can’t see what else it is that’s got him so exercised.

Of course. Even using a phrase like “Letting someone keep their own program” is the sort of mangling of the reality that’s typically libertarian. It seems to imply that, absent government, the program would still be there.

“If Bob pays $50 instead of $100 in tax, that is only a benefit if you think Bob owes that $100 to the govt and he is being let off.”

Yes. And since Bob does, in fact, owe that $100 to the government in exchange for services rendered and ongoing–the same way he owes rent to his landlord and car payments to his auto lender–he is, in fact, being let off. Next question?

Henri, I pay US taxes, and take the mortgage interest deduction, every year, and your comment is nonsense. OF COURSE it’s a way of reducing your taxes- IF you’re affluent enough to have a sizable mortgage, which makes it not only a tax break but a very regressive one. It is quite explicitly a subsidy for home ownership among those of moderate and higher incomes, and thus a classic case of a tax expenditure. Watch who squawks if you propose to do away with it and all will become clear.

erk…

sum of your loan payments –> sum of your interest payments

Henri, those are of course also subsidies. How is that not obvious? (“Subsidy” != “evil” of by the way, though I don’t like the mortgage interest deduction because it’s particularly regressive and because it’s a factor in encouraging housing bubbles.)

“Something in the tax code” that gives you a tax break targeted to some particular activity is by definition a tax expenditure. Though if you want to call it a pineapple, I suppose it’s still a partially free country.

I recently transitioned from renter to a mortgageholder. Oddly, renter-me had less money left over at the end of the year on a per-dollar basis than mortgage-me. Why, it’s almost like some magic fairy didn’t like renter-me, but *did* like mortgage-me, as if by a wave of the magic fairy’s wand, it was suddenly financially beneficial for me to have a mortgage than a rental payment.

I can’t imagine what the mechanism was by which I received such a benefit, or why I would receive it — it’s all just opaque magic to me. Certainly, I could not have known about that in advance, and it could not have been an express preference of my government which made it better to be mortgage-me than renter-me. Because if it was such a preference, the only way that could be expressed in my interactions with my government is through nice big checks labeled “MORTGAGE WELFARE” and everyone would have been talking about the MORTGAGE WELFARE PROGRAM and MORTGAGE WELFARE CHEATS and MORTGAGE WELFARE QUEENS and UNEARNED MORTGAGE ENTITLEMENTS. There’s no other way to do such a thing, or to enact such a “social program”.

But rich people in blue states vote republican.

Those are not subsidies, they are deductions, designed to determine your disposable income; subject to the AMT.

If you spent a good chunk of your gross income on, say, doctors last year – or on mortgage interest – you’ll pay less. I don’t see how this is regressive, it seems okay. Progressivity is achieved by marginal rates, not by eliminating deductions. In any case, the rich don’t pay much income taxes, they pay long-term capital gains; flat 15% rate.

A deduction conditioned on a particular activity, like taking out a mortgage, is a subsidy of that activity. It boggles the mind that this even has to be pointed out. Even the excellent snark of Holden Pattern didn’t get through to you?

Again, calling it a subsidy is a neutral description, not an insult. It can be a good ting to subsidize socially desirable activities, though one must always be careful of unintended consequences.

I’ll add my +1 to Steve’s comment about being not being surprised, because mw’s comment appears to be mainly projection. Speaking for myself, I don’t like regressive tax subsidies, in general. I don’t care why some group who may or may not agree with my political principles is getting them. It’s all WELFARE for rich people to me.

So, for instance, “it’s just something in the tax code” which results in hedge fund managers making millions that are taxed at a 15% rate is WELFARE for rich people, too. Schumer and by extension a chunk of the Democratic Party really are taking advantage of the general lack of financial sophistication in the population as demonstrated by some of the comments (especially Henri), above.

Really, “civilization costs money” is clever?

Quite a lot of bullshit has the precariously endearing quality of being clever.

A deduction conditioned on a particular activity, like taking out a mortgage, is a subsidy of that activity. It boggles the mind that this even has to be pointed out.

Again, a deduction is way to determine your disposable income. That’s why it’s called ‘deduction’; it removes the amount of mandatory spending from your gross income. It may or may not influence your behavior, that is completely beside the point. A lot of things are “conditioned on a particular activity”; very few of them are subsidies of that activity.

“Surely most universities in the US are either nonprofit institutions or state institutions, which in both cases reinvest income from student fees in their educational activities?”

The one doesn’t follow the other. Just because they are investing in *something* doesn’t mean that they are definitionally investing in maintaining or lowering fees. They clearly are not, you can simply look at the fees.

The mortgage INTEREST tax deduction subsidizes borrowing. Lenders actually squawk more than states if you threaten this deduction.

Back in the day when there were more tax brackets, it was also more likely to drop you to a lower tax bracket which meant that simply by borrowing more you might significantly reduce your tax bill. if your family income is hovering near $250k, you should be very aware of this.
As you pay down your mortgage, you interest payments decline. So, if you want to maintain that level of deduction, you can cash out or buy a bigger house. This further incentivizes another interested party, real estate brokers. If they were not already sufficiently invested in a system that favors buying over renting, one that favors churn over staying puts it over the top. The major winners (I think, without doing the math) are actually bankers and real estate brokers – notorious as drum majors in the march of socialism.

Back on the topic… When I first saw the list of programs from which people had benefited, I had an intuition that there was a difference between the tax breaks and the direct subsidies, but when I read Mr. Tabbarok’s post in MR, I changed my position. This happens to me about 70% of the time when I read and MR post I read, rising to 90% if we limit it to posts not written by Mr. Cohen. I think we need to recognize MR and Mr. Tabborok for the national treasures that they are.

Henri, you’re smart enough to realize what you’re saying is ridiculous.

In your example, if I make $200,000 and I spend $60,000 in rent a year, I have to pay taxes on that $60,000 even though it’s something one needs to survive.

If I make the same amount of money, and I spend $60,000 in mortgage payments a year, I save $14,000 a year in taxes.

Same amount of housing expenditure, different outcome in year-end income.

Henri, your relentless dedication to pedantic “dictionary definition” form over actual substance and your assumption that everyone is more ignorant than you makes you a paradigmatic spokesman for Libertarianism. You, like almost every libertarian I’ve ever encountered, are willing to waste more time being pedantic and repetitive than I am pointing out your pedantism, which I guess counts as a “win” in your world.

No, it is, in fact, the actual substance: you deduct your major mandatory expenses from your gross income, and this is how you arrive at your ‘taxable income’. All there is to it.

I guess you’ve been told a few times too many that the mortgage interest deduction is nothing but a subsidy (or is it a social program?), and now you can’t let it go. That’s fine, understandable. No harm in it, carry on.

My take on H.V. that we’ve all been waiting for:

My paraphrase of Henri: A tax incentive affects our society’s demand for a good, a subsidy affects our society’s provision of a good. To the degree that capitalist institutions are more than mere reflections of consumer demand, a subsidy is more than a tax incentive.

My response: yes very good. For purposes of studying the US from a (more reliable) sociological perspective, the distinction between tax expenditure and subsidy is real. At least if we study the home mortgage interest tax deduction in isolation. But then again, sociologists shouldn’t study any one policy in isolation.

The point stands that discreet political interests benefit from tax expenditures much as they may from subsidies. Furthermore, when seen as but one policy among many that benefits single family home ownership, the home mortgage interest tax deduction is certainly part of a general subsidy for a class of citizens to settle the suburbs.

Alex Tabarrok’s accusation that US liberals have a serf-mindset when considering tax expenditures is novel, if rather eccentric. Maybe he’ll look at a paper I’ve written on the influence of 18th c Rhenish guilds on the contemporary libertarian’s grasp of municipal bond legislation.

Is there really a serious question here?

Suppose Fred and Bob use the same barber, who charges them $30 for a haircut. Then one day the barber offers them the following special deals. Fred gets a straight discount: a haircut for $20. Bob still pays the full $30, but then on his way out the barber gives him $10 back — or perhaps a voucher, worth $10, for the local grocery store, where Bob gets his groceries anyway. Would anyone seriously claim that the two deals are different in any important respect?

So substitute the government for the barber. Fred and Bob, through their taxes, purchase public services (roads, courts, public education, police, or whatever). If Fred gets a deduction, he gets the same services at a discount; as a result he has more money to spend on other goods and services. If Bob gets a cash payment (or an in-kind benefit), then he too has more money to spend on other goods and services. Just as before, they get effectively the same deal. If one of them got a subsidy, the other did too.

This does not seem to be a deep or difficult point. It only requires the assumption that taxes are the price you pay for public services.

Note, by the way, that if there were no taxes and so no government, then you’d simply have to buy (some of) the same services in a private market. Perhaps you’d be able to get the same or better services at the same or better price; perhaps not. To answer these questions you’d have to evaluate some pretty wild counterfactuals. The point is, it is just dishonest to contrast paying taxes to “everything else equal, but you get to keep all your earnings”; what you have to contrast it to is buying comparable services in a private market, in a world very much unlike our own.

* whoops, blockquote fail.

Look. You’re taxed based on your ‘taxable income’. ‘Taxable income’ is supposed to represent your income with your personal circumstances factored in, so that the tax burden is distributed fairly. Reasonable people can disagree over the formula for ‘taxable income’. You guys/gals obviously do disagree with the way the US tax code defines it, but IMO this disagreement doesn’t translate into a “tax benefit” or “tax punishment”, other than in a purely rhetorical sense. And that’s all she wrote, that’s all I got.

Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxable_income

In Massachusetts you can deduct rental income. That’s why the state is affectionately known as “Taxachusetts.”

In Massachusetts you can deduct rental income.

Those taxeaters!

That’s why the state is affectionately known as “Taxachusetts.”

Quite rightly so–will no one think of the increased burden on normal people.

Henri V @ 87:
“If your gross income is $200K, but you have to take $150K worth of medications to survive, would the government, by allowing you to deduct $150K from your income, subsidize your existence or simply be fair in taxing you?”

No. That’s be the tax-payer subsidising big pharma. What you‘d be getting is $15k (‘worth’ as you so wrongly put it) of medications, charged at $150k because the taxpayer is picking up the tab.
Sheesh. Haven’t you heard of medicare/medicaid?

Seems to me the whole thing is knocked out at the end of Tabarrok’s third par.

“(NB I am *not* taking a position here on the best tax structure.)”

Er, actually you are, mate.

Good point.

I guess what’s noteworthy here is the artlessness of it.

It’s like your four year-old coming to you and saying: “NB I did *not* eat all the cookies in the cookie jar.”

parse- Why yes, pretty much by definition if you exempt one category of purchases from a sales tax that applies to most other purchases, you’re subsidizing that category. In this case you’re making it a bit easier for the less affluent to afford food at the grocery store. Which once again shows that subsidy != evil, despite the curious propensity of some people to take offense at the word.

It seems counterintuitive to say you subsidize the purchase of raw food by adding a surcharge to prepared food.

That’s because that’s a ridiculous way of putting it. Raw food is being exempted from a tax that applies to most purchases. A special exemption for one type of item from a broad-based tax is a tax subsidy for the exempted item. Again, this isn’t rocket science.

So, to clarify your position, Henri, when is a tax break a subsidy, and when isn’t it?

(It would be great if you could provide both a definition, and a couple of examples. Thanks.)

Thanks for that.

I am not sure the distinction you are trying to make really holds water, though. As any economist will tell you, if you reward people for doing something, you create an incentive to do it. That applies to having children, buying a home, or sending your children to college just as much as it does to buying an electric car.

You might argue that the intentions behind the measures are different, but from the taxpayer’s point of view the intention is irrelevant. I could dress up some justification for the tax credit for an electric car that says “we should equalize the hardship faced by motorists so people who drive higher-cost electric cars are not penalized for it.”. But that doesn’t change the nature of the incentive.

You might argue that the intentions behind the measures are different, but from the taxpayer’s point of view the intention is irrelevant.

In this particular discussion the intention is not irrelevant, the intention is the point of it. It’s either a social program/subsidy, or it’s a way to equalize the hardship. The latter being pretty much the opposite of a ‘social program’.

Your suggested justification for the tax credit for an electric car is not convincing. ‘Electric’ is the giveaway here.

…not to mention that it’s a direct credit, as opposed to a deduction. They actually give you cash for buying an electric car, regardless of what your overall situation is.

They actually give me cash when my income tax deductions reduce my tax liability below my withholding.

Fine, then for you itemized deductions is a social program. Like I said at the beginning, ‘social program’ means different things to different people. You’re clearly in the minority, but don’t let it discourage you. You have the right to your opinion.

Henri @130: that is a good point about me being in a minority in my definition of a “social program”. It was, of course, exactly John’s point in his original post. (A quick totting-up suggests I am in agreement with the majority of commenters here, though.)

The problem is that the distinction between “social program” and “not a social program” that you and most Americans want to use amounts to nothing more than saying “boo!” and “hooray!” Or, more precisely, saying: “I don’t benefit from this measure” and “I do benefit from this measure.”

Economically, the distinction is meaningless.

Well, you could simply ask: ‘which of the following government programs are, in your opinion, “social programs”?’ That would be an honest and informative poll. If you wanted to dig deeper, then for those who don’t see certain programs as ‘social programs’ you could even suggest some explanations, for example: ‘I had paid payroll taxes for 45 years, and now I’m simply getting my money back’, or, simply, ‘I earned it’, or something like that. This way you would have learned something about the prevailing attitudes.

Instead, they concocted a set of questions, clearly with the purpose to mock the respondents. Now, what’s the use of that? I suspect Ed above already knows that he’s much smarted than most, he doesn’t need another confirmation.

I’m a member of a social species, thus a social being. There is a lot of specialized knowledge that drives a myriad of necessary but focused activities, so I can’t survive outside a collective. I can build a network but I don’t know how to make dirty water clean. I can rebuild a carburetor (if parts are available) but I can’t make a ball bearing or refine brass or hone stainless steel. I live in a collective social structure called the U.S. that organizes the collective behavior of millions of social beings toward ends that have some hope of contributing to the whole.

It’s silly to suggest I don’t benefit if youngsters are educated; I benefit hugely if people can easily go to college (probably even if that education is free, given their likely demand for a more responsible media and future contributions to the collective). I benefit if the air is clean without even having to learn that means no asbestos, no radium, no mercury, etc. I benefit if there are enough inspectors to insure my food is clean, my clothes aren’t made with poison fibers, my trash is managed in sound ways.

Civilization costs money may sound trite. But there are 7 billion of us now, and that requires a lot of organization, incentives, and centrally managed investments in property protection and roads and libraries and clean water.

There are so many of us now, so interconnected, that one virus (absent diligence and vigilance) could take out billions of us in a few weeks. How long does a city survive (and we mostly live in cities now) if the water stops and the electricity and the trash collection? And the people who bring food to the markets?

Maybe we’ll reach a point where everyone wears a tracker and can be billed individually for every service used, every road taken, every bridge crossed, taxed for every food tested, and billed for every piece of research that didn’t pan out but might have … yet I doubt it because my life is benefited in uncountable ways by the contributions of uncountable people doing uncountable things.

Look at any moment in history and I live in paradise right now. Kings would give their first born sons to have what I have. So yeah, tax me whatever you want.

I used to have more psychic income than I have now from living in the U.S. We were proud of our infrastructure, our schools, our educated populace, our creativity, our innovations. For a moment we walked on the Moon and could talk about it to other people intelligently. Now I rarely meet a person who knows how their cell phone works, or what a transistor is, let alone a watt, and they all buy them every month.

Now, richer than ever, we argue we can’t afford schools or roads or clean water or libraries or even mountain tops.

It’s ridiculous to consider capitalism in a land that has financialized everything an invisible hand. Nothing is more visible right now that the debris of the last capitalist crisis.

If you were aloft in a balloon when the crisis occurred, looking down at the Earth you couldn’t tell anything happened. Every building and farm and factory and road and pond and stream remained intact. Something imaginary went away. Something not quite real vanished.

When the “not real” goes away, you should reconsider what it really is.

An engineer would say you’re just as wealthy in any real world and measurable terms as you were a moment ago. Any anthropologist from an alien culture watching this would be utterly mystified. It’s like watching lemmings take themselves all over a cliff running from cloud in the sky.

If you suddenly had to fight a war with zombies you have exactly as many resources as you had the day before the crisis.

But now, thinking you’re poor, you’re going to gut your roads, close your libraries, forget about your food and air and water, and stop educating yourselves.

Incomprehensively, it didn’t even require the zombies to defeat you.