Remember, It's The Government's Money - You're Only Allowed To Borrow Some Of It

The tax collection of the U.K. is proposing a new policy under which all paychecks in the country would go first to the government, and only then be sent on to workers after the appropriate taxes had been levied. As will not come as any surprise to anyone who knows me, I hate this idea with a passion. I don't think it's some kind of first-step-towards-the-gulag power grab, as more histrionic rightists might call it. Britain is a country with a long and thoroughly ingrained democratic tradition, and absent some 1930s style economic apocalypse I doubt very much that totalitarianism will go on the march there. But I do think it's a dangerous and unnecessary expansion of the government's coercive power over economic activity, and betrays a troubling assumption at the heart of modern left-wing ideology - that the concerns of society as a whole trump the rights of the individual.

The potential for conflict between individual interest and the well-being of society as a whole has long been one of the key sources of tension in democratic societies, and while I don't deny that there are certainly cases in which societal interest should be paramount - nobody should be allowed to dump toxic waste in a river at the expense of people downstream, for example - any free society which wishes to remain that way must respect the autonomy, political and economic, of the individual citizen. By and large, people do not go to work because they feel some abstract commitment to do their part for society, they go to work because they have personal financial concerns and desires which working helps them to address. The paying of salaries is fundamentally a private transaction between employers and employees, and the money an employee receives is recompense for his or her labor. It's not the state's business. I'm fine with requiring people to pay taxes, but the idea that the government has any legitimate right to see peoples' paychecks before they themselves do strikes me as deeply pernicious, and not something that should be entertained even in the name of ostensibly worthwhile goals such as greater government efficiency or cracking down on tax evasion. It's not by accident that Locke cited the right to personal property as one of the necessary conditions for free and just government - without a fundamental distinction between what belongs to the state and what does not, there are too many ways in which the government can abuse power and coerce the citizenry. Just ask all those people in China who were displaced from homes their families had inhabited for generations because the government wanted to build a dam or an athletic stadium and hey, family ties or no the land didn't belong to the people living on it anyway. Legitimizing the notion that the government first gets to seize whatever portion of a person's salary is currently deemed necessary, and only then must pass the money on to the person who earned it, erodes that distinction, and that's a bad thing.

The tangled libertarian web

This is an interesting post on the different strands in the libertarian movement. It strikes me that the distinction Manzi draws is essentially between dogmatic (liberty-as-ends) and pragmatic (liberty-as-means) libertarians. I definitely fall into the latter category - while I do value personal autonomy as a good in-and-of-itself, I do not think the set of cases in which the government has a legitimate right to restrict it is limited to laws enforcing contracts and prohibiting actions which directly and materially harm others. There are such things as collective action problems, for which solutions cannot be devised unless people are compelled to cooperate by government action. I don't think, for example, that industrial polluters would have cleaned up their act without government legislation forcing them to do so - as one look out the window at the smog-ridden skies in any of the industrialized regions of China will tell you, markets, being relatively localized phenomena with strong incentives toward self-interested behavior, have a very limited ability to exert pressure on companies to behave in an environmentally responsible way. I also find the tendency of more dogmatic libertarians to fetishize personal liberty as if it were always and everywhere the highest of civic goods rather problematic. There are certain situations where private and public interests are in conflict, and I do not see why the former should always win out. I am instinctually inclined toward the libertarian position on hotly debated topics like drug legalization and prostitution, but opponents of eliminating all restrictions on these behaviors have presented enough persuasive evidence that doing so would have a deleterious effect on society that I am forced to concede that they may have a point. In such cases I continue to argue for the merits of personal liberty, but do so cognizant of the fact that it is not the only consideration and that 100% personal liberty, 0% social consideration may not be the correct balance to strike. I think this sort of non-dogmatic approach is psychologically and politically healthier, as it allows us to adapt to changing circumstances, as well as more likely to result in meaningful movement in the direction of increased personal liberty - it's a lot easier to convince people that a relatively harmless drug like marijuana ought to be legalized if you're not simultaneously insisting that the effects of nasty stuff like crystal meth, which really does destroy peoples' lives and have a disruptive influence on communities, are purely a private concern. The role of libertarianism should be to limit government interference in the lives of citizens to situations where there is a clear and compelling rationale for it, and to make sure it is as unobtrusive as possible - not to oppose it entirely.

Unfortunately, I don't feel that nuanced libertarianism is well represented in contemporary national politics. The only libertarian figures with any degree of national prominence seem to be either "git yer stinkin' librul hands off mah guns n' money" antigovernment cranks (Ron Paul) or political sideshows (Arnold Schwarzenegger). And those two may be the last of a dying breed. The takeover of the GOP by the religious right has left up-and-coming libertarian-leaning politicians without a political home. Hopefully a few years of liberal excess and Republican electoral debacles will change that.