J.K. Rowling says she’s happy to pay taxes, because of a commitment to the welfare state. Matt Yglesias responds:
I’ve seen this quoted on a number of progressive sites, but you’ve got to wonder how real the second reason really is. Suppose Rowling moved to a tax haven, hired an accountant to tell her how much money that would save her, and committed to donating the savings to Oxfam. Would that be contemptible? Would it do less good for the world? Of course it really is contemptible for multi-millionaires to take action designed to merely increase the volume of personal consumption that they get to engage in and I hardly fool myself into thinking that your average tax evader has the high-minded motive of increasing his Oxfam contributions. But the point is that purely altruistic-motivated taxpaying doesn’t make a ton of sense, a genuinely altruistic person could always find some other way to use their money to help.
That doesn’t make any sense at all, as far as I can tell. There is a pretty clear normative difference between charity and state welfare. Those of us who consider paying taxes to be a positive obligation think that not just because we expect OTHER people to have to contribute to the public welfare but also (for many of us) because there is something intrinsically distinct about publicly designated social spending.
The charity I choose to donate to may or may not fulfill an actual public good. The significance of the state as provider of social goods is precisely that it constitutes the basic terrain of public goods. When you commit to supporting it, you’re not just supporting the particular policies that it carries but also the broader normative idea that the basis for provision of welfare ought to rest in some sense on a shared solidarity among people.
In the terms that Yglesias uses, the crucial element of tax-paying isn’t altruism but instead is the way it constitutes our most material support for the idea that there are certain elements of life that deserve general – rather than individual – support.
True, but remember when those elements included invading Iraq and developing bunker busters? Maybe I'm just getting old, but I find myself less and less interested in means than ends. Donating to the right charity saves X people and kills zero people. Paying money to the government saves X people and kills Y people. I'm not actually advocating not paying taxes. Maybe making enough tax deductible donations to things that aren't the military that you can offset the part of your taxes that inevitably goes to the military. It's also possible that I am insane.