No, paying taxes isn’t what gives us say over the government
Timothy P. Carney
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Sometimes, when homeschooling parents or Catholic school parents write about shenanigans by school boards or the failures of public schools, we are told we have no right to complain about them.
One common conservative response is: “As a taxpayer, I am paying the salaries of the school board, the teachers, and the principals through my taxes. They work for me.”
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That argument is half right, but it also falls prey to a very common error. It’s an error that I find conservatives and libertarians make the most because we think about property rights and markets. But liberals also make the same mistake.
We too often speak as if paying taxes gives us the right to tell our governments what to do. Hence this odd viral tweet from liberal author Kurt Andersen:
On one level, you could read Andersen’s comment as just another episode in the long-running dark comedy of liberals hating on red states for not being rich. See past episodes starring Hillary Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), or congressman Josh Gottheimer. Picking on Kentucky and Mississippi for not paying very much in taxes is picking on them for not being rich.
At the same time, you could see Andersen is committing the “I paid for this” fallacy: assuming that our paying for government is or ought to be what gives us say over the government.
This is false, and nobody should talk this way. Simply being a citizen is what gives us a say over our government.
Government is not a business that gives customers what they want in exchange for the customers’ money. Government is not a corporation that answers to investors based on those investors’ buy-in.
The “shareholders” of government are all the citizens (this is as true, on a moral level, in a monarchy as it is in a democracy).
The Fairfax County Public Schools system has to answer to me, even though I don’t send my children there, and it’s not because I pay their salary. It’s because I am a citizen of Fairfax County, and the public school system is a public body that has been entrusted by the people of the county with providing education.
This corrective is important in nongovernmental spheres, too. A parent at St. Bernadette School deserves to be heard by the school not because she pays tuition but because, as a school parent, she is an adult to whom the school owes responsibility. A full-tuition parent deserves no more say over how the school is run than does a full-ride parent.
My wife and I have authority over our children not because we feed and house them. We have authority over our children because we are their parents.
When I hear how people of all political stripes talk, I fear we are getting too transactional. We need to become more relational. And in politics, that means saying clearly that our say over the government has nothing to do with our “paying for it” but rather that our government is responsible to all of its citizens — even the 47%.
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