"Cruel" is an emotional response, not a factual response. There are just as many arguments about morality which condemn everything except pure per capita taxation: after all, the idea that I should pay more just because I'm more successful and others should pay less because they have more needs comes awful close to "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Saying, "well, these services have to be paid for somehow, and the rich are better able to pay for them than the poor" is a nonstarter. Raise the taxes enough and the rich will flee to other, friendlier, tax environments -- meaning this tax policy which is based on the illusion of fairness and non-cruelty has the net effect of spending more and driving away those who can pay for it, leaving large bills to fall on the shoulders of those who can't pay for it.
At the federal level, something on the order of half of all citizens pay no income tax at all. This means that half the country gets their services for free and the other half gets socked with the bill. This produces incentives to use more of the services and to push for the introduction of more services, which contributes to our spiraling debt burden. And so on, and so on, and so on.
By comparison, privatization of government services pushes expenses back on the people who make direct use of them. If you want to go into massive debt in order to pay for Bob's Defense Industries, Inc., you can (assuming your banker agrees); but you can't force your neighbor into debt in order to pay for Bob's Defense Industries, Inc. This strikes some people as having an immensely ethical character; and it strikes other people as denying the benefit of national defense to the people least able to pay for it.
In the last microeconomics class I took, we spent a good bit of class time looking at taxation, morality and ethics. The lesson I took away from it is that anyone who thinks there are clear answers in the realm of taxation and morality is fooling themselves and using numbers to justify their prejudices. Morality is orthogonal to taxation. It is neither moral nor immoral, it simply is.
no subject
"Cruel" is an emotional response, not a factual response. There are just as many arguments about morality which condemn everything except pure per capita taxation: after all, the idea that I should pay more just because I'm more successful and others should pay less because they have more needs comes awful close to "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Saying, "well, these services have to be paid for somehow, and the rich are better able to pay for them than the poor" is a nonstarter. Raise the taxes enough and the rich will flee to other, friendlier, tax environments -- meaning this tax policy which is based on the illusion of fairness and non-cruelty has the net effect of spending more and driving away those who can pay for it, leaving large bills to fall on the shoulders of those who can't pay for it.
At the federal level, something on the order of half of all citizens pay no income tax at all. This means that half the country gets their services for free and the other half gets socked with the bill. This produces incentives to use more of the services and to push for the introduction of more services, which contributes to our spiraling debt burden. And so on, and so on, and so on.
By comparison, privatization of government services pushes expenses back on the people who make direct use of them. If you want to go into massive debt in order to pay for Bob's Defense Industries, Inc., you can (assuming your banker agrees); but you can't force your neighbor into debt in order to pay for Bob's Defense Industries, Inc. This strikes some people as having an immensely ethical character; and it strikes other people as denying the benefit of national defense to the people least able to pay for it.
In the last microeconomics class I took, we spent a good bit of class time looking at taxation, morality and ethics. The lesson I took away from it is that anyone who thinks there are clear answers in the realm of taxation and morality is fooling themselves and using numbers to justify their prejudices. Morality is orthogonal to taxation. It is neither moral nor immoral, it simply is.