You Owe Me!
[You
Owe Me!
Having your neighbor imprisoned if he doesn't pay you is a dreadful thing to do.
That's why it's dressed up as 'family benefit' and other pieties.] "The U.K.
government is trying to cut its spending. This so-called austerity strikes many
commentators as not merely harsh but unfair.
For example, the government will no longer pay "family benefit" (roughly £1,000
a year for each child) to parents with an income over £60,000. Ed Balls, the
shadow chancellor, says this change is unfair. Similarly, according to Justine
Roberts, the founder of Mumsnet, a website for mothers, "people are saying it's
unfair" that the government does not subsidize childcare for "stay-at-home
mums."
Parents are not the only supposed victims. On any day of the week you can hear
someone declaring the injustice of insufficient government spending on this or
that deserving group: the ill, the old, the unemployed, university students,
filmmakers, rail passengers, you name it. Yet they rarely explain why it is
unfair. They speak as if the injustice of it ought to be obvious to any decent
person.
Perhaps it is obvious to most people, and especially to members of the allegedly
mistreated groups. Nevertheless, it isn't true. They want the money, of course,
but they have no proper claim on it. This is easier to see if you recognize that
"government spending" is no such thing. The money is provided by taxpayers, who
part with it on threat of imprisonment.
So the relevant question is not, "Does justice require the government to pay
mothers (or students or artists or whomever)?" but rather, "Does justice require
taxpayers to pay mothers?" Of course, if all taxpayers were mothers, the
transfer would be pointless: Mothers would simply be giving themselves their own
money. It is only because many taxpayers are not mothers that mothers and their
advocates seek the transfer. So a better way of putting our question is, "Does
justice require non-mothers to pay mothers (or non-students to pay students or
non-artists pay artists, etc)?
As an aid to answering the question, imagine two neighbors, one a mother and one
not. The mother is lobbying the government to imprison the non-mother if she
refuses to give £100 to the mother. The non-mother complains to her neighbor.
How will the mother explain that what she seeks is fair, that her neighbor
really should be imprisoned if she refuses to hand over £100?
On the rare occasions when the alleged justice of these transfers is defended,
it is typically portrayed as the repayment of a debt. For example, Prof. John
Ashton, incoming president of the Faculty of Public Health, wants more money to
be transferred from the young to the old by way of increased government spending
on social and medical care for the old. Here is his justification: "There is a
debt of honor we owe the elderly. They fought in World War II or contributed to
the war effort and wanted to create a secure environment that came to be known
as the welfare state which is now being portrayed as dependents and layabouts.
It is an abominable betrayal."
Warren Buffett often makes a similar argument. He claims that the rich should
pay higher levels of tax because they owe their wealth to people who have less
money. Or, as President Obama put it, because "you didn't build that," you owe
your money to those who did build it.
This debt argument suffers a defect so obvious that it cannot be the real reason
that those who peddle it support bigger transfers. Start with Prof. Ashton's
claim that the young owe the old money because the latter took part in World War
II. It simply isn't true. Most people over 65 were children or not even born in
1945. Is Prof. Ashton saying they should receive no welfare? I doubt it. But
then WWII is a red herring.
Similarly, neither Mr. Buffett nor Mr. Obama can really believe that taxes are
owed as repayment of debts. A wealthy Californian might have been educated in
the U.K. He might have employed workers in Bangladesh and sold his products to
Australians. But the taxes he pays to the U.S. federal government will go to
Americans, many of whom have contributed nothing whatsoever to his success.
Indeed, if you took the idea seriously, even a fully domesticated rich American
should pay no more tax than a poor one. He received no more state education or
defense or law-and-order than his poor compatriot. He has no greater debt.
More importantly, benefiting from something does not create an obligation to pay
for it. Suppose your neighbor paints a beautiful mural on the wall of his house.
You enjoy looking at it. But you do not thereby owe him money. If he
successfully lobbied the government to imprison if you refused to pay him £100,
justice would not be served.
Some argue that non-parents should pay parents because the children of the
latter will support the former in old age. Maybe they will. Then again, under
our socialist system, the non-parents will contribute to the education of these
children and to the cost of their birth in a hospital. The net transfer, prior
to direct subsidies for parenthood, is far from clear.
But it is irrelevant in any event. As the above mural example illustrates, you
cannot impose a debt on someone simply by doing something that benefits him, be
it painting a mural, wearing a low-cut top, singing a pretty song outside his
window or having a child.
After 65 years of the welfare state, Britain has become a nation of state
supplicants. It has delivered what the 19th century economist, Frédéric Bastiat,
lamented: a society in which everyone wants to live off everyone else. It is a
nasty business. Asking the government to imprison your neighbor if he does not
pay you is a dreadful thing to do. It needs to be dressed up in pieties, no
matter how absurd they are."
Mr. Whyte is a fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London.
You Owe Me!
Ex 20:15,
Eccl 10:2,
Jn 10:10
Italian family's triple suicide 'blamed on gov't austerity'
Eccl 10:2,
Jn 10:10
