Cowen and Caplan on Voluntary Taxes

And my argument is less powerful than all of these because I think too much in practical terms, to understand the moral philosophical implications of these arguments (too many years scraping for a living atrophied my brain somewhat). What does that mean, in my preferred practical terms? That redistribution from the government to lower incomes no longer works because the divide has become too great. As a person with little money, all I ask for is the chance to rebuild an economic environment that people such as myself can survive in, thrive in, and be economically connected in. That is not the same thing as government handouts or charity, because as any person in my position can tell others, we want to be strong enough to give back, as well. It sucks when we find ourselves on the receiving end, decades before we were ready. (Is any middle aged or elderly person ever really ready?) Just give us a chance to create a new economic floor, to stand on, be strong, and once again able to reach out to the world.

On a couple of dimensions, Cowen and Caplan are involved in an intellectual slight of hand. First, it is simultaneously impossible to maximize preferences over social outcomes and individual outcomes. By trying to combine the two into a single preference relation, they create the appearance of inconsistency when there is one. Frankly, I am disappointed in you that you didn’t fight back against what I would consider slander on the part of Cowen/Caplan. I think we should all stay away from arguments which imply that those who disagree with us are hypocritical.

The slight of hand works two ways. First, think of egalitarian outcomes as a pure public good which people generally have idiosyncratic preferences over. It is literally a homework problem for an intermediate undergraduate class to show that each individual’s own contribution to a public good can go to zero even pareto maximum goes to infinity. “We will all be better off if we can together commit to contributing” is a perfectly moral position. Intuitively, each person recognizes that their own contribution is too small to make a difference and that others will freeload on their contribution. Which is to say it is rational to not contribute oneself, but still recognize that everyone together should. So the slight of hand I mentioned is that if you can’t accept this as a moral outcome; why is it that you think ANY utility maximization is “moral”? Frankly, I think utility maximization is morally neutral–it should be understood as the greed motive together with a myopic view of non-strictly-economic outcomes, which brings me to my second point.

The second slight of hand is more fundamental. As I already suggested, utility maximization in the market is nothing more or less than the greed motive for individuals. There is something a little fishy (or more precisely, completely wrong) about comparing these greed-based market outcomes with non-greed-based motives which cannot be understood entirely as occuring in the market. Let’s call these “motives” as well. I have preferences over community outcomes, perhaps; or perhaps I have a “motive” associated with each of Jonathan Haidt’s moral dimensions. At any rate–whatever the details–simultaneously maximizing one’s own greed motive and the community motive is an impossibility since the community motive cannot be satiated by individual market interactions–by definition! Now, how choices are actually made in the presence of multiple motives each on different dimensions is something I’m working on, but I can say a couple of things whether that project pans out or not. First, maximizing the community motive (preferences over community outcomes) could involve advocacy even of actions one would not take by oneself. If this advocacy involves actions which would hurt oneself if implemented, then this is a sign of the strength of the community motive over the greed motive–that is; it is a sign of moral strength, not weakness. Finally, since the individual action makes no improvement for the community (approximately) but a big difference for the greed motive, the lack of individual action in the face of no community action is entirely irrelevant–the perception of powerlessness at best. (Incidently, the revealed preferences would make the community motive look a lot like a public good). That is the second slight of hand they engage in… mixing up morality with the greed motive to begin with. Human beings are not so simple.