Can we please stop crying about “Our Tax Payers’ Money?”

Far too often when reading a perhaps otherwise interesting essay, this horrible argument is made. Whatever the governments’ wrong doing e.g: police violence against protesters, or military adventures abroad, along comes the lament of how can they do this with our tax dollars? Whether it’s the activities of corrupt politicians, or some other case of perceived misuse of money by the government, too often included is the tax payers’ lament. This is a really bad argument.

First of all, the argument is very flimsy politically. For instance, would it be OK for the police to beat-up protesters if such activity was not publicly funded? Would it be OK to bomb foreign countries if it did not cost the “tax payer” anything? Probably not. For this reason alone, lamenting that dubious actions by the State that were undertaken “With Our Tax Dollars” is the wrong argument. Instead, it’s much better to argue against such activities by showing that they are wrong, harmful and contrary to the public good, regardless of how such undertakings were financed.

Further, the tax payers’ lament is actually false. The Government does not spend tax payers’ money. The government does not collect taxes because it needs this money to spend. All money, meaning here the national currency of the country, originally comes from the government. If the government did not spend or lend, there would be no such money in the economy. The government creates money.

What’s more is that workers do not really pay taxes in any economic sense.

When labour is sold as a commodity on the market its price is driven by its replacement costs. This is clear to most people when it comes to other commodities. For instance if the government enacted a tax on tomatoes, nobody would be surprised that the price of tomatoes went up. In most countries, the price of commodities like alcohol and tobacco is substantially made up of taxes, yet nobody expects that the sellers of these goods absorb the cost of such taxes in reduced profits, everybody knows they are passed-on in the prices paid.

The same is true for wages. Wages are nothing more than the price of labour on the market, and in a capitalist market economy, they are likewise driven towards their replacement costs. In other words, if your taxes were lowered, then your real wages would likewise fall, either by the labour market driving wages down, or by the availability of extra money in the hands of workers driving prices up. Everything else being equal, the inflation-adjusted wage would remain the same. Therefore, the workers do not really pay taxes in any meaningful sense, rather those taxes are passed-on to the their bosses as part of the price of labour.

Now, going back to the example of the workers taxes being reduced and yet wages remaining stable, in the case that for instance there were legal or structural barriers to wages being accordingly reduced by the labour market. I have noted above that the extra money available would drive up the prices of the things workers pay for. This is the real reason that the government requires taxes. Not to fund it’s own spending, but to control prices.

However this is not just a simple function of the amount of money the government creates, how money is spent is far more relevant than how much the government spends. More money only means higher prices when there is little or no excess capacity in the production of that which is purchased. In other words, only when the amount produced and sold does not or cannot increase in proportion with the increase in the supply of money.

Money spent on consumer goods is likely to drive the prices of those goods up. This is almost always the case with workers’ spending, since workers do not generally finance productive capacity directly, but compete against each other to purchase available goods.

Money spent on investments in production is less likely to drive prices up. Government spending can mobilize underutilized economic capacity, especially unemployed labour, and increase the productivity of labour by way of eduction and other public investments, thus at the same time creating more money, but also more goods to spend money on. Therefore, not increasing prices, but increasing the size of the economy.

There are no fixed limits on how much money the government can create. The governments and its central bank’s ability to lend or spend is limited only by law and policy. Therefore, all lending and spending is undertaken in order to achieve some public aim. Spending and lending is a social choice, a choice of what aims to undertake and what aims not to undertake. We are not limited by any scarcity of tax dollars as to how many protestors we want to beat-up or how many countries we want to bomb, or for that matter, how many students we want educate or how many people we want to provide with medical care, we can only be limited by law and policy, and ultimately, by the productive capacity of our society. In other we are limited only by social choices as to how to employ our productive capacity.

We have a right to say we do not approve of bad choices because we have a right to participate in the social choices made by our society, not because it is “our” tax money. The idea that our right to comment or dissent comes from the fact that we have paid taxes is a fundamentally undemocratic argument. Do people that pay more taxes have more right to say what social choices we make? No! We have a democratic right to dissent and that does not come from the amount of taxes we may have paid.

So please, pretty please, drop the tax payers’ lament. The government doesn’t really spend tax dollars, workers don’t really pay taxes, and most importantly, our right to criticize the government does not derive from how much tax we’ve paid, but from our democratic right to participate in social choices and to hold our government accountable to the public good.

I’ll be at Stammtisch tonight around 9pm as usual, please come! http://bit.ly/buchhandlung

“Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen!”  With these words Karl Marx perhaps summarized best what Communism is, succinctly expressing the goals of the communist movement. While Communism is an older and much broader movement than the work of Marx and his followers alone, we are all none the less united around the central idea that our shared productive capacity should be directed towards the common wealth and that each person should have the opportunity to maximize their ability and potential, and to contribute accordingly.

This stands in stark contrast of what might be described as “From each according to their privilege, to each according to there usefulness to the privileged,” otherwise known as “Capitalism” Where a privileged elite produce nothing, yet control the distribution of all wealth and direct our shared productive capacity towards their own enrichment, while everybody else produces everything, yet receives only as much as the privileged give them, according to their usefulness to the privileged, and only infrequently any more than their own subsistence or replacement costs.

Given the choice between a society that allows everyone the chance to develop to their full potential and a society where opportunity is determined by class structure and privilege, in other words a choice between Communism and Capitalism, who would chose Capitalism?

Given the choice between a society that directs its productive capacity towards creating real social value and building common wealth and a society that directs its productive capacity towards the enrichment of the few, in other words a choice between Communism and Capitalism, who wouldn’t want to work towards Communism?

Yet, few people today openly identify as Communists, many even believe that using this word somehow works against them, as if the elite who will resist all efforts to reduce their privilege will somehow be caught off-guard and be tricked into a more equal society if we just outsmart them with some clever new terms.

To paraphrase Juliette, What’s in a name? That which we call Communism, by any other name, would be suppressed just the same.

The fact is that any proposal that seeks to create more equality will be automatically called “Communism” by reactionary forces who who have invested considerable wealth and effort trying to sully the term.

A similar discussion has taken place among members of the Pirate Party. As Rick Falkvinge reports from the the discussion in founding the Spanish Partido Pirata “Either we call ourselves the Pirate Party, and get to define what the name stands for, they reasoned, or we’ll be called the Pirate Party anyway, without control of what the name stands for.”

Those who wish to preserve the privilege of the elite will call us Communists no matter what. If we are timid about being called Communists, and try to shy away from the name, all that will do is strengthen the attacks against us, it will make it seem like being a Communist is somehow shameful, something to be denied, something to hide. It will make it seem that we call ourselves something other than Communists only to keep people from knowing the truth about our sinister Communism.

As in the discussion that Falkvinge reports, we thereby relinquish the ability to define what Communism means, and what it means to be a Communist. We also let our accusers off the hook. By pretending not to be Communists, we allow them to never explain what it is they think is wrong with Communism and why it’s a bad thing. By pretending we are not Communists, we allow them to effectively employ a guilt-by-association fallacy to discredit us as Communists without ever needing to make a logical argument against our views.

We should be under no delusion, the same propagandists that have made communism a bad word in many uninformed minds, will do likewise to any new terms that seek to deny privilege and power to the elite. This is clearly evident in how the words “welfare” and even “liberal” have become terms of derision in US politics, for instance. This is also brought to the level of absurdity when right-wing commentators label even the most timid parliamentarian reformists as “Communists.” Such fallacy is displayed at it’s most vulgar with common feminist-baiting trolls likes “feminism is just Communism in drag.” We have all seen plenty of this.

By saying “Yes, I am a Communist.”, we turn the tables. Not only that, we open the door to a far more interesting and rich discussion, a discussion that is made unnecessarily shallow when we hide our Communism behind neologisms. Communists have been producing theory for hundreds of years, a rich stock of insight where many core questions have been investigated, disputed, and a wide variety of tactics, tendencies and views have emerged, including Marxian, anarchist and co-operative tendencies, which each having quite different views on how communism is to be achieved. Views we do well to consider and contrast.

To be Communist simply means that you believe in equality, that you do not believe that a society that allows one class of people to exploit another is the best that we can achieve, and therefore, that you believe that democracy and equality must be respected in all human relations, not only in government, but also in economic and domestic life as well.

Communists believe we are equals politically, equals in the workplace, and equals in the home.

Communism has never been achieved. So we do not yet know what a Communist society would look like in detail. Even the leaders of so-called Communist countries such as the USSR or China have never claimed to have achieved Communism. They have only claimed to be working towards it. And yet, this is perhaps the most common reason cited to avoid the use of Communism, because many of the attempts to realize it have gone wrong, have failed, and have even produced results directly contradictory to the aims of Communism.

Far from being a reason to avoid it, the mistakes and failures of the past are perhaps the strongest reason why we should continue to use the word. We know that attempts to achieve Communism could lead to negative consequences.

When we pretend that the ideas being explored are wholly new, when we employ neologisms and we make-believe that we have escaped from the political realities faced by those before us, when we allow ourselves the hubris to believe that our own theories and models are so new and novel that they do not have the same limits and risks of those of the previous revolutionaries, we invite failure and disaster.

When we use the word Communism, we do so without delusion, we already know it can go wrong. Thus we can learn from, and build upon the mistakes and failures of the past. Any idea can go wrong, any course of action, no matter how noble its ideals, can lead to unintended consequences. Simply using a different term does not protect us.

Instead of clouding the discussion with neologistic delusion, lets acknowledge the history and embrace the future of Communism. To appropriate the reasoning of the founders of the Partido Pirata, let us call ourselves Communists, and define what the name stands for, otherwise we’ll be called Communists anyway, and give up control of what Communism means.

If you believe in working towards a society where everyone is treated as an equal, an equal under the law, an equal in the workplace and an equal in the home. If you believe in working towards a society where the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all. If you believe in working towards a society that applies it’s wealth to empower the many and not only to enrich the few, join me in standing up and saying “Yes, I am a Communist” and lets work out what that means together.

I’ll be Stammtisch tonight as usual at 9pm or so. See you at Cafe Buchhandlung. Aparently, it’s a Fasching party at Cafe Buchhandlung! Wear a costume if you’re up for it.

- http://bit.ly/buchhandlung