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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 17, 2011
Tax on breathing
Perhaps I am slow-witted, for it has taken me a long time - decades, it would seem, of trying to answer political questions to at least my own satisfaction - to come to something like the conclusion I mentioned in this space last week. My remark was to the effect that conservatives should be against public policy. Against all public policies. And basically, against politics. For conservatives, read people in general, for I was not trying to advance a faction.Yet it is in the nature of politics to put one in a faction, whether one wants to be in one or not. Example: some "experts" propose to put a tax on excess breathing. This seems plausible enough, from an environmental point of view. Human breathers absorb oxygen and expel carbon dioxide. Those who breathe more deeply or quickly than others could be held especially to account. "Scientific studies" could establish a baseline for normal breathing levels, and a new government department could regulate breathing, based on these results. Excess breathers contribute more to global warming, or whatever, and should therefore be charged their fair share of the costs. They should also be vilified in public service campaigns for their antisocial behaviour. Now let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that my reader is opposed to this. Let us even suppose he thinks the whole idea is insane. He goes farther, he actually says aloud, "This is crazy!" He now belongs to the probreathing faction. He can be characterized as a diehard conservative, standing in the way of progress. It will be insinuated that he is himself a notorious excess breather, whose politics are informed only by personal selfishness. I chose a rather ridiculous example, but not an impossible one. Environmental regulation has been reaching into areas of everyday life that no government - not even the totalitarian one, run by Stalin - dreamt of doing a couple of generations ago. So many of the social and regulatory "advances" of the last 50 years would have struck the denizen of 1961 as equally ridiculous as a tax on breathing. So ridiculous, that it never occurred to him to mobilize resistance in advance. Now, let us go back 100 years. And let us consider not the tax on breathing, which for all I know people in the progressive vanguard are already discussing among themselves. Rather, let us consider the tax on income. In some sense, all taxes are ultimately taxes on wealth, so the experts who first proposed an "income tax" had intellectual cover. They were simply proposing to take a commonly accepted idea, one step forward. Surely, given the extraordinary costs of the Great War, no reasonable person could object to extending this principle, and taxing only the rich some nominal proportion of their personal income, as a temporary measure for the duration of the war. Indeed, those who objected were only the diehard conservatives, trying to stand in the way of progress. They were notoriously excessive income earners, whose politics were informed only by personal selfishness. Now, my imaginary, reactionary reader did not only object to paying taxes on his excess breathing. I imagine him as a true reactionary; as someone who objects, in principle, to having his breathing levels assessed by a government bureaucracy; to being stopped on the street for police spot checks; or selected at random for a "breathing audit," to see if he might be secretly breathing a little harder than he claimed in the last annual "breath return" he filed. He also objects to the anonymous hotline, that enables his vindictive neighbour to tip off the authorities about rumours that he wheezes in the shower. Perhaps this analogy is over the top; yet the comparison of income tax to a tax on breathing strikes me as instructive. On what "scientific" basis has the government decided where excess income-earning begins? And having decided, by what right founded in Magna Carta has it then empowered an immense bureaucracy to investigate every adult citizen, and trawl forensically through his tiniest chits and receipts in search of concealed income, with the intention of impounding it? Yes, I am just as reactionary as that imaginary reactionary reader. The more I have thought about it, the more I have become convinced that the very idea of income tax is an obscene intrusion; that the professional class of Han-era China were right to overthrow Emperor Wang Mang when he attempted to impose such a thing; that the Chancellor of the Exchequer was right to burn all the public records of Britain's first attempt at an income tax during the Napoleonic Wars; that the Supreme Court of the United States was right to rule that the very notion of a tax upon business receipts was unconstitutional. Et cetera. Yet today, instead of two pennies in the pound on obviously rich people (the original British income tax rate: less than one per cent), everyone who earns is paying through the nose, and living in fear of the tax department. This is the politicization of everyday life; what public policy comes down to; what we excuse by the word democracy. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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