Big government is a substitute for trust not the means to achieve it.

People don't trust government. That government is pretty bad at nearly everything it does. Politicians and officials are at best venal and at worst corrupt. Yet government goes on getting bigger. Go figure?

Nick Gillespie reports on how there has been an almost complete collapse in people's trust of the US government:

In 1964, according to Pew Research Center, 77 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that they "can trust the government in Washington always or most of the time." By 2015, that figure stood at just 19 percent.

Gillespie sets out how scandal played its part:

But the most powerful reasons for collapsing trust in government are surely the actions of government. Consider even a smattering of revelations and developments going back to the late '60s. The U.S. failure in Vietnam was bad enough on its own, but the Pentagon Papers, a secret report commissioned by the Defense Department that concluded our involvement was doomed from the start, revealed a government that was incompetent at best and duplicitous at worst. The Watergate scandal and revelations of widespread corruption in the Nixon White House led to the unprecedented resignation of a president who had won re-election by the largest Electoral College margin up to that point in history. (What suckers we were, giving a crook 61 percent of the vote!) High-profile government commissions issued reports showing that intelligence agencies and the military had engaged in illegal surveillance of American citizens and tested would-be mind-control drugs on unsuspecting soldiers and civilians.

Political corruption sits alongside government institutions having an almost complete disdain for the public to the point where they considers it entirely justified to simply lie to the public. Gillespie skims through the most egregious US examples and wonders why, despite government's abject failure it has continued to grow ever larger and to stick its grubby fingers into ever more aspects of folks' lives. And, with almost sublime irony, the loss of trust is the reason why people turn to government for protection even though they know it is "...at best incompetent and at worst corrupt".

Things are a little better here in the UK but, like the USA, we have lost trust in the fundamental institutions of society. We mistrust parliament, consider government essentially incompetent and are cynical about central social institutions like marriage, church and business. Yet no politician is asking how we might restore trust and confidence - in each other and in society as a whole. This is a moral mission rather than something resolvable through a policy platform and, as such, it sits uneasily with the now dominant utilitarian approach - moral leadership isn't about "evidence-based policy" but about helping people to recognise why trust is so important.

All our current approach to government and politics does is to provide new sets of rules - often in the form of bans and taxes - intended to manipulate public behaviour and to prevent the negative affects of mistrust from being realised. So the lack of trust becomes embedded - government doesn't trust people (and is entirely comfortable with not telling the whole truth) and creates an environment where mistrust is seen as normal. Yet lack of trust makes doing business harder, acts as a drag on economic growth, and rewards those who would hobble choice and opportunity while casting out those who would liberate people from such tyranny.

Gillespie concludes that we need "...policies that increase local control and individual autonomy..." - what we in the UK would call devolution and I think this to be the right place to start. Our obsession with sameness, with avoiding the postcode lottery, has pretty much destroyed the autonomy of local communities and the most approachable and accountable politicians - local councillors - have been reduced to powerless caseworkers through centralisation, local government reform and intervention-based inspection systems.

There's a tendency to see libertarian ideas as a sort of crash capitalism but perhaps we should look to voluntarism as a way through the sickening darkness of a trust-free society:

That means more work is needed putting together serious, detailed policy plans that give more autonomy to individuals and communities; highlighting examples of markets and voluntary organizations succeeding in building trust, self-regulation, and common purpose; and appealing to a broad, positive vision of a strictly limited government whose goals revolve around ensuring basic fairness, equality of opportunity, continued economic growth, and rising living standards.

Everywhere we look we find examples of voluntary action - whether for profit or for reasons of charity or community spirit - that provide this common purpose. Those ideas of mutuality, commonweal and co-operation that created so much good in the 19th century need refinding and reimagining. Whether it's free schools or new mutual financial institutions, these sorts of bodies provide approachable, accountable services to a defined community or a specific neighbourhood. And, at the heart of such organisations' mission is always the idea that most of the time you really can trust your neighbour.

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In which Zoe Williams (inadvertently) makes the case for voluntarism...

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OK perhaps that wasn't uber-statist Zoe's intention but her (or maybe The Guardian sub's) opening statement in a piece about tax is spot on:

Good policy can’t be devised on the basis that reasonable people must be coerced or conned into paying for our services

Sadly Zoe then goes on to gibber about how big companies don't pay enough tax and how she doesn't mind taxes just  "...the people who raise it, the people who spend it, and the way it is discussed". We get the usual Guardian caricature of the Tory (in the currently favoured figure of George Osborne) and a slightly ill-informed canter through some late 20th century political history.

But the statement is still there. If we are to have a system where some things are done collectively then there needs to be a system for people to share the cost of those things. Indeed Zoe describes the problem precisely:

It is impossible to devise good tax policy on the basis that reasonable people don’t want to pay it and have to be either coerced or conned into doing so. Deduction at source turns into the mug’s option while tax avoidance becomes the natural course of the prudent person. It is often said that HMRC doesn’t have the staffing levels to deal with avoidance as it currently stands, and that’s true – but actually the resources don’t exist in the world to police an activity that nobody believes is wrong in the first place.

So the question here is left hanging about like some bloke on the corner trying to look nonchalant because his date's 20 minutes late. So let's ask it a different way - can we have a system where people are happy to pay taxes? Zoe tries to make a moral argument - tax is an 'investment'. Now this is not only utter nonsense but fails to make the point, which is that tax is a payment for services recieved. And we coerce (i.e. make it illegal on pain of imprisonment not to pay the tax) because of the free rider problem.

Indeed it is that free rider problem - people getting the goods or services without paying - that is the biggest hurdle for voluntarism, for the idea that we can have collective action and the collective provision of public goods without the superstructure of the state. The answer, of course, lies in either preventing the non-payer from using said public goods (something that proved impossible when public goods were built with private finance by private investors) or else by making the charge low enough and the benefit great enough for it not to be worth nearly everyone's while avoiding the cost.

The problem with our current system is that many taxpayers look at how the money (or some of the money) gets spent and don't like it. This is the same whether the anger is directed at the government buying Trident nuclear missiles or at this:

The state will then proceed to piss this money – that I have earned – up the wall on various fake charities, foreign aid, quangos and an over-bloated third sector. These parasites will use this money to lobby the government to restrict further my liberties to live my life as I see fit  and campaign for the state to steal even more of my money.

We know that most people, regardless of political position, find the tax system unfair or excessive. And we know that European high-tax societies have a problem with tax dodging. Not just by high profile multinational corporations but by millions of ordinary workers:

 ...the latest estimates showed about 30 million people in the EU performed work that was not declared for tax. "Around half of all construction workers in Germany undertake shadow work; and over 80% of all Danes find shadow work acceptable – at least in some circumstances."

Somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the British economy is outside the tax system either because it is illegal (prostitution, drugs, smuggling and so forth) or because people prefer to be paid in cash. The assumption that Zoe and her sort make is that simpler and lower taxes wouldn't generate enough to sustain the system so therefore we should all grow to love tax.

The things that the Guardian reader thinks important - pensions, a welfare syste, high quality healthcare for everyone and a sense of social justice - are not things that need to be provided by a central state through the imposition of coercive taxation. Indeed all such systems do is create a different sort of free rider - millions of people who receive more in benefits from the state than they pay in taxes to that state.

Voluntary collective action, for all its problems with governance and with free riders, doesn't receive the attention is receives. Prior to the creation of national state systems of health, welfare and education such voluntarism did provide such services to nearly everyone, it's a myth that there was no health provision for the poor prior to the NHS, no elementary schooling prior to the Forster Act, or no provision for welfare prior to Lloyd George's Old Age Pensions Act. These things existed and provided for nearly everyone.

I'm not sure you could run an entire nation on the basis of such voluntarism but I do think that such institutions - friendly societies, mutual finance, worker and customer co-ops and the like - are diminished by government and that private investment will (as the turnpikes and railways show) be forthcoming even where the return on capital is compromised by the free rider problem. If there is a business benefit to building a railway from London to Birmingham, businesses will finance it even where the return takes the form of a positive externality rather than cash dividends.

So here's to Zoe Williams for inadvertently making the case for replacing much of what government does with voluntary, collective and collaborative action funded by the willing and benefiting everyone.

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Perhaps we should make higher rates of tax voluntary?

Yesterday evening I made – via the wondrous medium of Twitter – an observation about tax. It was simply that, if someone had a choice between two tax environments – high tax and low tax, then they’d opt for lower tax.

Of course, it’s not a simple as all that – living in the glorious South Pennines may indeed be sufficient of an incentive to pay higher taxes. The set of choices – ‘choice architecture’ I believe the boffins call it – do not exclude remaining in a place where there are higher taxes.

However, the real lessons in all this are firstly that there remain many people who at least claim to be fans of progressive taxation and argue that they’ll joyfully hand over most of their income to the benevolent state – it is as one remarked “the price we pay for living in a civilised society.”

And this is fine – if somebody believes that it’s a spiffing idea for the government to have 75% of his earnings that who am I to stop them handing over this cash to the government? But these enthusiasts for progressive taxation don’t do this do they? We know they don’t because almost nobody  makes such payments to the British government (and I’m prepared to bet that the same applies in France, Germany and the USA – indeed more or less everywhere).

Instead people who want to pay more taxes – for whatever reason – choose instead to clamour for higher taxes on “the rich”. What these people want is for everybody to pay more – including those like me who think the government takes way too much off us in taxes (certainly for the service we get in return).

If these progressive folk are so keen on paying more nothing is stopping them from doing so. And if such people believe that giving more is about securing “social benefit” then consider some alternatives:

• You want money to be spent on caring for people? Rather than give it to the government, how about paying the nursing home fee for an elderly neighbour or providing someone to clean her house, bath her and help get her shopping?
• Perhaps you want your money to go to housing the homeless? Here’s a suggestion, rather than giving it to the government how about paying the rent yourself or – here’s a thought – putting the homeless person up in your spare bedroom
• Maybe you want lots of lovely arts stuff from your taxes? Just an idea, pay the money to your local gallery, sponsor a struggling artist or cough up for music lessons at your local school.

I could go on but you get the point. What these progressives are saying to us selfish Neanderthals is that we should be made to pay more in taxes because they want to pay more taxes. And what we get is a load of chittering about ‘civilization’ and ‘fairness’ – as if this is of any real consequence.

We live in a society where morality is defined – for some people – as being a fan of government. A culture where our duty to look out for our neighbour is sub-contracted to some state official meaning that we don’t have to do anything. Indeed, that state official actively dissuades us from such activity since it does him out of a secure, tax-funded living.

I am not a worse person than you if I believe that government isn’t the solution to social problems. Indeed, as one reads through the history of government, we see that for much of its time that government acts in the interests of the governors rather than the governed. And those governors include the scribes, the bureaucrats and the administrators as well as the god emperors, kings, senators and prime ministers.

The point of the revolutions – if I might be a little bit Jacobin here – was to secure the end of this tyranny, to establish a world where the interests of the governed, as determined by the governed, were paramount. And, since those interests were not universal (my wants, needs and preferences are different from yours) such an establishment can only be achieved by granting sovereignty to the individual. And this means removing that sovereignty from those god emperors, kings, ministers and scribes.

There remains a role for collective action, for collaboration, cooperation and co-production. And this can be delivered through a ‘government’ (indeed is perhaps best organised in this manner). But this doesn’t give us the right to argue that we should remove money from Fred simply because there are 100 or us and only one Fred. Yet that is precisely the principle behind “progressive” taxation – not that it is more practical to take money in this way but that it is somehow more moral to do so.

It would be a delight if, rather than coercing higher rates of tax from people, we make those higher rates voluntary. We can then apply the arguments – “fairness”, “civilisation”, “social value” and so forth – to persuading people to sign up to that higher tax rate. And it would finally call out the “progressives” – put up or shut up we might say.  And – forgive me for my cynicism – I’d bet that a fair few of those currently heaping coals of fire on the heads of us sinners would be found wanting in the taxpaying stakes!

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