Uncharacteristic David Brooks Rebuttal

Unlike a lot of liberal bloggers (who are all many orders of magnitude more famous than I am), I don't often write posts responding to David Brooks columns. And I'm not going to respond to very much of his latest, but there is one line I'd like to address:

Liberals see it [tax policy] as a way to punish the greedy and redress the iniquities of capitalism. Conservatives see tax increases as an assault on the enterprising class perpetrated by arrogant central planners.

The latter half of that statement is true. Hell, the latter half of the former half of that statement is true. Liberals do, indeed, see the tax code as a tool to smooth income inequality. Because it is. Maybe it's not the best one, but it'll get the job done. But, uh, punish the greedy? That's really not the point. Yeah, it's about redistribution, but it's about redistribution because a thousand dollars each in the hands of a thousand poor people will create a lot more well-being than one-million dollars in the hands of one multi-millionaire banker. It's because we want to take care of the less fortunate, and the only way to do that is to ask the more fortunate to pay a numerically, though not philosophically or ethically, disproportionate share. Progressive taxation is a pretty direct way to get there.



This strikes me as a fairly typical conservative or moderate-conservative way of thinking. Right-wing thinking about public policy is largely phrased as slogans. Watch the Republican arguments at the debates and you'll notice that their arguments tend not to be terribly consequentialist. It's largely policy by slogan, a kind of deontological ethics. Inflation is bad because it weakens the dollar, and the dollar is a symbol of America, and weak dollar = weak country. No discussion of the actual consequences of inflation. When you get an argument phrased in terms of consequences, "Obama's job-killing policies are destroying the economy," which is, to be fair, about the alleged consequences of Obama's policies, there is literally no attempt to make a connection between the action and the consequences. The line of thinking is, roughly, Obama's policies are socialist (because we say so!), socialism is evil (because we define it to be!), therefore Obama's policies are evil. This probably isn't true of every argument a conservative ever makes, or even every argument at a Republican debate, but I think it's a lot more true that it, perhaps, should be.

I really don't think Democrats do this. I think if you watch a Democratic debate, you'll find that policy debates are almost entirely about the consequences. (I may have been discussing consequentialism in my philosophy class today...) But moderate conservatives, who have invented this notion that the two parties are always equally far from a reasonable truth, and hard-core conservatives, who exploit that sentiment to get away with crazier and crazier ideas, love to project a pathology of conservative thinking onto liberal thinking. This specific one, that conservatives have a philosophical commitment to small government and low, flat tax rates while liberals have a philosophical commitment to big government and high, progressive tax rates, is a favorite. But it's entirely wrong. Liberals get that in an ideal world you wouldn't have taxes, and you probably wouldn't even have government. But we acknowledge that the world isn't and can never be ideal in that way, and that to make the world as good a place as we can we need to have a strong, activist government committed to doing good. (And we can make arguments for that claim!) Given this, and the need of that government for money, we believe that the best way to get that money is in a way that ameliorates economic inequality and has the least adverse impact on well-being, and that progressive taxation is that way. (And we can make arguments for that claim, too!) A liberal desire for a relatively large government financed by relatively high, relatively progressive tax rates is not one of the fundamental values of liberalism. Rather, it is a specific policy preference that follows from the basic liberal values. The flow from those values to these policies is largely an empirical one: we believe that these policies are the best ways to fulfill these values. But the taxing and spending is not the end per se. The end is what we're spending on. Taxing and spending is the means. For a conservative, not taxing much and not spending much is the end. That's very different.