Taxes (the individual and society)

The first thing I thought of when my brain was set to the task of considering taxes in fiction was Robin Hood. One of my discussants remarked that people often set taxes in feudalism because it's easy. Setting taxes in a scenario that isn't like feudalism is much more complex, because you have to consider the interplay of factions of people trying to get their needs met.

When you live in a society, there are things that the individual can't pay for, but which the group can pay for - things like roads, police, fire departments, schools, the mail. The basic idea of taxes is that the individual pays into a pool which covers everything society needs. The much trickier question is, how do you decide what society needs?

Kate remarked that sewers didn't come along until quite late in history. Mohenjo Daro didn't have roads (the link suggests it had a "street plan", so perhaps this is a question of how roads are defined by usage). Do your research on history, because things that you take for granted in society didn't always evolve when you thought they did.

What kind of history does your world have?

The tragedy of the commons is when people neglect those resources that they don't have individual responsibility for; taxes are meant to combat that. We asked what a society would look like if people are expected to take care of their own stuff, and how that would be enforced. Che asked what payment would be expected in such a system. Money? Grain? A year's indenture of one's oldest son?

We discussed money, and what has value, for a few minutes. Money is essentially a generalized social agreement on a symbol of value, whether that be rice or shells or gold or silver, etc. Even when money is present, a lot of labor is not given monetary value, such as women's labor in our society. What if you had a society based on mutual non-monetary obligation? What would be the service provided? Not babysitting! Perhaps teaching the young in the home. A lot would depend on what skills you had to offer, and hopefully what you desired to do would be taken to account. Money eliminates these tricky calculations by creating a way to compute value that is generally agreed upon and makes vastly different services interchangeable. It also lends itself to larger-scale complexity.

The Romans did a lot of standardization. Amphorae came in two sizes and prices were set based on those quantities. In Babylonian times there were standardized weights and measures that were used for tax purposes.

Churches also can collect money in the form of tithes. In some communities, this would be like pooling resources for education, since the church provides a lot of that service.

Brian mentioned that in Germany, they have a church tax - a tax paid by the citizens to the government to support the operations of the church. Originally this was passed over from the main tax pool, but then it got itemized and people started asking not to pay it. So many people stopped paying the church tax that churches started saying that non-payers weren't welcome at mass.

Do all members of a society contribute to a tax pool? How do you classify membership in a society? How much are you obligated to support society? Who are the citizens? Are servants or slaves counted as citizens at all, or are they partial citizens? Is anyone failing to uphold the society? Is anyone deliberately trying to break down part of the society?

How do you decide who is a "productive" member of society? Children don't pay taxes... until they become productive. But what about the disabled? Are they fully included, or are they ostracized because they are not expected to become productive society members? These questions can become very complex and difficult, because things are rarely black and white.

Sometimes you hear people say that they don't want to pay taxes for schools that their children do not attend. The counterargument to this is that having an educated population helps everyone. Some people don't care to treat this as a benefit.

There are occasions when society benefits but individuals don't. Wanting a la carte benefits is a very American phenomenon.

Taxing an individual's income is a relatively new idea. It first started after the Napoleonic wars.

Creating taxes on things can have odd effects as people try to reduce their tax burden. If you tax windows, people may brick up their windows. If you have a bedroom tax, people may try to put fewer bedrooms in their homes. If you have a tax based on street frontage, you end up with lots of long skinny buildings.

People have always liked to use loopholes to avoid being taxed. When you put taxes on trade, that's how you get smugglers. If you allow people to write off charitable donations, then you get people who will bend over backwards to create something that appears charitable. Brian told us about someone who wrote a book about how great he was, had it printed, and then "donated" it to libraries, which allowed him to write off millions of dollars in taxes. One of the odd characteristics of the American tax system is that it differentiates between income from work and income from investment (aren't they both income?).

Whenever you have taxes, you have to have tax collectors. You also end up with Treasury agents, the people whose job it is to find the tax cheaters. Tax collectors appear in fiction, but they are usually portrayed as evil. (A Taxing Woman, the film by Juzo Itami, is one counterexample.)

Remember that tax avoidance is legal, while tax evasion is illegal. Al Capone got arrested for tax evasion.

Do people threaten to kill tax collectors?

We talked for a bit about the history of the US Marshals. They were outlaw hunters, but they were also slave hunters. They were strike-breakers, and had jurisdiction across state lines.

We talked very briefly about Universal Basic Income. That would have to rely on taxes, but it would also benefit every member of society in ways that would make it harder for employers to abuse them. Here's a link about Finland's recent UBI experiment.

Kate asked what it would be like if motherhood were a paid job, maybe paid by taxes. Would that lead to standards, and state minimums for nutrition, education, etc.?

On some level, as you are creating a society you have to ask how much of the value of the individual's labor goes back to the society. The name we give to the type of society depends on the answer to that question. If all of it goes back to society, that's communism. If none of it goes back that (I guess) would be libertarianism. When you're somewhere in between, you can learn a lot by considering how the balance is enforced and where it can be influenced.

Thank you to everyone who attended. Tomorrow's hangout will meet at 10am Pacific, and we're going to talk about Translation, Translators, and Interpreters. Join us!

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