Today’s edition of the Kansas Jackass blog has a post written by Jason Croucher that criticizes Americans For Prosperity because the group doesn’t like taxes.
That’s not quite accurate, as Croucher himself says he doesn’t like paying taxes. Instead, the post seems to argue that we have to pay taxes because they’re there, and we don’t know whether they’re too high, and anyway, we can’t identify and agree on what is waste, so let’s just pay. Something like this, anyway. But there are a few problems with this post that deserve discussion.
He likens paying his cable television bill to paying taxes. This analogy is false on several levels.
First, subscribing to cable television is a voluntary act. A company offers a service, a person decides to buy, and therefore becomes a customer. The customer — and the company, too — can decide to sever the relationship whenever and for whatever reason the parties have agreed to.
That’s not the way taxes work. There’s nothing voluntary about the relationship between state and taxpayer.
Then he says that he doesn’t know whether his cable bill and taxes are too high — his emotions make him feel like they are — and how there’s no rational reason for thinking they should or could cost less.
As it turns out, there is a rational reason why a cable bill is what it is: competition provided through markets. It hasn’t been this way until recently, but now you can get television service in several ways besides free over-the-air broadcasts: cable TV, satellite TV, and in many areas, TV provided by the telephone company. These three service providers compete with each other on the basis of price and service. (This doesn’t include services like hulu that show television programs over the Internet.)
For most of the things that government does and taxes us to pay for, government is the sole source. Even for areas where there are alternatives, such as private schools, many people can’t afford to pay their taxes and private school tuition at the same time, so government is almost like the sole source. And even if a family decides not to use the government schools, they still have to pay the same taxes just as through they used them. Companies operating in markets can’t compel their customers to do that.
Furthermore, competition provides a built-in incentive to control waste, something that Croucher seems to think is desirable to control in government, if we could come to agreement as to the definition of waste.
In private industry, the profit and loss system provides a powerful incentive to control waste. At the minimum, being efficient while satisfying customer needs leads to greater profits. Its strongest incentive, however, is survival: those firms that are wasteful die.
What happens to wasteful government programs? President Obama campaigned on ending wasteful earmarks, but signed a bill containing 8,500 such earmarks. He did say this is the “end to the old way of doing business,” but I don’t think anyone believes him. Or ask George Will about the mohair subsidy.
The automatic pruning of inefficient or wasteful companies through markets and the profit and loss system saves consumers from having to do with a grocery store what Croucher wants us to do with Kansas government: come up with a list of “waste.”
So government, as we see, is largely immune from the pressures of a marketplace. So Croucher is correct on one respect: we don’t know what our taxes should be.
But we can be positive that they’re too high.
PDF Related posts:
- Taxes in Kansas at an All-Time High
- Some Kansas House Members voted for spending, but not the taxes
- AFP-Kansas launches website about tobacco taxes
- Kansas taxes have impact
- Steineger responds to critics. They’re not persuaded.
- Kansas blogger prone to exaggeration
- Kansas Fed-Up with High Taxes
- Kansas Taxes Outpace Inflation
- Just Say It: We Need to Raise Taxes in Kansas
- Research on state taxes: Kansas should cut
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
It seems to never cross their minds that the government is a monopoly, that by nature, tries to control all it touches. Not to mention that it steals our money by aggressive means. How much is enough in taxes? As much as I, as an individual, want to pay, period. Pretty simple.
If you steal the product of my labor, you make me a slave…how anyone could be okay with that baffles the mind.
Kansas jackasses don’t seem to understand that having only one source for everything in life — the government — means they’ll no longer have any right to choose. They spend a lot of time claiming they need more rights and the right to choose, yet they want the government monopoly to have control over all those “rights.” How does that make any sense?
Are they just logically impaired?
Very logical points Bob.
The folks at jackass are just plain stupid.
It’s not that AFP dislikes taxes it’s that they know that increased tax burdens harm the economy.
The bottom line is that the private sector will spend the money in a more effecient and effective way than the public sector. PERIOD.
Where are the possible solutions in the comments above? As long as we keep electing the same ilk, or just nodding our heads and going along with the increases, it won’t end. Some of the Fed’s mistakenly didn’t pay some of their taxes, are they in jail, have they paid up, do we know or is it already under the rug? I’ll bet there’s dust under the rug @ state level too. And does anybody know what the new USD 259 supt is going to be paid – the last one was supremely overpaid. Come up with some ideas. I came from a small town where there was a volunteer fire department, and it managed to put out fires.
The Kansas Jackass is an intellectual jackass. He probably has tenure at a state institution.
Kansas has high taxes and high tax rates when compared with most of our neighboring states. Look at the Tax Foundation’s data that is often quoted by taxpayer friendly groups like Americans for Prosperity or Kansas Taxpayers Network.
Jackasses everywhere seem to think that our prosperity can be turned off and on like a light switch. History has shown that creating a system where prosperity can develop requires a number of key conditions: a rule of law; limited government; a system of property rights which includes intellectual property (patents, copyrights, etc.) and limits on taxes. Where government is unlimited the prospects for economic growth as well as freedom are dim.
This reality can be ignored (just read history) but this reality cannot be denied.