“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
~ Winston Churchill
Every two years, I’m forced to state clearly my civic preference for participating in this American Experiment.
The question usually carries more weight than the answer deserves. By choosing not to vote, I’m not protesting the Republic or democracy. I don’t think people who vote are fools, nor do I regard abstention as an act of political heroism. Least of all a “protest.”
Occasionally, I will encourage the right sensible person not to vote either.
If you believe a candidate will govern better than another one, by all means pull the lever. Voting is useful if only for “throwing the bastards out.” That strikes me as a perfectly defensible use of an afternoon.
My own reluctance comes from somewhere between Thomas Paine and O’Rourke, although considerably closer to O’Rourke.
Paine begins Common Sense with the proposition that society and government are not the same thing. People create society because they need one another. They create government because they occasionally behave badly toward one another. Government, even at its best, therefore begins as a remedy for a human defect rather than the source of human flourishing.
Taxes are the price we pay for failing to create and maintain, let alone live in, a civilized society.
Paine possessed the great advantage of living before his revolution disappointed him. He could imagine Americans throwing off monarchy and constructing a republican government that would preserve liberty without acquiring all the appetites of the government they had just rejected.
Two hundred and thirty-four years later, O’Rourke had seen enough appropriations bills to be less optimistic.
O’Rourke’s political writing starts from the same American suspicion of authority but replaces Paine’s revolutionary faith with experience. Politicians are neither philosopher-kings nor uniquely wicked creatures. They are people responding to incentives, operating an institution whose principal raw materials are other people’s money and the legal power to tell them what to do.
The part of American history that makes this more than a joke dates back more than a century. The writer and social critic Frank Chodorov rightly labeled it the “Revolution of 1913.”
He was writing specifically about the Sixteenth Amendment, which gave Congress constitutional authority to tax incomes without apportioning the levy among the states. The first peacetime income tax applied to very few Americans and began at rates that would look almost quaint today. Less than 1% of the population initially paid the tax, at a normal rate of 1%.
Compare that with the 1 to 2% paid by colonists before they threw off the yoke of monarchy… or the vapid ~24% modern citizens pay. And for what?
Chodorov’s objection was not principally the rate. It was the relationship.
Before the income tax, Washington depended primarily on tariffs and excise taxes. A government that could reach directly into personal income possessed a source of revenue that expanded with its citizens’ productive activity.
Chodorov believed that changed the practical balance between the individual and the federal government because Washington could now finance ambitions that previously would have collided with an empty Treasury.
The federal income tax did not originate with World War I. The Civil War income tax had been a temporary wartime measure, and Congress eventually allowed it to expire in 1872.
The Sixteenth Amendment gave Washington a new way to collect your money. More than 100 years later, Uncle Sam hasn’t exactly forgotten how to use it. (Source: Shutterstock)
But once the Sixteenth Amendment created permanent taxing authority in 1913, the European war provided Congress with reason to expand it dramatically. Federal internal revenues rose 956% between 1916 and 1920.
By the end of Woodrow Wilson’s administration, the top combined income and surtax rate had reached 77%.
Two other constitutional and financial changes arrived that same year.
The Seventeenth Amendment transferred selection of U.S. senators from state legislatures to direct popular election. The change grew out of genuine problems—deadlocked legislatures, vacant seats, political machines and charges that the Senate had become a “millionaires’ club.” But the original arrangement had also given state governments direct institutional representation inside Washington.
After 1913, senators answered to statewide electorates rather than the legislatures of the states they represented. They became all but permanent citizens of Washington and spokespersons for the Federal government.
Then, two days before Christmas, Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act.
Congress created a central bank after repeated financial panics, particularly the Panic of 1907, had demonstrated the weaknesses of relying on private financiers such as J.P. Morgan to provide emergency liquidity. The new system gave the country an institution capable of expanding currency and credit in ways the old banking structure could not.
You don’t need to subscribe to the conspiratorial version of 1913. It’s irrelevant whether a secret cabal had to gather in a smoke-filled room on the exclusive and remote Jekyll Island and plot the destruction of the republic. The result has been the same – an endless supply of the nation’s money, printed at will.
Each reform had advocates with intelligible reasons. The income tax promised an alternative to tariffs. Direct election promised to attack corruption. The Federal Reserve promised a more stable banking system.
The more interesting question is what happened after all three existed at once.
Washington acquired a much larger claim on national income, senators became less institutionally dependent on state governments, and the country acquired a central bank capable of supporting a vastly larger financial system.
Within a few years, the United States entered a European war, raised an army of millions, borrowed extraordinary sums and increased tax rates that would have been politically unimaginable when the original income tax passed.
None of those institutions “caused” World War I, the New Deal, the welfare state, the warfare state or the enormous federal government we live with today. People caused those things by making political choices over the following century.
The machinery simply made the slow march of progressive ideals possible.
Chodorov’s point was that government ambition is organically constrained by what government can finance. Once politicians gained reliable access to national income, the practical ceiling moved upward. He later traced federal grants to states, expanding programs and permanent “emergency” measures to the revenue power created in 1913.
Two major financial institutions arrived in 1913. One has been collecting your money ever since. The other has been helping determine what that money is worth. (Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis)
His language was deliberately incendiary, but his institutional question remains worth asking: how much could Washington promise if Washington could not collect the money? Or print it?
“When a new source of taxation is found it never means,” H. L. Mencken observed at roughly the same time as Chodorov, “that an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before.”
Which brings us back to the voluntary act of voting.
Paine believed ordinary people could strip government of inherited authority and govern themselves. His attack on monarchy remains historically exhilarating because he refuses to accept the proposition that one person acquires a natural right to rule another merely by emerging from the proper womb.
O’Rourke inherited the republic Paine helped imagine and found himself surrounded by politicians offering voters Medicare benefits, farm subsidies, mortgage deductions, defense contracts, student loans, tax credits and several thousand pages of appropriations in exchange for their continued affection.
His joke about voting “encouraging the bastards” is not only catchy and accurate. It’s funny. And true.
Modern elections invite us to participate in an auction conducted largely with money taken from the bidders. Again, here’s Mencken: “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”
One candidate promises a single set of benefits. Another promises another. Each assures us that somebody else will bear the cost. The contest encourages us to think of citizenship as choosing which people in Washington should use government power to advance our preferred interests.
Why not ask less of them?
Our approach to elections is nothing like political apathy. As a citizen, you ignore politics at your peril. Once they’ve gained office and believe they have been handed a public mandate, politicians of every moral suasion control your taxes, your money, your property rights, whether you are at war or choose to abstain.
Increasingly, especially since the financial crisis of 2008, the nabobs inside the beltway, appointed to one commission or another, control the financial markets in which we make our living.
Observing political power and endorsing its exercise are 100% diametrically opposed activities.
My instinct is still recognizably Paine’s: nobody acquires a moral claim over another person merely by winning an election. My expectation is closer to O’Rourke’s: give politicians enough money and authority, and they will find something to do with both.
“Ever since Jefferson’s day,” we quote Mencken a third time, “the American people have been bolstering up its powers and giving it more and more jurisdiction over their affairs. They pay for that folly in increased taxes and diminished liberties.”
So I don’t vote.
I pay attention.
The latter is preferable. Washington has never suffered from a shortage of encouragement.
~ Addison
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