Commentary
The shopping mall, or the common good?
by Gordon C. StewartInteresting how some words raise our blood pressure. The word "tax," for instance.
I heard it on a recent edition of Midmorning. A group of wealthy Americans have signed a petition called Wealth for the Common Good. They actually want their tax rate to be raised. A caller to the program was getting hotter by the minute. She was in a master's program and hoped to get above the line of $250,000 in annual income, and wondered why she should be "penalized" once she makes it there: "If I want to give some of my money away, that should be my choice. But I shouldn't be penalized by the government."
What views of the self and of society lie beneath the difference between the wealthy Americans who want to pay more taxes and the caller whose blood pressure was going through the roof because the government was going to penalize her with taxes?
The caller displays a self-understanding shaped by a consumer economy in which the self is an independent operator. The world is a shopping mall where I choose the stores to enter, which aisles to browse and what to buy. The world is there for me. Government is "them" -- the enemy of the mall. It penalizes shoppers, takes away my choices and trespasses on my property. It is the enemy of freedom.
The wealthy petitioners -- mostly from the post-World War II generation -- tend to have a different view. They see themselves as "citizens" who, as citizens, bear responsibility for the common good. Many of them describe themselves as "stewards" rather than owners of their wealth. The wealth they have earned or inherited came from the society itself, and they feel obliged to pay their fair share of their nation's tax burden.
The America in which this older generation finds itself is strange to them. They wonder how a world of citizens became the world of the independent shopper. How a world in which a citizen was a brother's or sister's keeper became a world of greed. How, from Wall Street to Main Street, the common bonds and the common good became so shredded that we would see "taxes" as a penalty.
Our blood pressure should rise over the demagoguery that has turned greed into virtue, taxes into penalties, and the common good into a series of fenced yards whose "owners" dare anyone to trespass.
Taxes are the way a citizen contributes to the common life: sewers, streets, highways, utilities, street lights, clean water, breathable air, safety in the workplace, first responders and peace officers, national defense and security, Social Security, Medicare, airports and public transportation systems, not to speak of an educational system upon whose success depends the nation's future economic health.
The Wealth for the Common Good petitioners scratch their heads at how we came to see government and taxation as the enemies of freedom, instead of, as Lincoln put it, "the great task" of "a new birth of freedom."
On behalf of that task, it's time to take back words like "contributor," "citizen," "we," "responsibility," "government" and "common good." Not to mention "taxes."
Gordon C. Stewart is pastor of Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, and a frequent guest commentator on All Things Considered.
Comments (5)
Thank you! It's nice to be reminded that we are all in this together. I especially appreciate the examples of how our daily life is made possible by public enterprise.
Those wealthy petitioners are welcome to contribute more if they so choose. Nobody's stopping them. It seems to me that they are petitioning not because they want to pay more but because they want to make others pay more.
To say, or suggest, that a person is selfish and immature for believing that they own themselves, and what they create from themselves, is a backwards view. Our rights and our wealth are not something first belonging to the government (or the public) and then allowed to us. It works the other way.
The caller's belief that her property is hers to be disposed of according to her choosing is not born out of a "consumer economy"; it is born out of dignity and self-respect. It is not a modern view; it has deep roots.
Consider that the human individual is sacred and that persons thrive in community and relationships. Putting a soulless creation such as the government between people is destructive to these bonds. People voluntarily helping others cultivates gratitude, humility, and a desire to help others on the part of the recipient and a sense of virtue on the part of the benefactor. Attempting to force this act via the State creates a sense of entitlement and personal impotence in the recipient and a sense of bitterness and personal impotence on those who are being taken from.
Voluntarism brings people closer. Force and coercion destroys the human.
I will tell you what will give a person a sense of personal importence, and if I let it, bitterness, is finding myself who loves giving to others, in a predicament of living in a country where a medical emergency can cost me everything I have ever worked for. We live in the only industrialized country where that it a possibility.
Yes, Nick, and yes, Stewart, we are in this together, but don't we understand that the means do not justify the ends? I think I remember Obama saying that on the campaign trial. Indeed, it is great to give to others, and most do based on their choice, but to enforce such policy is immoral .
Perhaps this new generations understands this because like technogical evolution, we also experience moral evolution, and today's generation are perceptive enough to scoff at the antiquated belief that to take without consent is not okay.
To think you have the right to tell others what to give is putting yourself on an improper plain. That force is needed speaks to the moral merits of your cause. Our goal should be to limit this force as much as possible--not to embrace it and cloak it as "community".
Without belaboring the size of the current tax burden or the efficacy of government expeditures the good pastor seems to conflate compassion with coercion. While Christ admonishes us to love our neighbor which is what compassion is; it is indeed an individual responsiblity which cannot be executed by the state. The state on the other hand with its monopoly on the use of force can only compel, there is no virtue in coercion.
However, if we've given up on a theistic worldview which holds the individual as created by God in His image and therefore valuable in his own right. If instead we favor a statist world view which values individuals only as they relate as an assett to the state, then the pastor is right on.
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