Shamelessly Cross-Posted From the OC.
Late to the party as always, I’d like to point out that University Economics Professor Bill Harbaugh has a new paper on paying taxes in Science a couple of weeks ago. First of all, congratulations to Professor Harbaugh on getting this interesting piece of research into a leading journal. Go Science! Secondly, I’d like to move on to my amateurish and maybe misplaced critique.
Unlike a lot of right-leaning folks, and especially unlike many libertarians, I’m open to the possibility that paying taxes does make people feel good in some way, some of the time. If you think of a nation-state as a really large tribe, and think a little about how important intra-tribal generosity can be in an evolutionary setting…well, maybe even compelled generosity can make people feel good. But, even if the conclusion is right, I don’t think it really has much implication for the proper relationship between man and the state: the proper role and function of government is unaffected by what makes people feel good. In fact, I would argue, that due to the extremely difficult problems we face when we try to aggregate preferences, and the strange behavior of voters, that we will never be able to achieve a satisfactory outcome for all or even most citizens in a given nation-state. Therefore, the philosophical position that a minimal state achieves the most freedom and allows individuals to pursue their own ends with minimal interference which allows the best outcomes given the constraints of the real-world, is still fairly compelling, I think. Furthermore, if voluntary giving and compelled giving stimulate the same area of the brain it seems that allowing people to keep their money and donate to charity as they see fit would achieve similar ends to forced giving through a state system. Additionally, perhaps paying taxes doesn’t offer the same kind of hedonistic reward as relevant alternatives, which would mean it isn’t the best choice in many instances. Science’s summary seems to say that much is true:
The sense of well-being in the voluntary giving condition surpassed that seen when subjects were taxed.
In any case, I have a few questions about the study in general:
1) As the ODE story points out, only 19 people were sampled for this study. That’s a pretty small sample to draw conclusions from, and it could be biased, so I wonder if this paper should really serve as a jumping-off point for larger sample studies in the future.
2) Is compelled donation to a local food bank really a good proxy for taxation? A local food bank is an easily identifiable good, and one that has fairly measurable effects that participants in the study can see or at least read about in the local paper. Taxation, on the other hand, helps and hinders a variety of activities by a variety of people at a fairly large remove from the taxpayer which could, I suppose, reduce the effect if people feel more tribe-like affinity for their city than they do for the country as a whole. So I’m not sure that a local food bank is exactly the right proxy for taxation as it is actually practiced. I wonder if a better proxy would be something like a rich compact of Hawaiians in Maui.
Maybe those two issues are addressed in the full paper, but I’m not made of money so I don’t have a subscription to Science and I can’t seem to find a working-paper version anyplace on Professor Harbaugh’s website. Anyway, it is a pretty interesting bit of research and I’d be interested to hear answers to the above.
