Corruption and Hypocrisy

The Republicans and Democrats and their respective friends in the media are now engaged in a great debate over who between them is more corrupt, and each party makes an amusingly good case. However, the really amusing thing is the absurdity and hypocrisy of the politicians’ claimed expectations that things in Washington should be other than corrupt.

Look at the actual activity of the Congress. Each year they are sitting on a pile of about two trillion dollars that the IRS has taken from its rightful owners, and they get to decide who gets it. They divide it up. That fact that there is often corruption in such a process is not remarkable. The wonder – and one of the triumphs of our liberal, democratic, republican form of government – is that they are not murdering each other in the streets over it.

It is a crucial and valid insight of the libertarians that the financing of government is always and everywhere an essentially criminal activity. Whether by outright seizure and expropriation or by the extortion under threat that is taxation, governments get their money by stealing it.

(To see this, consider a simple example that libertarians often use. A couple have a shop in a city and own a small building. In addition to their normal overhead, each year they have to make two large involuntary payment of one thousand dollars each. The first payment goes to a person called a gangster and is for what is called protection. They give the gangster a thousand dollars each year so that their shop is not vandalized or burned down. The second is to a person called a tax collector. They give the tax collector a thousand dollars each year so that their shop is not seized for back taxes and sold at auction. While the actions of the gangster are illegal, and the actions of the tax collector are legal, and while the money taken by the tax collector may be used for better purposes than the money taken by the gangster, both acts are extortion. It seems impossible to deny this without destroying the meaning of the word or resorting to a legal positivism that asserts that the right and the legal are coextensive and even equivalent. )

This does not mean, as the anarchists claim, that there should be no government or that we shouldn’t pay our taxes. The traditionally used term is apt and correct. Government is a necessary evil. It must be vigilantly watched and carefully limited to prevent tyranny. But in the world as it is, our government is essential for freedom, prosperity and a civil society.

However, the fact of taxation as extortion does mean that we should be careful of what we allow the government to take and suspicious of politicians who always want to take more. It also means we should ask of each government program whether it is worth robbing our neighbors for. And it certainly means that, given the current size and scope of our government, we should have the grace and good sense not be surprised when we learn that corruption creeps into the division of the spoils.