You Are the Rich Person in This Argument

For roughly six thousand years of recorded civilization, nobody paid an income tax. Not once. Governments rose, fell, built roads, fought wars, and raised armies, all without touching a percentage of anyone’s paycheck. The idea that a government reaching into your income before you ever see it is normal, permanent, and obviously necessary is one of the youngest ideas in human history. The United States adopted its first income tax in 1861 to help fund the Civil War, repealed it a decade later, tried again in 1894, watched the Supreme Court strike that version down in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust the following year, and only made it permanent with the 16th Amendment in 1913. That’s roughly a hundred and fifty years old. Measured against the whole of civilization, the income tax is a teenager pretending to be an ancient institution.

I bring this up not because “it’s new” makes it wrong. Plenty of good ideas are new. I bring it up because the people who treat progressive taxation as self-evidently correct rarely seem to know how recent, how contested, and how narrowly it survived the process that created it. Confidence should track knowledge. Here, it usually doesn’t. I made a version of this case back in May, that not all opinions are created equal, and that the size of someone’s certainty ought to bear some relationship to the size of their homework. This is a good test case.

So let me state the honest version of the other side before I take it apart, because the sloppy version isn’t worth answering. The real argument for progressive taxation isn’t “the rich are bad.” Any adult should be embarrassed to argue that. It’s an argument about diminishing marginal utility: a dollar taken from someone earning forty thousand dollars a year costs them more, in real human terms, than a dollar taken from someone earning four million. It’s also an argument about public goods: roads, courts, national defense, and basic research benefit everyone, including people who’d never fund them voluntarily at an efficient level, so a mandatory system solves a free-rider problem a voluntary one structurally can’t. Those are real arguments, made by serious people, and they deserve a serious answer instead of an eye roll.

Here’s the answer: they don’t establish what people think they establish.

Start with diminishing marginal utility. If it’s true that a dollar means less to someone who has more of them, that’s just as true of the person making the argument as it is of the billionaire they’re pointing at. Whatever you currently pay in income tax, there is a family living on two dollars a day for whom your marginal dollar means dramatically more than it means to you. If “it costs them less” is sufficient reason to take money from someone, it’s sufficient reason to take it from you too, on that family’s behalf. Almost nobody who uses this argument means it that expansively. They mean it about people richer than themselves. That’s not a principle. That’s a preference wearing a principle’s clothes.

The word “rich” is doing a lot of quiet work in these conversations, and it always seems to point at someone else. Check the global income distribution sometime. Clear something in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars a year, and you’re comfortably in the top few percent of every human being who has ever lived. “Tax the rich,” said by someone in that position and aimed at someone with a few more zeroes, is the identical move to a person earning a hundred and fifty thousand saying it about someone earning eighty. The logic doesn’t stop where it becomes inconvenient. It just usually gets applied selectively by people who never noticed they were doing it.

The public-goods argument is stronger, and I’ll give it that much credit. National defense and enforceable contract law probably are hard to fund voluntarily at scale, and I’m not going to pretend a fully privatized version of every government function is a settled case. There are serious people, David Friedman most notably, who’ve tried to make that case at book length. If you want the strongest version of that argument, read him, not me. But somewhere between “the government should exist” and “the government should take a third of your income and run the post office, the schools, the retirement system, and half of healthcare,” a lot of ground gets covered that the public-goods argument was never built to defend. Most of what actually gets taxed and spent isn’t a genuine free-rider problem. It’s just easier to run something on money you don’t have to ask for.

Which is where the real argument actually lives, and it’s simpler than the tax-policy debate: I don’t object to helping people who have less than I do. I already do, and I’d do more of it, the same way I’ve made the case that real leadership looks less like giving orders and more like showing up quietly and doing the work without needing the credit. What I object to is being told that caring about other people requires a government to take the decision out of my hands and make it for me, under threat, with no opt-out.

If you believe the wealthy should give more, you already know at least one wealthy person by any honest global standard. It’s you. Start there. Lead by example instead of waiting for someone with more zeroes to go first. That was always the more interesting argument anyway.