We frequently hear about how each of us should pay or receive ‘our fair share’ of taxes. Whether that’s the state Department of Labor claiming to ‘ensure the NH businesses pay their fair share’, or the federal Census Bureau arguing that it ‘helps each community get its fair share’ of tax funds, or some other example of lobbying of the government, by the government, for the government, we see this phrase again and again.
But I think it’s time to add an ‘s’ to it, and start talking about ‘our fair shares’ instead of ‘our fair share’.
Imagine that Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice own shares in a company. Bob and Carol each own 10 shares, Ted owns 1000 shares, and Alice owns 10,000 shares.
When it’s time for the company to make a decision about allocating resources, should they get an equal say in the matter? Should Bob’s vote have the same weight as Alice’s? That would be insane, wouldn’t it?
They don’t just vote. They vote the shares that they own. To put that differently, they vote their fair shares.
The idea of ‘one man, one vote’ makes sense when the primary focus of government is the protection of individual rights (the theory put forth in the Declaration of Independence). After all, everyone has the same rights, so it makes sense that everyone should have the same amount of influence.
But when the primary focus of government changes from protecting rights to redistributing property, it changes the fundamental nature of the enterprise to something that is much more like a corporation than a mutual defense association. In that case, the idea of ‘one man, one vote’ makes no more sense for government than it does for a company.
In the case of a corporation, the measure of how much you’re contributing — and how much influence you get — is the number of shares that you’ve committed to owning. You buy more shares, you take on more risk, you get more say.
There are no ‘shares’ in government, but there are shares in redistributive government programs. A straightforward way to measure them is to count the tax dollars that a person is forced to commit to paying for that program.
Imagine that Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice live in a town that is voting on a budget for its school district. Bob and Carol are renters, who pay no school taxes. Ted owns a home on which he pays $2000 in school taxes. Alice owns a home and two rental properties, on which she pays a total of $12,000 in school taxes. She also owns half of a business that pays $18,000 in taxes that are ultimately used for schools.
Should Bob’s vote have the same weight as Alice’s? That would be insane, wouldn’t it?
If we’re going to run government like a corporation — generating ‘revenue’ through taxes in order to provide ‘goods’ and ‘services’ — then we should vote like a corporation:
Whenever money is to be collected for any redistributive program (whether it’s public schools, or heating oil assistance, or food stamps, or any other kind of welfare), it should be voted on, not by the legislature, but by the people directly, in a referendum; and each person should get to vote a number of shares equal to the number of dollars that he would have to contribute to the program — including dollars that would be contributed indirectly through taxes on businesses that he owns all or part of.
We might call this the Fair Shares Act. It just acknowledges that each person’s ‘fair share’ of the voting should be equal to his ‘fair shares’ of the cost.
Anything other than that is just… unfair.
