OPINION
Have you noticed how the people who claim to love the poor often end up sounding like nobles trying to control the peasants?
These marvellous and generous benefactors loudly claim there should be no tax cuts whatsoever, at any time, regardless of how legitimate the reason may be. The moment a welfare programme comes into force it is considered Year Zero. Before the programme = barbarism. After the welfare programme = not far enough!
Just when the peasants feel they are fully cared for, the nobles always find another grievance to solve with other people’s money. Or at least, that’s what they say altruism is. I don’t know. I didn’t read the Communist Manifesto; seventy pages is a tad too long for me.
Here’s a good example of the type of noblesse oblige that passes for altruism in 2023. The author of this tweet is the Kiwi technology advocate Justin Flitter, whom I know relatively well enough to also know that he knows better than to say inane stuff like this:
New Zealand is grinding to a halt as people who voted for tiny tax cuts finally realise all the good things those taxes were paying for.
It’s obviously a reference to National’s planned spending haircuts. Flitter seems to subscribe to the boring, predictable idea that the government is “responsible” for people’s well-being. Not his, of course. Other people need help, but he’s fine.
This attitude is not altruistic, it is feudal. Specifically, the structure he is advocating is that between client and patron. Patronage is the most ancient and powerful bond of political organisation. It is the simplest social contract and, like slavery, you can change its form, but you can never get rid of patronage. It’s too useful.
The patron/client relationship is always based on the fact that one side (the client) makes bad decisions which requires someone who makes good decisions (the patron) to bail them out. In return for the patron’s protection, money or assistance, the client binds themselves to the patron and becomes in some ways part of the patron’s extended family.
Patronage is the default model of communist government, particularly in New Zealand. For example, investing in teacher’s unions ensures loyalty to the government, not just from one generation of teachers, but from most students who will pass through the public education system itself. It’s hard to beat a closed-loop system of patronage like this, especially when it pays for its clients with your money.
In the ancient world, the family home had a hearth, inside of which burned a fire. If that fire went out, it symbolised the end of the family line. No one except the family was allowed near that hearth. A stranger was always a stranger unless he became a client. That didn’t make the client equal to the family, but it did come with certain perks.
But no matter what happened, neither side of this triangular relationship ever forgot the fundamental reality that somewhere along the line, the client had screwed up and could no longer protect themselves. Hence the need for a patron.
Let me put this in a context you might understand: migrants are the screw-ups of their home countries who can leave. If you’re having trouble with this, just ask if it makes sense that someone who was important in their home country would ever leave. Ouch! I know, the truth hurts.
Similarly, if someone needs (not wants) assistance from the government, then that person is a screw-up who can’t leave their home country. Again, ask yourself how many moral, confident people you know who ask for handouts. Such people wouldn’t be caught dead with a welfare cheque. They know how to make good decisions and tend to become patrons themselves.
On the other hand, people who don’t know how to make good decisions make great clients. And the government is incentivised to create as many dependants as possible. Things work out better for it with this strategy (in the short term, as the Greeks found out).
Transgender ideology is many things but most importantly it is a patronage network. It is a jobs programme that provides billions of dollars to medical professionals, pharmaceutical companies, mental health advisors, activists, educators, journalists and more. It’s an industrial ideological revolution that requires just as much infrastructure as the railroads of old. It creates a government-sponsored boom cycle at every level.
The civil rights era was the Golden Age of patronage. The constant churn for the next rights issue generated enormous power for the communists but also massive revenue. Each time a new client group is discovered (or manufactured) the existing social infrastructure must be modified, retooled and expanded. New books, new educational materials, new media. All of which require new taxes.
Maybe Flitter knows all this, but in case he doesn’t, here’s a perfect description of the system he is causing to exist: only immoral people become clients. Said the other, more terrifying way: governments want a population that makes bad decisions. What kind of society does this create? Look outside, see for yourself.
Patronage, like slavery, is a permanent feature of any human society. But it’s never been at this scale before. So, what you should keep an eye on is when guys like Flitter use words that obfuscate what’s going on. Things like “welfare” or “altruism” aren’t analogies. Analogies are for being precise; these are euphemisms which are meant to deceive.
Euphemisms lead to perverse incentives. Flitter’s position of never reducing the size of the tax burden, no matter what, ultimately encourages immoral behaviour from precisely the kind of people you don’t want to be acting immorally, i.e. the productive.
It blows my mind that some of my fellow citizens still think it’s a good idea to steal the private property of productive citizens and launder it through the government just to pay for their own access to medical care. It’s astoundingly selfish if you think about it. That some people can’t afford certain things is certainly a legitimate grievance, but don’t insult everyone’s intelligence by presenting the issue as one of altruism.
Here’s the fallacy. I’m not depriving someone of healthcare by refusing to pay more in taxes any more than you are depriving starving people of food by using your money how you like. The two are not related. Do you own an iPhone? Well, you could feed someone for a month merely with the premium you paid for that phone over competing brands. Did you starve someone because you wanted to buy Apple? No, of course not.
It’s not “altruism” to steal from the productive to create a client class. New Zealand spends more per capita on education than almost any other major country. Perhaps we should demand more from the beneficiaries of our generosity – the government – than that they produce students who rank 23rd among 30 industrialised countries in maths proficiency.
Paying taxes is a duty and a responsibility. It’s my duty to pay them. It’s the government’s responsibility not to waste my money. That’s as far as the contract goes.
Taxation is not theft. I’m not a libertarian. I understand the concept of rent. But asking the government to continually raise someone’s taxes and then to then pass that money to people who don’t know how to make good decisions just to create a patronage network is morally equivalent to theft. It’s quite literally what mafias do.
Many things could be better in New Zealand. That’s something Flitter and I agree about. But I would like an actual solution that doesn’t alternately blame productive people for them or demand that this worryingly small segment of the population bears the burden of solving those problems.
After all, where does the patronage incentive stop? Maybe it’s healthcare today but the next thing everyone thinks is a public service will also require a minor tax increase. Fix homelessness? Okay, raise the taxes a per cent or two. Need to shell out more for unemployment? Another per cent. And when we must pay back all the debt? Another few per cent.
Despite what the communists want, the result of a corrupt patronage system in the guise of a tax system is not that the rich pay 6–10% more. The result will be that the rich will pay 0% more because they will spend their money on finding legal ways to avoid paying new taxes. And then what? You aren’t solving the problem. You are just moving problems around.
Worse, fiddle with the incentives and the productive people will simply refuse to engage with society in any “altruistic” way at all. Why would they? The most powerful patron would then just be treating them as clients without any protection in return. That’s called slavery.