As a Brit who often visits the USA, I have struggled to understand the US view of government, and especially taxation. It seems unique in the developed world.
Today I listened to a program on the BBC called "The Public Philosopher" in which a well-known philosopher interacted with an audience at Harvard about universal healthcare. He asked audience members to speak about their beliefs and tried to reveal the principles behind their beliefs.
My country (like most in Europe) has a universal healthcare system. Britain is a rather extreme example, because its system is financed by tax and run by a government agency. In other European countries, the health systems are often insurance-based. But however payment is organised, to have universal basic healthcare, most countries insist that everyone is covered. This means that people who are unable to work are paid for by taxation, and workers are covered by compulsory insurance arranged by their employers.
All these systems need compulsion, and Europeans accept that. Compulsion means that healthy people can't say "I won't pay insurance (or tax) because I'm not sick" and insurance companies can't say "we won't accept a sick person because we will lose money".
The big surprise for me is the strong belief of the Harvard audience that compulsion (they called it "coercion") is un-American. For Republicans, this was expressed simply as "the government should not take away what I've earned". For Democrats, the question is whether poor people are coerced by their poverty and sick people are coerced by their sickness, so that they are denied participation in American society. The debate was not about the obvious benefits of basic universal healthcare, only about freedom from coercion.
Now to Europeans, this focus on coercion is surprising. We don't like being taxed, (who does) but we all assume that our governments must be coercive about a lot of things in order to run the country.
For Europeans, the freedom to elect our governments is enough. When the government coerces us to pay tax and obey the law, that is OK because we elected them to do that and we can un-elect them at the next election.
For Americans (at least in the audience in Harvard) freedom also means freedom from government coercion. I think that this must relate to the fact that the US constitution is confrontational. So an election is not about choosing between manifestos, as it would be in most European countries; it is about choosing adversaries who will slug it out in the Washington boxing ring.
I note that the American Revolution was not won to secure freedom from taxation as some US citizens claim. It was won to ensure that there was no taxation without representation.
My question to US citizens is this: is this an accurate picture of the US system and an accurate analysis of the differerence in thinking between the USA and Europe?
A friend in the USA emailed this reply:
ReplyDeleteHello Peter!
As an American, I have also been puzzling over our odd ideas of what constitutes government and what it is supposed to do. It seems to me from my reading that the Republicans see their supreme goal to create a loose federation of individual states that contribute minimally to a central government that doesn't have much say over how they decide to run themselves. This is the States Rights wing that helped bring about the Civil War.
The States Rights folks are against federal and local taxation and any other conceivable style of taxation at all for that matter. They believe that the decisions over who pays for what in their state should be left at the local level and not mandated or controlled by the central [federal] government. These hardy individuals will then be able to achieve their ultimate goal of controlling their own lives and destinies free of the coercion by taxation you wrote of in your post.
Unfortunately, these thoughts of independence from the federal government's influence is most precious in those states who receive the most aid from the federal government. There are a number of states, particularly in our South that yearly receive more money from the federal government than they pay in those taxes collected by coercion.
There is also the "hole" in their logic that if it isn't paid for by federal monies, then it will have to be paid for by the state and local governments raising their taxes instead.
The taxman becomes someone more familiar to them but the taxation still occurs. I cannot understand what their thought patterns are sometimes and I'm absolutely certain that they cannot understand my own ideas about it either.
To me it seems a simple proposition: You pay for what you need in the most efficient manner that you can in order to save money. If that means gathering together into a "collective bargaining" group to negotiate, oh say drug prices, you will be able to bargain more effectively than the rugged individual trying to find the best price on the open market. There is a reason for large scale monetary collection by taxation - to pay for the common services or infrastructure that the whole society requires to function efficiently. This requires a standardization of the item or service [e.g. radiology] that is best done as a group rather than piecemeal for efficiency's sake
I am interested in this question of our national attitudes to coercion and how this relates to our history. In the UK we have our origins in the feudal system where the lords of the manor had almost complete power over the lives of the people living on their land. This was followed by a monarchy in which one person held most of the power. For hundreds of years back we have been used to accepting that we must comply with what our rulers decree.
ReplyDeleteThe American population is, I think, (correct me if I'm wrong) mostly descended from people who chose to escape some form of coercion in their home countries.
Perhaps these characteristics persist down through the generations much more strongly than we realise.
Yes, national character may have something to do with it. Psychologists certanly detect differences: 40% of Brits are extroverts but 60% of Americans are extroverts.
DeleteAgainst your argument is the fact that the British monarch lost most real power in the reign of George III, in other words at the same time as the American Revolution. The monarch's powers were quite limited after George III, and we introduced voting rights at much the same time as the USA (first votes for householders, then votes for all men, then votes for women).
I think another factor may be the westward expansion of Americans. For at least 200 years, anyone who felt there was too much government could move west and find less government. Their attitudes of self-reliance have fossilised into the present-day tea party.
Would any Americans like to correct us?