Why not just label the organ collection a “tax”, and say “Even if the tax burdens some people disproportionately, it helps people more than it harms people, and is therefore justified”?
I’d bet that if you look at the effects of ordinary taxes, and you count the benefits separately from the harms you’d find that statistically, the tax kills at least one person to help more than one person, just like the “organ tax”.
Of course, the organ tax vs. normal tax comparison is a comparison of seen versus unseen—you can’t tell who the people are who were killed by the taxes since they are a statistical increase in deaths with nobody getting their hands bloody—but I hope we’ve learned that seen vs. unseen is a bias.
The claim that ordinary taxation directly causes any deaths is actually a fairly bold one, whatever your opinion of them. Maybe I’m missing something. What leads you to believe that?
In progressive tax regimes it’s rather hard for people to literally be taxed into starvation, but that doesn’t mean that no deaths occur on the margins. Consider for example the case where a person needs expensive medical treatment that’s not covered by insurance, they (or their family) can’t afford it, but it’s close enough to their means that they would have been able to if it wasn’t for their taxes. Or consider a semi-skilled laborer that’s making enough money that their taxes are nontrivial, but not enough to support their family on base pay once taxes are factored in. In order to make ends meet they take a more dangerous position to collect hazard pay, and a year later they die in an industrial accident.
And so forth. Looking at the margins often means looking at unusual cases, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any cases where the extra money would have made a difference. That’s not to say that dropping those taxes (and thus the stuff they fund) would necessarily be a utilitarian good, of course—only that there’s stuff we can put in the minus column, even if we’re just looking at deaths.
Ah, the hazardous profession case is one that I definitely hadn’t thought of. It’s possible that Jiro’s assertion is true for cases like that, but it’s also difficult to reason about, given that the hypothetical world in which said worker was not taxed may have a very different kind of economy as a result of this same change.
I can think of a hypoothetical person who has a 99.9% chance of living without the tax, and a 99.8% with it. And I can also think of there being more than 1000 such hypothetical people.
“Can afford to live without it but not with it” implies going all the way down to 0% chance. You don’t need to go down to an 0% chance for there statistically to be deaths.
But how does that work? What mechanism actually accounts for that difference? Is this hypothetical single person we could have individually exempted from taxes just barely unable to afford enough food, for example? I don’t yet buy the argument that any taxes I’m aware of impose enough of a financial burden on anyone to pose an existential risk, even a small one (Like a .1% difference in their survival odds). This is not entirely a random chance, since levels of taxation are generally calibrated to income, presumably at least partially for the purpose of specifically not endangering anyone’s ability to survive.
Also, while I realize that your entire premise here is that we’re counting the benefits and the harms separately, doing so isn’t particularly helpful in demonstrating that a normal tax burden is comparable to a random chance of being killed, since the whole point of taxation is that the collective benefits are cheaper when bought in bulk than if they had to be approximated on an individual level. While you may be in the camp of people who claim that citizenship in (insert specific state, or even states in general) is not a net benefit to a given individual’s viability, saying “any benefits don’t count” and then saying “it’s plausible that this tax burden is a minor existential risk to any given individual given that” is not particularly convincing.
There are all sorts of random possibilities that could reduce someone’s life expectancy by a tiny amount but which statistically over large numbers of people would result in more than one extra death. Imagine that someone has to work one extra hour per month and there’s a tiny chance of dying associated with it, or that they delay a visit to the doctor by one week, etc. Or all the other mechanisms which cause poorer people to have lower life expectancies (I highly doubt you can’t think of any), which mean that someone who gets marginally poorer by a tiny amount would on the average not live as long.
In Italy quite a few entrepreneurs have committed suicide since the time the tax rates were raised, which may or may not count depending on what you mean by “directly”.
Why not just label the organ collection a “tax”, and say “Even if the tax burdens some people disproportionately, it helps people more than it harms people, and is therefore justified”?
The idea of taxation is usually that people get taxed equally. You can’t kill everyone 10%, you could only kill 10% a 100%.
Also, when you tax someone (especially someone with lots of money), they’re usually capable of living afterwards.
I’d bet that if you look at the effects of ordinary taxes, and you count the benefits separately from the harms you’d find that statistically, the tax kills at least one person to help more than one person, just like the “organ tax”.
Of course, the organ tax vs. normal tax comparison is a comparison of seen versus unseen—you can’t tell who the people are who were killed by the taxes since they are a statistical increase in deaths with nobody getting their hands bloody—but I hope we’ve learned that seen vs. unseen is a bias.
The claim that ordinary taxation directly causes any deaths is actually a fairly bold one, whatever your opinion of them. Maybe I’m missing something. What leads you to believe that?
In progressive tax regimes it’s rather hard for people to literally be taxed into starvation, but that doesn’t mean that no deaths occur on the margins. Consider for example the case where a person needs expensive medical treatment that’s not covered by insurance, they (or their family) can’t afford it, but it’s close enough to their means that they would have been able to if it wasn’t for their taxes. Or consider a semi-skilled laborer that’s making enough money that their taxes are nontrivial, but not enough to support their family on base pay once taxes are factored in. In order to make ends meet they take a more dangerous position to collect hazard pay, and a year later they die in an industrial accident.
And so forth. Looking at the margins often means looking at unusual cases, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any cases where the extra money would have made a difference. That’s not to say that dropping those taxes (and thus the stuff they fund) would necessarily be a utilitarian good, of course—only that there’s stuff we can put in the minus column, even if we’re just looking at deaths.
Ah, the hazardous profession case is one that I definitely hadn’t thought of. It’s possible that Jiro’s assertion is true for cases like that, but it’s also difficult to reason about, given that the hypothetical world in which said worker was not taxed may have a very different kind of economy as a result of this same change.
I can think of a hypoothetical person who has a 99.9% chance of living without the tax, and a 99.8% with it. And I can also think of there being more than 1000 such hypothetical people.
“Can afford to live without it but not with it” implies going all the way down to 0% chance. You don’t need to go down to an 0% chance for there statistically to be deaths.
But how does that work? What mechanism actually accounts for that difference? Is this hypothetical single person we could have individually exempted from taxes just barely unable to afford enough food, for example? I don’t yet buy the argument that any taxes I’m aware of impose enough of a financial burden on anyone to pose an existential risk, even a small one (Like a .1% difference in their survival odds). This is not entirely a random chance, since levels of taxation are generally calibrated to income, presumably at least partially for the purpose of specifically not endangering anyone’s ability to survive.
Also, while I realize that your entire premise here is that we’re counting the benefits and the harms separately, doing so isn’t particularly helpful in demonstrating that a normal tax burden is comparable to a random chance of being killed, since the whole point of taxation is that the collective benefits are cheaper when bought in bulk than if they had to be approximated on an individual level. While you may be in the camp of people who claim that citizenship in (insert specific state, or even states in general) is not a net benefit to a given individual’s viability, saying “any benefits don’t count” and then saying “it’s plausible that this tax burden is a minor existential risk to any given individual given that” is not particularly convincing.
There are all sorts of random possibilities that could reduce someone’s life expectancy by a tiny amount but which statistically over large numbers of people would result in more than one extra death. Imagine that someone has to work one extra hour per month and there’s a tiny chance of dying associated with it, or that they delay a visit to the doctor by one week, etc. Or all the other mechanisms which cause poorer people to have lower life expectancies (I highly doubt you can’t think of any), which mean that someone who gets marginally poorer by a tiny amount would on the average not live as long.
In Italy quite a few entrepreneurs have committed suicide since the time the tax rates were raised, which may or may not count depending on what you mean by “directly”.
Would that eliminate much of the remaining creepiness from Yvain’s scenario? (It scarcely makes a difference to me, though others may differ.)
It does for me. “Tax” implies social acceptance in a way that “secret police” does not.