Authors of science fiction and fantasy have cultivated a special skill (beyond the ability to torture characters and be tortured by commas all authors acquire). Simply, we speculate.
Yes, all authors need to build a world, but we spend hours (or months, or years…) creating an internally consistent alien species or a complete currency and economic system to back it up. Put more poetically, it’s the ability to see the water we are swimming in and imagine something different.
How we pay for things is one of the biggest rivers
One of the things I’ve been doing more recently is using these world-building skills on the real world. It’s so hard to get out of our bubble without jumping into someone else’s that may be even more bizarre. Deconstructing the world in the same way you can construct a fake world is a way to pop the bubble, at least for a few seconds.
What a society is willing to pay for collectively, to tax, and what it insists is an individual purchase reveals everything about the true values of that society.
What are the prerequisites and rewards of any society?
What actually are taxes? One way to think about them are prerequisites to citizenship. Just by breathing, these are the things you get from your fellow citizens.
Anything that we pay for individually, literally our income after taxes, becomes rewards for productivity in our society. You only have access to these if you are a productive member of society. (And I can’t emphasize enough, that I mean productive in the narrow economic sense, not anyone’s value as a human being just by breathing, which is infinite! This is a thought experiment to try on a perspective.)
When this goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong.
The most brutal regimes in the world often start with innovation in what should be a prerequisite and what should be a reward. When everything is a prerequisite and the government provides everything equally, you end up with some really boring fashion choices. Also, it’s never equal, and it’s usually unspeakably repressive.
But similarly, when somebody gets a great idea that everything should be a reward and the government should provide nothing to its citizens (or put another way, citizens should provide nothing to each other), you get somebody trying to sell shareholders on sewage treatment. And a fairly brutal time if anything goes wrong for you and you’re not in a private in-group of some sort.
What does it look like in a sane system?
What do we pay for collectively? (AKA, tax)
Things that are prohibitively expensive for an individual or even an individual company, but everyone can benefit from.
Building weather satellites, collecting data, analyzing it, and predicting the weather are prohibitively expensive for one person or one company to do, thus it behooves us to collectively launch them.
Which sounds obvious, but America’s launch of a new weather satellite was delayed over funding fights when one legislator said we don’t need government weather services because we have the weather channel. Until somebody asked where they thought the weather channel got its data…
The interstate highway system cost $500 billion in today’s money when it was built about 60 years ago. Jeff Bezos (and every other billionaire today) are worth less than half that. Even the biggest shipping company on earth could not have financed the roads it needs to operate in one country, but it was a drop in the bucket to do together.
Things that everyone needs but are only profitable at scale.
There is significant overlap with the first one, but there is a slight difference here, because the things in this bucket could be done by private enterprise in cities, mostly, but are not profitable in rural areas because there just aren’t enough people.
Highways and post offices come to mind. Also radishes. I’ve moved back to a rural area and have not had a fresh radish in a year. Apparently, they just droop when they’ve gone more than a few hundred miles from home?
Political wish lists for multiple or powerful constituents.
This one could go either way in the good or evil column. Politicians and interest groups get a bee in their bonnets all the time about what we should be providing for the community. They go ahead and try to convince us to fund it and often do.
This is how we get oil subsidies and solar subsidies in a climate crisis, bridges to nowhere, 5-cent bags, and several states where we tax candy made without flour at a much higher rate than those without. True story.
Things that we personally need to be productive.
Before your first day of work, there are a couple of things you need to be a productive worker that traditionally, the entire society funds.
One huge example is national education. Workers come into work knowing how to read and add and work in groups and all the other things that you learn in school. There are countries without national education so children who enter the workforce without the ability to pay are restricted to jobs that don’t require literacy.
Most developed countries agree that health is a prerequisite for working. If you are sick, you can’t work. In the US it’s a reward for productivity, in that your employer pays for your health and then stops if you’re sick. (Ask me how I know.)
That’s… a choice. It’s a weird choice, but it is a choice. We like to spend on national defense instead. Productivity goes way down if you’re invaded, so we collectively fund that to magnificent levels.
Protection for the vulnerable.
Every society has to confront the fact that there will always be members of that society who are unable to be productive or care for themselves or have anyone to care for them.
I want to seriously emphasize again that I mean productive in the traditional economic sense, and not in these folks worth as human beings or ability to contribute to the world by being alive, which is priceless.
This again gets very controversial as some people want private industry or a religious institution to be the one to care for them and believe it should be none of the government’s business. But most agree starving children should be a public responsibility.
And sometimes we publically fund just weird things for no reason whatsoever, like getting all the gold you want for $1 in Whiskeytown National Recreation Area. (Technically, you have to get it out of the stream yourself, but it’s yours when you do!) It’s also probably on fire, so good luck.
Behavioral control
We offer rebates or extra taxes to try to get people to do more of one thing and less of something else. This is controversial, both in efficacy and execution, but nobody seems to be able to resist trying it.
A high tax on cigarettes in part was meant to discourage cigarette use. First-time home buying credits privilege homeownership over rentals. Married couples make out like bandits in the tax code!
My favorite is the perverse consequences you see. Like when Greece taxed blue water, so rich people hid their pools under green covers. Or the most famous example when the British government offered a bounty for cobras killed in India, so people bred cobras to get a bigger bounty, with a net increase in cobras.
Moonshots
Much of our scientific and medical research is funded by the government in the US because a private company could never put together that amount of funding and remain profitable. But since profitability isn’t the goal, we can do crazy things like go to the moon or cure cancer or stop climate change because we can throw our collective might at these problems and not worry about keeping the lights on for another year. [She says optimistically.]
What things lend themselves to private investment or individual payment?
These are the rewards for productivity in society. i.e. what we do we our literal after-tax paycheck or profits.
Competition and choice are desirable and possible.
You can buy a $1000 car or a $1 million car or a house with one room and a house with seventy. Wherever products get better with competition and choice, it’s ripe for individual profit and private reward. Of course, hopefully, housing homeless people falls under protecting the vulnerable, but for the most part, when you get a choice, it’s better from private hands.
The fun stuff.
We’re just so weird wacky and wonderful that a government program to distribute board games would be very, very sad. Whereas the smorgasbord available can contribute to every taste. Flux Monty Python which is a fantastic game, by the way, serves such a niche audience that it needs the kind of agile freedom of private experimentation and private reward in the form of profitability.
Crusades and pet causes
A robust social safety net hopefully will keep the vast majority of people healthy and a robust National Institute of Health or equivalent will hopefully keep researchers working on big problems. But there are always going to be conditions or other problems that numerically just don’t make sense for a major investment. (I’m not saying that’s a good thing, just that that’s reality.)
It’s going to matter a whole lot to a very small group of people and it’s up to those people to fill in the gaps when you paint with a broad brush and get research funded or get projects done.
What does this look like in fictional societies?
It can get so fascinating! In the Dune universe on a desert planet, the phrase the author Frank Herbert constantly used was that “A man’s flesh is his own; his water belongs to the tribe.” Water was so scarce that it became a collective resource, a tax on everyone.
In Ursula Le Guin‘s radical novel about a true anarchy government, The Dispossessed, almost everything was collective, yet not exploitative. That was the premise she was exploring. Almost everything was a prerequisite of life and there were very few rewards. Everyone worked to provide for each other regardless of ability and though nobody had very much and everyone had a level of freedom that we have not matched.
Almost diametrically opposite, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, explored a society attempting to be completely a reward where nothing is a prerequisite, and also not exploitative.
You can do this yourself. Take a current government benefit and make it a reward and see what perverse consequences might result? Public land becomes private, and what happens to tourism, economy, and employment in many parts of the country?
Or say what happens when, say, the internet becomes a public good, as it has in some places, and how that affects employment, oversight, censorship, good and bad? The possibilities are endless.
When things end up in the wrong bucket?
I’ve tried to stay relatively neutral in the writing, and not get into the politics too much, because that’s not the point of this particular newsletter. Mostly because I’m not in the business of making my blood boil every week. Or yours.
Plus, this will never, ever be resolved. We can and will talk forever about what to fund what not to fund, who pays for these things, and who is not paying enough. And even the best programs have inevitable perverse consequences. But I wanted to share this as taxes are due to maybe give you a new framework to think about these debates.
Is this something we should pay for collectively because trying to make a profit at it is a fools errand? Or is this something that’s better in private hands that it will be profitable or in such a niche that the majority of us are never going to care about it or one of the other?
One insane example: power.
In my opinion, a private electric grid is an insanity, because electricity is definitely a prerequisite for productivity in this day and age; installing one is prohibitively expensive, and you’re trapped by where you live, meaning you have no competition and choice. On the other hand, solar companies where each can compete to make the best product and the investment is within reach of most homeowners and businesses, you can shop from a company in Indonesia if that’s where you get the best deal, making it perfect for the private market.
Same product, two very different endings that become automatically political positions, but if you look through the lens of what is a good collective purchase and what is a good individual purchase and what is a necessary prerequisite for life, and what is a reward, and where we monumentally screw this up, you maybe see something a little differently.