The myth of solitary capitalism

I have a lot of conservative friends. I also have some liberal friends who agree with much of what my conservative friends say and think. One of the things I hear a lot of people saying these days is that they don't want to pay taxes, or at least they don't want to have their taxes raised. They rationalize what they are saying by stating that they worked hard for their money, they earned it, so why should they have to give it to someone else? Let's take a look at this idea.

Imagine you are ridiculously wealthy, maybe you are, I don't know. You came by your wealth by working hard and being smart with your money. Capitalism has rewarded you and you consider yourself a staunch capitalist. Now let's imagine that someone offers you 200 billion dollars, in cash, to live by yourself on a deserted island. You agree and hop in their boat, a couple of days later they drop you off on an island in the middle of the Pacific ocean. The island has plenty of clean, fresh water to drink. The trees are filled with delicious fruit. You have every thing that you need to live. You wave to the boat as it pulls away from the beach and hear the captain of the boat tell you to have fun and try to not get too lonely because no one will ever come back. You are completely alone with your 200 billion in cash.

Things are very different for you now, but you may not realize just how different. You see you have just stopped being a capitalist. It isn't that you have had a sudden change of heart about capitalism, you may still be a fervent believer in capitalism. The thing is that it is impossible to be a capitalist if you are alone. Sure, you could look around the island and figure out a product you could make with the items you have on hand. It might be something really wonderful, but with no one else around who is going to buy it from you? You can build a house out of the available wood and make you a roof out of palm leaves but you can't do anything to increase your wealth. With no one around to want to live in your house you have no way of transforming it into wealth. Your house has value, but only to you, capitalism demands that it be worth something to someone else and there is no one else. You aren't even rich any more. Sure, you have 200 billion dollars, but where are you going to spend them? Can you use them to hire someone to make you tropical drinks while you sit on the beach since there is no one around to hire? On your island, by yourself, your money has no value, oh sure, you could pile it up and sleep on it as a makeshift mattress but it has no value to you, and since it has been removed from a capitalist system it has no value to anyone else either.

You see capitalism requires a society to exist in for it to exist. No one can be truly self made if it requires at least the simple existence of other people for you to have any wealth. Sure, you worked hard for your money, no disagreement there. I can easily accept that you are smarter than most people and handled your money well. The simple fact remains that your money and work and intelligence is worthless unless it exists within a society.

Because of this it is in your best interest to have the society you live in be stable and prosperous. Because if your society fails you fail. This is why we pay taxes.

The phrase "redistribution of wealth" can't be spoken today without starting an argument. I believe the reason for this is that many people have a false perception of what the phrase means. It does not mean that the government will take money from a wealthy individual and give it to a poor individual. We found out recently that Newt Gingrich paid almost a million dollars in taxes last year. The government did not take his million dollars and hand it over to one or two or even three people making them really well off without having to work for it, strangely this seems to be what many people think redistribution of wealth means.

What redistribution of wealth actually means is that money is taken from individuals, wealthy or otherwise, and is given to our society as a whole. Money is being moved around so it is an obvious redistribution, but it doesn't go to specific individuals. It goes to repairing roads that we can all drive on. It goes to keeping up our schools so that we can have an educated population who can participate in our society. It goes to fund scientific research that helps save lives and makes living easier for all of us. Obviously all of these things can create jobs along the way, but that isn't the main reason why we do and should do it. In other words redistributing wealth makes a stable society possible and therefor makes capitalism possible. Paying taxes doesn't make you poorer, it allows you to become wealthier. Redistribution of wealth doesn't favor those who don't work hard, it makes it worth while for all of us to work hard. We all, even those in the top tax brackets, receive more benefits from the taxes we pay than they cost us to pay. Sadly the urge to not pay taxes has reduced our tax revenue rates to the point that we are having a hard time doing all of the things that we need to do to have a stable society. The reduction in tax revenues is forcing us to borrow money to keep our society as stable as it is so people can continue to get wealthy. Reducing taxes has got us to the point where that on a personal level we aren't saving money any more, we are costing ourselves money.

No one, and I mean absolutely no one has become wealthy based solely on their own hard work and intelligence. We all, in part at least, have gotten to where we are because of the society in which we live. Ignoring this fact could make it impossible for any of us to get anywhere.