The Coercion of NPR and Your Local Library

Sheldon Richman makes fun of NPR commentator Bill Harley:

For Bill Harley the tax-cut mood signals the loss of something special in American life: the shared effort of community. "There are some things we can do together that we can't do apart," he said. "The ownership society with everyone taking care of themselves only goes so far. Some of us can afford our own books and DVDs, but they do no good sitting on a shelf unused. I can pave my driveway but not my street. I can't afford to have my own fire truck or ambulance waiting for a private emergency. And kids learn better when there are fewer than 30 of them in a classroom. Raising taxes and sharing resources now seems somehow un-American. . . . But democracy works better when all citizens have access to information and some basic services. In that sense, an open library door paid for by all of us symbolizes the heart of what we say we hold dear. That's what commonwealth is. The problem is, the commonwealth still costs each of us something."

Unfortunately, Harley's nostalgia for a time past doesn't reach back far enough. Earlier in our history, doing things together meant real, voluntary cooperation, not the phony cooperation orchestrated by ambitious politicians and achieved through coercion, which is the essence of taxation. During his sojourn in the young United States, Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by the voluntarist and cooperative bent of the people he encountered. He wrote in Democracy in America: "The citizen of the United States is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he only claims its assistance when he is quite unable to shift without it. . . . [I]n the United States associations are established to promote public order, commerce, industry, morality, and religion; for there is no end which the human will, seconded by the collective exertions of individuals, despairs of attaining."

Tocqueville might wonder what's become of America if people like Harley can think of no method other than physical force to set up a library. Who's the true communitarian? The one who seeks voluntarist solutions or the one whose first resort is compulsion?

Perhaps Harley doesn't think of taxation as fiscal force. Indeed, neither the word force nor any of its synonyms appeared in his commentary. His communitarian and humanitarian tone disguises the fact that his preferred method of financing libraries and other things he wants is to threaten fines and imprisonment against those who have other plans for their money. The maverick who wishes to opt out of the collective effort would not be left alone, but instead would be hounded by the taxman. Contrary to what Harley may think, we don't tax ourselves.

Cooperation doesn't mean coercion.