The Atlantic ran a piece this week about the “Time Tax.” You can read it if you’d like. It approaches the problem from a specific angle, and that specific angle opens a lot of sidetracking doors (e.g., is racism only racism when it’s intentional?) which predictably distract from the main point, something we are evidently so darn good at in today’s political discourse (I would include an example here, but I’m afraid that would illustrate the phenomenon). But the article’s main point is a good one, and so is the secondary point, and they are these:
The government wastes your time.
Sometimes it does it on purpose.
The on-purpose thing is a little eyebrow-raising, but it adds up upon reflection. As the article, somewhat overly implying maliciousness and hinting at what I would guess is unwarranted attribution to a man who did not build the system, quotes:
The unemployment-insurance system was the primary bulwark against the economic ravages of the coronavirus recession, keeping the country’s finances afloat. It is, in fact, not a bulwark, but a patchwork of 53 unemployment-insurance systems, many of which are meant to frustrate users. Its designers’ goal was to “put as many kind-of pointless roadblocks along the way, so people just say, ‘Oh, the hell with it; I’m not going to do that,’” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis admitted during the pandemic. “It was definitely done in a way to lead to the least number of claims being paid out.”
This is…bad. And while unemployment insurance is a particularly bad system to have be particularly difficult (there are good-faith debates that can be had about the best way to address the problems unemployment insurance purports to address, but if a system exists, it should be able to serve its purported purpose), particularly in a time of particular need, this phenomenon is ubiquitous within citizens’ interactions with the government. To cite two oft-cited examples: Filing federal income taxes is so difficult that an entire industry exists to do it for you, or to walk you through doing it yourself. Going to the DMV requires a half-day off work for some people. The government wastes your time. It’s a fact of life.
But the thing The Atlantic misses with its admittedly catchy headline is that this does not serve the purpose of a tax. With a tax, you’re paying the government to do something in exchange for you not having to do it. I don’t want to build a highway, so I pay a toll when I drive on 45 or 130 here in Austin, or on I-90 back home in Illinois. I don’t want to defend myself against a possible attack by a foreign state, so I pay income taxes. I don’t want to homeschool my eventual kids, so I pay a higher rent to my landlord than I would were property taxes not to exist. This is an oversimplification, but it’s how taxes work: You pay a tax because you agree to a social contract in which a government handles some things for you. If you don’t want to pay it, you either accept the consequences or move to a place with a different government. The parts that get wasted? The parts that get spent on five-thousand-dollar-and-evidently-still-not-“decent” office chairs? That’s theft. That’s individuals stealing from you through the government. Stealing comfort. Stealing salaries. Stealing fun little goodies from lobbyists. Stealing whatever substitute for self-worth they get out of reelection. Every time the government wastes something, it’s not a tax—it’s theft. Some of the tax you pay, then, is a true tax, but a lot of it is just people stealing, and what The Atlantic points out well by publishing this piece is that they aren’t just stealing your money: They’re stealing your time.
It’s important to make the distinction that “the government” is not the one stealing. Governments don’t have that kind of agency. It’s people doing the stealing, through the mechanism that is a government. People get the chairs. People get the goodies. People get the substitute for self-worth. Not every elected official or government employee, of course. Many people in these roles are earnest, effective public servants. But many are not, and even some that are earnest steal these things by accident, creating unintentionally burdensome systems which rob people of their time in exchange for the sense that they have done something good, which brings another point around: You don’t have to work for the government to use the government to steal. We steal from each other all the time using the government’s hands. In certain red locales in recent years, voters steal time from other voters and agency from those deterred from voting by supporting efforts making it more difficult to vote. In certain blue locales last year, voters stole opportunity from children by yielding to science-contradicting demands from certain teachers unions. The thefts range in severity—thefts of rights, thefts of property, thefts of life—but they occur habitually, in all these little tradeoffs that come through what most benignly manifests as bureaucratic inefficiency.
Time, like everything shy of life itself, has value to an individual. But when it’s given to the government, it doesn’t give that government the value. It gives the value to other individuals, who either destroy the value or take it in some indirect, piecemeal way.
The government isn’t taking your time as a tax. People are taking your time. As a robbery.
i drink your milkshake
Amen