The President’s surprise proposal to abolish dividend taxes is big news.
There are many ways to evaluate the idea, including consideration of the
effects on short- and long-term economic growth, equity, and the federal
budget. The Administration also emphasizes that a dividend tax is unfair,
since the income that was used to buy the shares was already taxed once.
(The response from commentators like Paul Krugman is that there are many
double taxes, including all sales taxes.) Another consideration seems
to be overlooked. I believe we should retain a distinction between earned
and unearned income, and we should be less hesitant to tax the latter.
There is nothing wrong with investment income. But workpurposeful
human effortis much more closely linked to human dignity and value.
As Pope John Paul II wrote in Laborem Exercens (1981), "Work is a
good thing for man-a good thing for his humanity-because through work
man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also
achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed in a sense becomes ‘more
a human being.’"
Robert Nozick, the great libertarian philosopher, denied that there was
any moral difference between work and other activities (such as investing)
that produce value. He was reacting to the old leftist idea that labor
alone creates value, and therefore laborers deserve the full price of
their products. It is a scandal of capitalism that some of the reward
goes instead to capitalists, who do not work. In the words of Ralph Chaplin’s
old Wobbly anthem, "Solidarity Forever" (1915):
It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they
trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid
* * *
All the world that’s owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
This song implies that we should recoup the money that capitalists have
taken from the workers who really made everything. Dividend taxes would
then be a good idea, and the higher the better. Unfortunately, the song
is pretty clearly wrong: investors, managers, and inventors create value,
just as workers do. However, we can still understand labor as morally
different from other economic activities. Compare two people, one of whom
makes a living by digging ditches, while the other profits from inherited
stocks even though she is comatose after an accident. The first labors;
the second does not. An intermediate case is someone who actively invests,
mixing knowledge, intellectual labor, and accumulated capital to generate
wealth. I think that the work aspect of wealth-creation is virtuous, onerous,
and not sufficiently rewarded by the market. This is an argument for policies
(such as dividends taxes) that favor work.
(All this is "auto-plagiarized" from a law
review article I wrote some time ago.
My wife and I went to an event at my 3-year-old’s nursery school today.
She saw me still in my pajamas just before she left for the day, and said
"Daddy, you will get dressed before you come to my school, won’t
you?" This is the beginning of at least 18 years of her worrying
about whether I am about to embarrass her in public.