Embed Notice

In the liberal imagination, taxes work something like this:

“Rich people earn lots of money. Some of them use some of that money in bad ways. So the government taxes them, taking away some of their money and redistributing some of that to useful things that help people who don’t have as much as the rich.”

In this formulation, taxes are a mechanism to make the rich “pay their fair share” and fund socially necessary public goods.

But that’s not actually how redistributive taxes work! Instead, it goes something like this:

“The state uses violence to facilitate exploitation by the rich of the working class. The rich take so much from the working class that members of the working class might die from destitution. To keep enough workers alive for the rich to continue exploiting, the state caps how much the rich can take, requiring the rich to give a little bit back in the form of taxes.”

In the presence of capitalism, welfare spending is certainly preferable to no welfare spending. But that welfare spending by the state would not be necessary if the state didn’t first facilitate capitalist exploitation. The rich *do not pay for welfare.* They’re simply not allowed to steal as much.

https://c4ss.org/content/4790