Citizenship

In a recent edition of “The New Yorker,” Jill Lepore offers this opinion on taxes:

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food.”

The first clause of that paragraph sounded familiar, so I did some research and found that it repeats the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.  I also found a similar concept from an 1852 report of a committee of the Vermont legislature:

“Taxation is the price which we pay for civilization, for our social, civil and political institutions, for the security of life and property, and without which, we must resort to the law of force.”

Of course, taxes pay for government, and there is a strong anti-governmental streak in the nation right now. Certainly, most of us dislike paying taxes, be they sales taxes, property taxes, or income taxes, and it is easy to feel antipathy toward public institutions which we support with our taxes. This is particularly true when we disagree with what that government does, think of it as wasteful, or fear or resent its power. I share those feelings. When I lived in San Francisco, I often made the joke that anything not forbidden was compulsory.

I have been thinking about government lately as the Trump administration and its supporters have taken actions to undermine laws that I believe are critical to the well-being of the nation, and to advocate for increased “privatization” of many government functions.  I suggest a metaphor to describe government and the role it plays in our lives, one that reflects Holmes’s elegant description of taxes and civilization.

Rather than view “government” as an entity separate from the populace, I suggest that the government is our “commons” in the sense of what a group of people own and hold in common. The concept is similar to the grazing land held in common among pre-industrial European farmers or irrigation ditches bringing water to small-scale farmers in Northern New Mexico.

In contemporary society, commons abound that are provided and regulated by local, state, and federal governments. Streets and roads are our commons for getting around. Clean air and water are the commons we share that provide basic needs for life. The electronic spectrum is our commons for communication, through television, radio, and the internet. Police and firefighters are our commons for our security and protection of our property. The military is our commons for protecting our country. Our public educational system is our commons for the future by giving our young people the skills and understanding to be self-supporting, engaged citizens. Social Security and Medicare represent our commons for the well-being of the elderly and those who need financial help to support themselves.

The word commons, of course, is related to community, the idea of shared interests and values. By protecting and allocating the many commons in our lives, the government, then, is the glue that holds us together as a people.  More importantly, government is more than merely the glue of our society; it represents the community of the entire citizenry—in reality, we are the government. It reflects the spectrum of our values, our mores, our hopes, our fears. Because our beliefs vary across the population, obviously the actions of the government will always be subject to criticism by its citizens.

There are those, however, who deprecate the role and responsibilities of the citizenry in the government, who deny that the government reflects our values, who do not agree that we citizens are the government. They are fixated on privatizing as much of the government as possible. While the private sector has a role in carrying out some functions of the commons and in serving as a counterbalance on the overreach of the government, the idea of wholesale privatization has a fundamental fallacy:  it takes away our right as citizens to control our lives. Certainly the government, its leaders, and bureaucrats are often short-sighted, inefficient, and completely wrong. Despite that, however, in this society we can, in theory, change the direction of the government through the ballot box. We can throw the bums out. Sure, the electoral system is flawed and unduly affected by money, yet it does generally reflect our collective values, good and bad depending on one’s perspective.

In contrast, when government functions are taken over by the private sector we surrender that right of control. We give up our role as honorable citizens and become mere consumers. We trade our place at the ballot box for one in the check-out line at Wal-Mart. We can vote the Democrats or Republicans out of office but we can’t vote out Chevron, Amazon, Facebook, or the Koch Brothers.

Moreover, replacing functions of government in regulating and distributing the commons is antidemocratic in another way: it takes control from all citizens and gives it to only a few, usually the wealthy and powerful who see control as a way to make money, or to cynically seek advantage over some aspect of our lives. A good example of the latter is the Sagebrush Rebellion promoters in the West who want to take land belonging to all citizens and use it for their own purposes.

There is a fundamental flaw in my argument, however: the assumption that the citizenry has both the desire and ability to assume the responsibility of overseeing the government and the commons it comprises. In contemporary American society, citizenship is an abstract concept, secondary to activities related to family, work, recreation, etc. Many of us are so busy and distracted with daily living that we cannot conceive of the idea of being an engaged citizen. Voting is a good example. Only just over half of eligible citizens actually voted in the 2016 presidential election, and off-year state and local races typically garner an even smaller percentage. I know several college graduates who have never voted and have no interest in doing so.

Moreover, few citizens give much time to understanding issues related to politics and government, relying instead on superficial information from television, radio, and internet sites like Facebook. Talk radio is an instructive example. Callers to sports programs exhibit a much more sophisticated and balanced knowledge of teams and players than do callers to programs on politics have about issues affecting us as citizens.

There is a more basic issue in play, as well. In our society we are not so much citizens as employees; our identity is defined by our job description. We become what we do—surgeon, accountant, janitor, welder—in comparison to which the role of citizen seems inconsequential. Further, being an employee trumps being a citizen because our employers have more influence over our day-to-day well-being than does the government. The distinction is stark. As citizens, at our polling places we have the right to vote and the power of the ballot, but as employees on the job, for the most part, we have only the right to remain silent and to do as we are told. Unlike my idea in which the citizen controls the government, our relationship with our employers is reversed: the boss determines our fate. For example, being denied the right to vote is minor compared with being fired. As a result our attention and loyalty are given primarily to our employers.

Of course, as employees, we receive wages or a salary, money we use to pay for food, shelter, and transportation, and for other things beyond basic necessities, things we buy with our “disposable” income. In deciding how to use our money we become “consumers,” an absurdist term worthy of Orwell or Vonnegut. This role, however, is even more antithetical to that of citizen than employee. Just as we too often become what we do, we are even more so defined to a large extent by what we buy, whether it is a car (used Chevy or new BMW), where we shop (Goodwill or Nordstrom), or the neighborhood we live in (rented apartment or house in a gated community). Further, unlike the role of citizen, being a consumer offers immediate and personal gratification. Bringing something new home from the mall or seeing the UPS truck pull up is a hell of a lot more exciting than attending public hearings or reading candidate biographies or the pros and cons of ballot initiatives.

Even though in theory, government is our commons, the glue of community that binds us together, the reality is starkly different. We have unknowingly abrogated (or been forced to abrogate) the rights, responsibilities, and power of engaged citizens in exchange for the bland, lemming-like role of employee and consumer.