As societies become wealthy Progressives believed, welfarist (or even socialist) policies would gain ever more popular support.
To the dismay of (Richard) Titmuss’s followers, however, something very close to the opposite occurred. In liberal societies across the world, wealth made many workers less enthusiastic about joining unions and other collective bargaining structures. The experience of increasing personal prosperity made working–class citizens in many countries less willing to pay taxes in support of state-based service programs. The growth of social wealth made the exercise of personal economic liberty more important to many people.
No doubt some people resist taxes because they are greedy, but there also seem to be other, more complex moral factors at play. For one thing, as people’s incomes rise, they experience an increasing range of personal options about how that income might be spent. Facing the wider range of options, people seem increasingly to find personal meaning in economic decision making. British Labour MP Frank Field expresses this point with startling directness: “The idea that rising tax bills will be hidden by rising real wages has proved to be one of the greatest fallacies of the post war period. Rising income levels now offer a growing body of voters the chance for the very first time to make major decisions themselves on the composition of their standard of living. Such opportunities are seized with relish.”
Growing prosperity seems to give an ever-wider range of people a sense of power and independence. It encourages a special form of self esteem that comes when people recognize themselves as central causes of the particular lives they are living- rather than being in any way the ward of others, no matter how well meaning, other regarding, or wise those others might be. In many countries, ordinary citizens are increasingly resentful about having economic decision making power taken from them by the planners of the social democratic state. In ways that are difficult to understand, prosperity makes the personal exercise of economic liberty more rather than less valuable to many liberal citizens.
From Free Market Fairness by John Tomasi
HKO comment:
As Keynes as others believed that we would eventually solve all of our basic economic needs, they thought our economic lives would become less central. Like so many other elitists they thought that others would see and think as they do. They failed to see the increased wealth they predicted as more than a single dimension.
They also failed to see how these changes would affect people. As basic needs were met, luxuries became necessities. Think cell phones, cable television and computers.
It is simple to write of the unwillingness to pay higher taxes as greed, but money represents much more than material wealth. It represents “the ability for everyman to make himself” (Abraham Lincoln). The attempt to take more of a man’s wealth is seen as attempt to infringe on his very freedoms.
The wealth accrued to modern society such as 401k accounts puts ownership of the means of production in more hands. The assault on wealth that emanates from the class warriors is seen as affecting far more that the millionaires or the richest 1 or 2%.
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