Megan McArdle talks about a 'collective action problem'. I don't know the origins or intent of her full conversation but this graf sure does grab me:
But if you think that you have more money than is fair--money that the government should, by rights, be using for some more noble purpose--then there is no collective action problem. You can send the money to the government. They will spend that money on either actual public goods, or things that you think should be paid for out of the common weal. (Or at least, they will do this to exactly the extent that they would if you plus 20 million of your fellow citizens were forced to send them money via a new tax bill.) There is no strategic value to withholding the money from the government; your fellow citizens are not going to say to themselves, "Oh, Henry's paying extra, so I guess it's okay if I vote for McCain." There is no interactivity here. You, alone, can secure more public goods by putting your extra dollars in the treasury--exactly as many public goods as your dollars will secure if you vote for a politician who extracts that tax money, plus the same amount from other similarly affluent people, via the tax code.
I've been thinking about voluntary direction of taxes for a long time. There ought to be some percentage of the federal income tax which is directable. Which is to say some set of public services which are non-essential ought to be direct beneficiaries of what taxpayers desire. But McArdle's suggestion implies something more interesting still. Why not cap all personal federal income tax at say 25% and let the people who think that the government ought to be doing more, pay with their own money? Would this interfere with the commons? Aren't many government benefits charity?
I'll just take one example. If people believed that the disaster of Katrina was the government's fault, would they spend more or less of their voluntary tax on the parts of government responsible?
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