Taxation: the Only Possible Solution

within the existing societal paradigm

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Contemporary society has several problems related to two of the most basic needs of the human beings who, after all, are the society: housing and health care. In both of those areas the market is failing to provide sufficient supply (with sufficient quality) at a price everyone in society who is willing and able to work a full-time job can afford. Anyone who doesn’t agree that every member of society who is willing and able to work a full-time job should have sufficient housing and health care can stop reading — and go stuff oneself.

There are three possible solutions to that problem: keeping employment and incomes the same while pertinent prices go to zero; increasing employment and incomes while pertinent prices remain constant (or at least increase at a slower rate); or using government to intervene in the market to solve the problem: taxation in one form or another. So, the only possible solution within the existing societal paradigm is taxation.

There doubtlessly are better and worse ways of applying that solution, but at least we can know that taxation in some form is the only solution worthy of discussion. When failures of the market-based economy are causing human suffering, to be morally outraged by the thought of abandoning market-based economics in the pursuit of a solution to that suffering is to manifest an astonishing degree of moral confusion.