Fairness

Continuing on the theme of how to talk about taxes, here's Kwame Anthohy Appiah in Sunday's WaPo on why it's important to appeal to fairness:

....

How, in the first Bush administration, did the movement to repeal the estate tax prevail? Not just because it was craftily renamed the "death tax." The number of Americans who told pollsters that they opposed the "death tax" was just a few percentage points higher than the number who said they opposed the "estate tax." As Yale scholars Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro have shown, it mattered more that proponents of repeal made a moral argument (however specious): that the tax was unfair because, for one thing, it involved taxing earnings twice.

Defenders of the tax typically countered with an appeal to self-interest: But you're not paying it, because it applies to just 2 percent of households. They didn't quite grasp how powerful appeals to fairness are. In fact, when the barnstorming Teddy Roosevelt proposed the tax a century ago, he made the case for it precisely in terms of fairness: He talked about what the wealthy owe to a nation that made their success possible.

Roosevelt, of course, was one of the great leather-lunged orators. This primary season has seen an ongoing dispute about whether soaring rhetoric of moral uplift has any relevance to the hard work of devising and implementing public policy. But once you start thinking about how powerfully affected we are by our sense of fairness -- and about how powerfully that sense can be affected by the way issues are described to us -- it's hard to dodge the fact that whiffy moral rhetoric can have practical consequences when April 15 rolls around.

At some level, we're those kids with the candy bars. We may change our minds about what's truly just, but not about how much fairness matters. As faltering as our intuitions about fairness in public policy are, success comes to the politician who can enlist them effectively. It's not enough to craft good policies, you have to convince people that they're wise and just. Some individuals, for reasons we grasp only dimly, are a lot better at that than others, however smart, engaged and sensible. Almost doesn't seem fair, does it?