Noli Me Tangere

 The New York Times reported yesterday on the debate surrounding Washington State's graduated tax on incomes greater than a million dollars a year. "Critics want voters to repeal it," the Times summarizes, "and bar state leaders from imposing income taxes in the future, arguing the millionaires tax will drive out wealthy entrepreneurs and eventually lead to income taxes on everyone else."

Here, one is reminded of that scene I was just talking about from Anatole France's Penguin Island (1908), in which the wealthiest penguins approach their kind-hearted lawgiver, Father Mael, to plead an exemption from any form of progressive taxation. As they solemnly insist, hat-in-hand: 

For my part I am ready to give up all that I possess in the interest of my brother Penguins, and if it were necessary I would even cheerfully part with my shirt. All the elders of the people are ready, like me, to sacrifice their goods, and no one can doubt their absolute devotion to their country and their creed. We have, then, only to consider the public interest and to do what it requires. Now, Father, what it requires, what it demands, is not to ask much from those who possess much, for then the rich would be less rich and the poor still poorer. The poor live on the wealth of the rich and that is the reason why that wealth is sacred. Do not touch it, to do so would be an uncalled for evil. You will get no great profit by taking from the rich, for they are very few in number; on the contrary you will strip yourself of all your resources and plunge the country into misery.

It seems that even penguins are acquainted with the arguments of "trickle-down" and "supply side" economics—or become so as soon as they have incomes large enough to be taxable. 

France, with his famous irony, suggests with mock naivety that such arguments must be valid and irrefutable, since "in fifteen hundred years the best of the Penguins will not speak otherwise."

This is apparently what the best penguins argue today in Washington state: you cannot touch the incomes of the millionaires, because they create jobs for the poor. Plus, there are so few of them. Only an estimated 25,000 households pay this tax in all Washington. You will drive them out of the state. And then, you will have no choice but to tax everyone else who remains. 

So too, the billionaires and tech CEOs in California say: of course, it's not a question of generosity. We'd give you the shirts off our backs if we could. But if you enact your new wealth tax, some other billionaires—less loyal and patriotic than ourselves—might get the wrong idea and take their business elsewhere. You'd have capital flight and end up with a smaller tax base than before. 

The best penguins in New York say the same thing about the "pied-a-terre" tax. And in Rhode Island about the tax on second homes. 

It's what the best penguins said in Britain, too, under the Labour government at mid-century. As Bertrand the artistic Tory puts it in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim: "'But their home policy... soak the rich ... I mean ...’ He seemed to be hesitating. ‘Well, it is that, pure and simple, isn’t it? I’m just asking for information, that’s all. I mean that’s what it seems to be, don’t we all agree? I take it that it is just that and no more, isn’t it?" 

To which Jim Dixon responds inwardly: "Betrand's speech [...] had annoyed him in more ways than he'd have believed possible." But then, Dixon is a penguin of humbler origins; not a descendent like Bertrand of the finest of the penguin stock. 

But suppose there is not actually any evidence of the ruinous consequences often prophesied of modestly taxing the already wealthy? What if—indeed—as the Times reports, "A Cornell University researcher named Cristobal Young studied the impact of taxes on higher earners in New Jersey and California and found minimal out-migration in their wake. Washington also hasn’t yet seen significant out-of-state movement after lawmakers created a capital-gains tax in 2021."

Lies, lies, they must be! Could fifteen centuries of the best of the penguins be wrong?