Yesterday the Dish quoted Gregg Easterbrook:

Wealthy people who say the rich should pay higher taxes — Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have joined Obama in declaring this — are free to tax themselves. If you believe the top rate should rise to 39.6 percent (Obama) or 50 percent (Buffett), then calculate the difference and send a check for that amount to the Treasury. Of course no one individual doing this, even a billionaire, would have much impact on the deficit. But if rich people who say they believe in higher taxes were willing to practice what they preach, this would prove their sincerity, making legislation on the point more likely.

Presumably Obama and Buffett don’t send such checks to the Treasury because they believe they have better things to do with that money. Being a candidate for president can get expensive, after all–and Mr. Buffett probably thinks his vast charitable donations do considerably more worthwhile good than Uncle Sam would, dollar for dollar.

But the double standard is telling: While Obama and Buffett think they’re putting their own money to better use than the US Treasury would, they don’t support other billionaire and multi-millionaires’ right to make their own call. Their support for higher taxes is thus a transparent desire to appropriate other people’s money for government use (which they apparently have greater faith in when it comes to other people’s, but not their own).

This brings me back to something Lev wrote while blogging about Atlas Shrugged:

When you get down to it, Objectivism and Communism are utopias of different forms. One says not to help out anyone, to let them stand on their own two feet. But this ignores the human tendency toward compassion, a strong urge in most people.

I’ve never read Ayn Rand or anything Objectivist, and don’t much care about them or the latest in bad cinema (my guys are Friedman and Hayek). But insofar as libertarianism is thought to parallel Objectivism here, let me address it.

Libertarianism is fine with the human tendency towards compassion. We say you should have ample freedom to be compassionate with your own resources; the giving of your money and time to charitable causes (or if you’re feeling terribly inefficient, to the U.S. Treasury) is perfectly appropriate and laudable.  (Although libertarianism per se is amoral, taking no stance on what you do with your money–only that you should have the freedom to choose.)

What libertarians don’t support (indeed, vehemently oppose) is the pernicious idea that taxes should force other people to put their resources towards your (or a democratic majority’s) preferred statist ends. Being a good Samaritan with other people’s time and money is a morally worthless and tragically misguided cause–most especially when it results in absurd implicit marginal tax rates. Europe is, of course, worse.   Basically, our human tendency toward compassion should always be charitable–never forced nor an entitlement.

Now, U.S. tax law is far from perfect and in dire need of overhaul.  Pretty much everybody agrees on this except the makers of Turbo Tax, H&R Block, and lobbyists for companies benefiting from write-offs (e.g. General Electric, as was recently in the news).  So let’s fix those things, and let’s bring revenue and spending on a sustainable path.  But all this is independent of the misguided idea of taxation in the name of compassion.  We can easily do it with flatter effective tax rates.  And from a standpoint of sheer utilitarian economic efficiency, we should.