“Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets” by Sudhir Venkatesh

by Patrick Baker

Whoever has problems with the word “nigger” might very well have problems with Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. The N-word appears on nearly every page and begins to ring in the ears after a while. Yet (or perhaps, “for”) the word and its use are emblematic of the larger problem at issue in the book: the everyday life of poor blacks in America’s cities and the way it is studied and approached by academics and government alike.

    Early in the book, Venkatesh recounts how, as a young sociology PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, he finds out the hard way that his subjects are not, as he thinks, “black” or “African American” (N.B. the sociologist being trained today would use euphemisms like “urban” or “inner-city”). Having entered a gang-controlled building in the Lake Park projects to ask its inhabitants, among other things – “How does it feel to be black and poor?: (a) very bad, (b) somewhat bad, (c) neither bad nor good, (d) somewhat good, or (e) very good” (14) – Venkatesh receives from a young gang leader, J.T., the answer that sets the tone for the rest of the book, not to mention for his career as a sociologist: “I’m not black. . . . I’m not African American either. I’m a nigger.” J.T. explains, “Niggers are the ones who live in this building. African Americans live in the suburbs. African Americans wear ties to work. Niggers can’t find no work.” And finally – and here is the point for academics, politicians, and the American public – “You ain’t going to learn shit with this thing [i.e. the sociology survey]. . . . How’d you get to do this if you don’t even know who we are, what we’re about?” (16). Indeed, one wonders how the findings of sociology keep from stinking if the field does not recognize the basic identity of its subjects.

    Venkatesh gained renown for his description of the economics of crack dealing in Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics. Venkatesh’s research on drug dealing came from his attempt to answer J.T.’s challenge. For the next several years after their first encounter, Venkatesh followed J.T. around the Chicago projects, especially the infamous Robert Taylor Homes on the city’s South Side. Here are just a few of the fascinating things he learned about and reports on: the inner workings of gangs and their hierarchy; gangs’ symbiotic relationship with supposedly legitimate entities, like building managers, the housing authority, social workers, and even local government and the police; the unreported, underground economy in which residents, nearly all of them officially unemployed, participate; the absence of medical care, ambulance service, and law enforcement, and what residents do to compensate; the fear instilled by rogue criminals (i.e. those without gang affiliation) and the rare yet dependable drive-by shooting; the community-oriented outlook of drug dealers; the true sense of community that reigns in a place considered inhuman and unlivable by outsiders. In short, Venkatesh learns what it means to be a “nigger,” which turns out to be much worse, much better, and much more interesting than the rest of us imagine.

    Gang Leader for a Day provides the layman with an education in ghetto life. For the scholar, and more specifically for the social scientist or sociologist, it raises important questions – and challenges sacred assumptions – about the validity of statistically-based quantitative research. A predominant belief in social science is that statistics are the only way to measure salient features of economy, social life, psychology, and well-being. Only by sifting through large quantities of data can patterns be identified. Furthermore, according to this line of thought, qualitative studies, such as the one Venkatesh used for his book, tend to be too anecdotal or case-specific, and thus they cannot be used to formulate broad conclusions. But as long as statistics are based on questions as self-delusional as “how does it feel to be black and poor” – self-delusional, in this specific case, because for J.T. and his gang, blacks and African Americans are by definition not poor; so-called “niggers” are – how could their analysis lead to accurate generalizations? Social scientists have long been wary of the veracity of surveys, and they have long held their own prejudices and presuppositions suspect. What Venkatesh shows, though, is that their quantitative methods are haunted by a more basic problem: lack of experience, the experience that comes from daring to do extensive field research in places considered dangerous. It is this experience that is necessary for data to be meaningfully collected and intelligently interpreted. And thus it is experience that is necessary in order to reach informed policy decisions. It cannot be substituted by asking how it feels to be “black and poor.” According to Venkatesh, it can only be answered by going to see for oneself.

“Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert

by Patrick Baker

What results from a reading of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is first and foremost that the reading of novels is dangerous business. Well, certain novels. Romantic novels. Stories of love – not merely its consummation but more importantly its indulgence, its feeling on the bone, its transfiguration of the soul. What is different about the novel in question? Despite its (for the time) breathtaking depiction of the physical act of love and the ceremonies of courting, it would in no way inspire anyone to infidelity, much less to the foolish notion that love leads to happiness. Flaubert’s novel is an antidote to the Romantic novel. It explodes the commonplaces about Cupid’s gift, or, as it were, affliction, revealing it as the insistent self-delusion of the distressed mind. Passion is not the release or realization of the self; it is the self’s will to power manifested in a sick, perhaps the only, kind of possession open to the middle classes: the possession of another’s body, thoughts, and time, the conquest of another self.

    Flaubert explodes not only the myth of love but also that of pastoral bliss or simplicity. An obvious appreciator of nature and the pastoral setting, he is disarmingly honest about its ugliness. Romanticism’s Caravaggio, he describes oil floating atop rivers, broken-down dwellings, crumbling chateaus, the precise anatomy of cows, and a ubiquitous shabbiness. Of humans, only two content characters appear in the book, and only one of them might incite emulation. The first, whom no man could ever desire to imitate, is Madame Bovary’s indolent husband, Charles, content because oblivious to the point of solipsism. The other is her father, Père Rouard, content because he has what he needs, knows what he has, and respects what he has had in the past. He is simple but no fool, calculating but not deceptive, caring without limit. Yet for all his fine traits he is destroyed by the self-immolation of his daughter, whom he could lead to nothing better than a bourgeois existence.

    As for the French bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century, which might just be Flaubert’s true protagonist, it appears as an utterly execrable collection of nobodies: enlightened, self-important apothecaries, tavern-keepers unwilling and cantankerous, lascivious administrators, distracted vicars, busy-body homemakers, incorruptible lathe-operators, and earnestly incompetent medical officers pleased to masquerade as full-fledged physicians. And let us not forget the desperate housewife played by the title character. The poor below them fare even worse – only a filthy blind man enters the scene. As for the aristocracy, they are party-goers, horse-chargers, broke diamond-bearers, but above all corrupters. No one would err in calling them nobles.

    The only escape for a woman who has had visions of ecstasy – in this case the direct result of a juvenile flirtation with the Church, the reading of Romantic novels, and a single attendance at a ball – is to take comfort in the arms of illicit love. She will naturally fall prey to the aristocracy, although an up-and-coming specimen of the professional class, so long as he is thoughtful and sighs in all the right places, can equally claim the lien on her heart. What she yearns for is a fantasy of kings and princes, mistresses and ladies, being swept off her feet and waltzed around a room until dizziness overcomes her. Her heart has been penetrated by the ancien régime, whose twin pillars of greatness – Church and nobility – were emasculated by the Revolution, Napoleon, Voltaire, and decades of Restoration. Her tragedy is that her heart can never realize its desires, for modernity has rendered them illusions. The noble, the gallant, the beautiful, the majestic, the austere, the unapproachably foreboding – they have all vanished in a puff of semi-democratic nullity. The import of Madame Bovary is not that a lustful woman will not be satisfied by an affair, but that modern man would do best to forget his longing for a grand existence. That beautiful possibility has been obliterated by the benighted boringness of science, embodied perfectly in the doltish medical officer Charles Bovary. For we are all married to him, and we are all quietly desperate. But who among us has the strength of will to autodestruct in the name of transcendence? Or is that, too, worthless Romanticism? There is no way out, except perhaps to follow Flaubert’s example and write about it.

“The Great Books” by David Denby

by Joshua H. Liberatore

I’ve read a handful of books on the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, but none surpasses the lay critic David Denby’s The Great Books. Although I admire Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and tolerate portions of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, I find that such books are only interesting as philosophical or literary arguments; they don’t actually make me want to the read the precious books that form their core concern. Furthermore, straight-up polemics like William A. Henry’s In Defense of Elitism or E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy or William Bennett’s Book of Virtues, or any other politically motivated investigation of the curriculum debates that have wracked (and continue to smolder in) American universities over the past two decades, are limited in their practical impact for the same reason. Too often these ardent culture warriors, from both within and without the university and from both sides of the political spectrum, are so obsessed with looking at particular books and whole fields of study through the lens of “values” – liberal and conservative – that they ignore the most basic and crucial function of the reading experience: edifying the self.

    Denby’s perspective is not ideological but rather admirably selfish yet supremely earnest. He wants to reread the books for himself and find out what they have to say to him. A well-known film critic and journalist (now with the New Yorker), Denby decided “to go back to school” in 1991, attending core curriculum classes at Columbia University for a whole year, 30 years after he’d studied there as an undergraduate. He had two simple goals. His first goal was to see what the big fuss was all about. In 1991, Columbia was a lonely holdout, maintaining two required, year-long humanities seminars in the great books tradition under heavy fire from liberal critics. Many universities had already given up the fight, if they fought at all. Some had gone even farther and dismantled or at least reduced liberal arts requirements of any scope, including basic competency in a foreign language. In the face of all this ripe controversy and hand-wringing, Denby wanted to see whether the courses he took in 1961 were worth battling for a generation later.

    His second goal, inextricably linked with the first, was simply to feed his soul. He describes having felt intellectually depleted by his years in journalism and critiquing movies. He worries about the decline of his own reading skills. He’s stopped doing “serious reading” and become just another daily consumer of the New York Times. Also, as a denizen of New York, he sees crime and deterioration blighting a great city (and in one instance, experiences it directly) and wonders whether literacy or education might have anything to do with what is happening on the streets. But most principally, as an adult and a father, Denby wants to restore something basic and sacred in his cultural and mental machinery, something that the great books (he hopes) might exercise as nothing else could.

    These two goals are linked because, by the end of the book (and after the year of reading), Denby illustrates exactly what was missing in the ink spilled by renowned professors and intellectuals over “political correctness” at the university: the joys and sorrows of a direct reading experience. He puts himself into an actual laboratory, a functioning classroom of talented and diverse students at an elite Ivy League university, under the guidance of capable teachers, and well, just reads. And as he reads, he listens to the conversation, occasionally contributes a remark himself, and interweaves his own memoir into a thorough inspection of the role books play in his life. He lives the great books, not in any cliché sense, mind you – some of the books he finds boring and oppressive – but in the best, genuine significance of a reading life: explore, listen, discover, reflect, and apply.

    He fully admits that his “adventures with the indestructible writers,” as he calls them in his subtitle, are not always easy or pleasant excursions. Aristotle turns out to be quite tedious. Kant is insufferably convoluted and dense. Dante is flat in translation. Who in the Ivory Tower possesses the courage to confess such sentiments in writing, sentiments which nevertheless many devoted readers like Denby have felt and agreed with? On the other hand, to witness Denby’s passionate rediscovery of Homer, Montaigne, and Virginia Wolf – writers he’s sampled before but whose impact was minimal – rings with the triumph of awakening. Great writers speak in different tones to different people at different stages of life – that is why the books remain on reading lists and bookshelves after hundreds, even thousands of years. Their endurance has nothing to do with a white-wing cabal hell bent on enshrining the cultural values of European civilization in the face of diversity’s assault. It’s not to exclude the voices of those who have been left out of or have suffered under that grand narrative. And it’s not about shaping democracy or freedom or any other abstraction. These books keep getting taught because they simply refuse to stop speaking. And now, if you will excuse me, I need to reread The Brothers Karamazov.

POTUS and the Subtext of Tragedy

by Joshua H. Liberatore

Interrupting his prepared remarks for the closing session of the American Indian Tribal Nations Conference last week Thursday, POTUS spoke up on the breaking news that was blazing like an untamed wildfire across wire reports and Internet headlines by late afternoon:

My immediate thoughts and prayers are with the wounded and with the families of the fallen, and with those who live and serve at Fort Hood. And these are men and women who have made the selfless and courageous decision to risk and at times give their lives to protect the rest of us on a daily basis. It’s difficult enough when we lose these brave Americans in battles overseas. It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an Army base on American soil. (November 5, 2009)

POTUS chose his words carefully, measuring sadness and regret, gratitude and admiration, but wisely avoiding the anger and belligerence that were already surfacing in many media reactions from both sides of the political spectrum. The shooter, an American citizen from Roanoke, VA, was a Muslim. Murmurs of “terrorism” and “suicide mission” were already lurking on the lips of even NPR’s commentators. For his part, POTUS sought solace in general themes and trusted rituals, ordering flags to fly at half-mast through Veterans Day.

And it’s also recognition of the men and women who put their lives on the line every day to protect our safety and uphold our values. We honor their service, we stand in awe of their sacrifice, and we pray for the safety of those who fight and for the families of those who have fallen. (November 6, 2009)

What transpired at the Fort Hood Army base was surely a tragedy, a massacre of most ugly proportions (13 dead, 30 wounded). What makes it worse is the saddening alacrity with which justified alarm spills over into unthinking panic and brazen speculation. In the reduction process, crucial subtexts inevitably get ignored. If suspect Nidal Malik Hasan had been a Christian white man from Omaha, would we know within hours of the shooting what church he worshipped at? Would reporters already have interviewed his pastor? Would his family’s citizenship and ethnic heritage have come under immediate scrutiny? Thankfully, POTUS has been delicate. In his Saturday morning video address, he chose not to name Hassan, nor did he mention either the 39-year-old doctor’s self-proclaimed Palestinian identity or his Muslim faith.

This past Thursday, on a clear Texas afternoon, an Army psychiatrist walked into the Soldier Readiness Processing Center and began shooting his fellow soldiers. It is an act of violence that would have been heartbreaking had it occurred anyplace in America. It is a crime that would have horrified us had its victims been Americans of any background. But it’s all the more heartbreaking and all the more despicable because of the place where it occurred and the patriots who were its victims. (November 7, 2009)

The subtext of the incident is more complicated and painful than the mainstream media prefer to countenance, although the Washington Post did have the guts to run a fairly lengthy story on Hasan’s unhappiness in the Army, his intensive efforts to be relieved from service, his immigrant family’s secular and patriotic background. Hasan’s job both at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and at Fort Hood was to counsel wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, many of whom suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder, what in Freud’s day was more candidly titled “shell shock.” Hasan routinely complained of the harassment and ridicule he often received for being a Muslim after September 11. He argued with colleagues about the injustice of the wars that were breaking his patients’ nerves. According to relatives, he did everything he could to be discharged from the military, even offering to repay his medical school expenses.

The SRP is where our men and women in uniform go before getting deployed. It’s where they get their teeth checked and their medical records updated and make sure everything is in order before getting shipped out. It was in this place, on a base where our soldiers ought to feel most safe, where those brave Americans who are preparing to risk their lives in defense of our Nation, lost their lives in a crime against our Nation. Soldiers stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world called and emailed loved ones at Ft. Hood, all expressing the same stunned reaction: I’m supposed to be the one in harm’s way, not you. (November 7, 2009)

One of those soldiers about to be deployed was Hasan himself, a prospect that deeply upset him, and in the words of his aunt “he must have snapped.” Apparently, Hasan is not alone in his despair. In October alone, 16 U.S. soldiers committed suicide; the suicide rate among Army personnel is up 37% from 2008 and is now well above the rate for civilian Americans.

Thursday’s shooting was one of the most devastating ever committed on an American military base. And yet even as we saw the worst of human nature on full display, we also saw the best of America. We saw soldiers and civilians alike rushing to the aid of fallen comrades, tearing off bullet-riddled clothes to treat the injured, using blouses as tourniquets, taking down the shooter even as they bore wounds themselves. (November 7, 2009)

Though it received very little media attention, and only a brief, perfunctory statement from the White House, an eerily similar shooting took place last May at a psychiatric clinic at the dubiously named “Camp Victory” in Baghdad, in which Sgt. John M. Russell opened fire and killed five other soldiers. This bloody episode, all but ignored by the Iraq-weary American media, was nevertheless duly noted by the military, which commissioned a wider-ranging report that concluded: “There is no clear procedure or established training guidelines in any of the references for managing soldiers identified as ‘at risk’ for suicide or the proper way to conduct suicide watch.” A journalist who has looked into the conditions and procedures for psychiatric cases in the military discovered that soldiers who suffer from PTSD are often marginalized and punished; in some cases a profoundly bizarre and paradoxical bribe is offered: a troubled soldier lobbying for release from duty can purchase his freedom by agreeing to deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq.

We saw soldiers bringing to bear on our own soil the skills they had been trained to use abroad, skills that had been honed through years of determined effort for one purpose and one purpose only: to protect and defend the United States of America. We saw the valor, selflessness, and unity of purpose that makes our service men and women the finest fighting force on Earth, that make the United States military the best the world has ever known, and that make all of us proud to be Americans. (November 7, 2009)

Despite these bleak reminders of the deteriorating mental health of our military personnel, it’s no surprise that incidents like that of Fort Hood engender renewed praise for the heroism and dedication of our soldiers. Base commander Lt. Gen. Robert Cone summed up his assessment of the tragedy by applauding the first responders who shot Hasan and rushed to attend the wounded: “Suffice it to say . . . the American Soldier did a great job.” POTUS cautiously emphasized that comforting narrative as well, reminding us of the debt of gratitude we owe those whose job it is “to protect and defend the United States of America.” Is anyone asking whether that job has become altogether too onerous?

“I’m a Stranger Here Myself” by Bill Bryson

by Joshua H. Liberatore

America is a funny place, let’s be honest. And there’s no better writer to remind us of exactly why and how it is a funny place than the inimitable Bill Bryson. I’d read his Made in America last year and learned a great deal about the peculiarities of American English. Even in that more scholarly exploration, I’d enjoyed his wit, intelligence, and likable prose. So when I picked up I’m a Stranger Here Myself, his charming collection of short essays, I was ready for a reading experience that would juxtapose pleasantly with the heavy, sober themes that make up the lion’s share of my reading. More than ready for something both smart and light, I think I even needed Bryson’s kindly reprieve. I’m a Stranger is the type of book you pick up in a bookstore and read the first 10–15 pages of without trying, which you enjoy immensely, even laughing out loud at spots, but you hesitate to buy it in deference to your backlog of “serious” reading. Or perhaps you buy it as a Father’s Day gift for your dad and sneak in a few more chapters before wrapping it up and signing the card. And then, without planning or calculation, you return to it years later on a lark. At least, that has been my experience with Bryson, and he always rewards my odd loyalty.

    I’m a Stranger has an excellent premise, relevant to anyone who has traveled or lived overseas for more than a few months: the resplendent joy and sorrow of rediscovering America after a sizable absence. Originally from Des Moines, Bryson lived, married, and raised four children in England for over 20 years before relocating to Hannover, New Hampshire. His short articles – initially written for a British audience – read as postcards from the visitor we see in ourselves at those precise moments when we feel our own strangeness in the most familiar and intimate settings, the paradox of self-aware belonging. His topics of interest are as varied as America is broad: the national obsession with statistics, the reliable friendliness of service staff, the incompetence of our postal system, our propensity for absurd waste, the special feel of a true classic diner, our consummate hatred of walking even the shortest distances, the immensity of New Hampshire’s forests, the bedazzling abundance of junk food in our grocery stores, the fundamental illegibility of all owner’s manuals, the endless silliness of new gadgetry.

    The list goes on and on. Bryson’s range is impressive, and though his main purpose seems bent toward making us laugh, he also leverages keen observations on more serious fare. Some of the pieces in I’m a Stranger focus on the idiosyncrasies of living in a small, New England town, but even these avoid becoming parochial. Writing in an era just before the dawn of personal blogging, Bryson reminds us – and we do need reminding – that making daily analysis of one’s surroundings and milieu need not be banal or exclusionary. This is “occasional” writing, in the sense carried by genre paintings in an earlier age, the stuff of everyday life brought to a level of insight and scrutiny that is neither so specific that it alienates nor so general that it bores. And Bryson is a master at the craft. Not every piece is first-rate, of course, but all have something unusual to offer. Bryson feels a curious mixture of affection, bemusement, and disdain toward American life and culture that is, for this fellow stranger anyway, nothing short of irresistible reading.

Rethinking Taxation: A Flight of Fancy

by Joshua H. Liberatore

I’ve been reading the Federalist Papers recently on the subject of taxation, and an interesting convergence with a contemporary issue has surfaced quite suddenly: the nagging disconnect between fee and service. A lot of penetrating articles have accompanied the health care debate on the faulty linkage between cost and quality in the health care industry. In particular, the employer-based insurance model that characterizes (and often circumscribes) most Americans’ health care choices and consumption has handicapped them as smart and rational purchasers of theoretically competitive services. Since insurance companies foot 60–80 percent of most health care purchases, and employers pay 50–75 percent of insurance premiums, we as consumers don’t develop the savvy shopping skills we might exercise for the myriad other spending choices we make every day. Furthermore, we don’t hold providers immediately accountable for quality of service, and we don’t enjoy any good mechanism by which to do so. And when we do have complaints about billing, we tend to blame the insurance companies or the gap in our employer’s coverage.

    Isn’t the same true of the bulk of our tax burden? Where does it go? What does it pay for? How efficient is the government in allocating the money that gets shaved off our paychecks? Unless we are really paying attention, we simply don’t know. Even if we are interested in these questions and decide to look into a particular area of government spending such as education or farm subsidies, the answers aren’t readily forthcoming. Indeed, the search itself quickly becomes overwhelming. But what if we knew exactly what sort of government programs we were subsidizing with every consumer choice we made in the so-called free market. What if our taxes carried an inherent connection – thematic, associative, or in some cases, palliative – to our consumption patterns, a connection we could observe everyday? A romantic fantasy on that order seems worth pursuing.

    Since the earliest days of our republic, taxation has been the issue par excellence of our national (and perhaps local) politics. Almost everything we argue about politically comes down to the raising and spending of tax revenues, a recognition which ranks the moral and social dimensions of political questions as categorically useful but functionally secondary concerns. Let’s face it: It’s all about the money and for what purpose it is spent in our name. It’s a simple point perhaps, but in reading Hamilton discuss taxation in a more theoretical vein in his Federalist essays, several bright lights ignited for me. The principal observation is to recognize how much, for example, we take taxation – income and sales taxes, in particular, less so property taxes – for granted. Considering only the first two types of taxes for now, the possible virtues of a completely different arrangement in raising the necessary capital for the good of society, often called consumption taxation, capture my fancy. When we explore the range of benefits offered by consumption-based taxation, we cannot help but be compelled by its rational and ethical soundness.

    Let me start with a crucial disclaimer. My views on this subject, I grant, are very un-American, principally because consumption taxes tend to penalize consumer choices and might be seen to impinge on the free market, which though nonexistent in practical terms, inspires our faith and awe at every turn. But income taxes have their own ethical and practical shortcomings. Liberals don’t like to complain about taxation being heavier on the rich by percentage, if not in absolute terms. Many liberals even tend to favor a more sliding, redistributionist tax scheme whereby middle class folks see tax cuts proffered them while wealthy people fund continued government expansion. This is certainly the case with the current health care debate. These notions play well with most voters, the vast majority of whom find themselves, somewhat sadly, not among the most wealthy, even though politicians often talk as if we are the most important people in the world, the very bedrock of American prosperity.

    But intellectually, I’m not sure how progressive taxation favoring the middle class can be honestly defended as fair, unless one champions the argument that rich people have more to gain from government programs, which has the advantage of being true, in the sense of overall social influence and political clout. The paradox is not overly subtle: although politicians address their remarks to middle class audiences, they direct their policies toward the economic elite who fund campaigns and peddle power. Income-based taxation only conceals the basic injustice of that scenario, however. We don’t say, for example, that rich people should, by virtue of being rich, pay more for food, manufactured goods, property, or services. It just so happens that rich people make these choices on their own. Under no compulsion, wealthy folks tend to eat in fancy restaurants, shop at Whole Foods, buy expensive electronics and cars, avail themselves of pricier travel, financial, and health care services, and live in more affluent neighborhoods in bigger, costlier dwellings. Nothing wrong with that, is there?

    Here’s where consumption taxation comes in. If people were taxed based on what they spend rather than what they earn, not only would it be ethically superior and intellectually defensible, we could also bring some interesting connections to bear on government services, linkages which are much more politically useful and meaningful than the distance inherent in progressive income taxes. I begin with my pet concerns as examples: pollution and the environment. If gas taxes applied directly to fund a whole suite of environmental and ecological mitigation measures – everything from national parks, the Department of Interior’s operating budget, wetlands and forestry preservation, water and air cleanup efforts, carbon offset purchases, just to name a few, the fuel we love to burn would contain within its very combustion the money needed to palliate against the damages automobiles cause. Similarly, a flat, fixed-rate tax (or one levied in proportion to price, weight, efficiency) could be paid on each automobile or vehicle purchased that could be used to pay for the car’s lifecycle waste management, material recycling and reclamation, highway and bridge maintenance and repair, public transportation infrastructure, Department of Transportation programs, and the like.

    Now, understand, to be effective, these taxes would have to be high and somewhat onerous, but they’d be functionally off set by the refreshing and novel absence of income tax. We’d get to keep our entire paychecks, and any raises and bonuses we happen to receive would fully translate into new income rather than getting lost in tax adjustments and deductions. Instead, our consumer choices would carry all the burden of their eventual cost to society, both realized and invisible. Many economists are already talking about the advantages of true pricing for our energy costs, adjustments that would reflect the genuine cost of our energy use not just the base retail price, what economists call accounting for externalities. Politically, it’s a difficult sell, but the need for true pricing is slowly gaining traction now that some sort of fledgling carbon legislation seems imminent. True pricing is, of course, a “free-market” alternative to government regulation, no less insidious than your average airline government subsidy. Consumption taxation combines these strategies and applies them to all purchases, not just energy use.

    In a consumption-based tax scheme, of course, each consumer category carries a different tax rate, a little like states levying different sales tax rates for groceries, liquor, cigarettes, hotels, airplane tickets. And certain things we purchase, like gasoline at the pump, already have targeted taxes that presumably go to good use. So the idea is not entirely foreign, but the taxes are by and large too low, especially in the case of the gasoline tax, and we have no idea or don’t care what the beneficiaries do with the money. But if these categories had thematically-connected and thus logical links to government services and programs, we’d begin to notice powerful adjustments in consumer behavior, adjustments that signify meaningful solutions to real problems. A Democratic Congress already attempted to achieve something like this back in 2006 when they suggested funding a renewal of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program with a new cigarette tax, arguing that higher taxes would discourage smoking. President Bush threatened to veto the measure, and not until the Obama Administration took power in 2009 did SCHIP, which provides health insurance to 11 million children, finally get a new lease on life.

    Take food as another example. Our groceries are already taxed at a different level than our cars and computers, but groceries as a category are already quite broad and problematic. On one level, we’d want to see the grocery tax go directly to things that we already pay for (farm subsidies, international food aid, agricultural land management programs, rural poverty mitigation, the Food and Drug Administration). In the cases of USDA farm subsidies (current loyalty: agribusiness lobbies) and the FDA (current loyalty: pharmaceutical companies), a consumption tax might have quite an educational effect on the American consumer, who would begin to comprehend and scrutinize the program he was paying for each time he purchased produce, canned corn, pork chops, or Tylenol. Smart consumption taxation could provoke some healthy debate about the value and efficiency of these programs because we’d be directly investing in their continued operation on a daily basis.

    On another level, we’d also want to see some disaggregation in the taxes we pay on food, and this is where the potentially frightening, fascistic component of my proposal begins to send red flags up to libertarians. A large and broadly mandated Federal agency like Health and Human Services (responsible for Head Start programs and disease research at the CDC) would see a cut of the grocery and restaurant taxes, but certain divisions could carry different tax burdens. Food purchases outside of a small grouping of fresh produce, staple grains, meat, and dairy – your sugar cereals, cookies and chips, all beverages other than water, coffee, and tea – would carry a premium tax to cover the costs of heart disease research and obesity reduction programs, as well as Title I free lunch programs in public schools. It sounds a bit totalitarian, and perhaps it is, but its advantage is the enormous potential to outweigh any ideological discomfort when, again, we consider that we wouldn’t be paying any income tax. Most middle class people’s incomes would rise by almost 20 percent, real money by any standard.

    I’ve mentioned only Federal programs and expenditures so far, but some kind of local taxes would still be necessary, perhaps based on property or rent taxes, to pay for law enforcement, municipal waste disposal, and all basic local-level services. But we’d do away with state income tax: state government budgets would all have to come from property consumption, toll fees on state roads and bridges, business taxes, and perhaps a per capita slice from the Federal levy on general consumption. Again, consumption would be directly linked to service quality and availability. We’d know exactly where our money was going and why.

    Obviously, I’m not an economist, and I have no mathematical notion of how specific numbers and category breakdowns would have to look in order to imitate the current revenue stream from income taxes. My guess is that you could gradually scale back overhead budgets for most of the Federal agencies, as the consumption taxes started to settle into their mitigation role. Gas taxes would be made high to encourage less driving, for example, so roads become cheaper and fewer to maintain; meanwhile, public transportation revenues steadily increase, and their additional funding from gasoline and car purchases allows them to expand and serve more areas, meeting the needs of more consumers who are responding rationally to the new incentive scheme and driving increased demand.

    As drivers begin to understand that they are directly subsidizing subway riders (and they already are, just through income taxes), they will take a good look at their consumption levels. A consumption-based tax scheme necessarily involves what seem like moral choices made by the government on behalf of consumers, a nanny state telling people what’s good and bad for them, penalizing the bad and rewarding the good. If that seems outrageous and draconian, let’s remember that our current taxation scheme already makes those same choices, but the connections to services are opaque to consumers, since the apparent neutrality of income taxes being skimmed from our pay checks merely conceals the destination of funds by dumping them into a huge pot. Hence, any perceived moral neutrality in the current scheme is illusory.

    Now, you may wonder how national defense fits into this. My answer is simple and will undoubtedly appear naive: when “national defense” returns to the more modest and truthful meaning it enjoyed for Hamilton and Madison, we will find that it costs infinitely less. Currently, we spend more on so-called defense than the rest of the world combined, more than nine times what our nearest rival China spends on “defending” a population of 1.3 billion people. Just let those numbers sink in a bit. How good is the defense we get for such an absurdly high cost? Was our Pentagon able to defend the passengers on United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001? No, but the passengers organized and defended themselves, at least to the effect of preventing the plane that carried them from becoming a weapon of mass destruction. Since Elaine Scarry has already illustrated the profound ironies of that case study in her fine essay “Citizenship in Emergency,” I will limit my discussion to a few simple points. Under a consumption-based tax scheme, we’d be looking at cutting the military budget by at least two-thirds and much-reduced armed forces. (If you examine the corresponding numbers before World War II – only two generations ago – you will see that a small standing army is not historically impossible to achieve.)

    Perhaps a basic per capita annual head tax could be levied to fund the armed forces, called up only during real national emergencies (not the dozens of “national emergencies” currently in force with respect to places like Zimbabwe and Burma). This head tax would be returned as a full rebate to anyone willing to serve in the military, whether as an active duty soldier or in a civilian support capacity. Just imagine how different our debates would be about what constitutes “national security” interests, by far the fattest, juiciest lemon the American public has been swallowing year after year since 1948. Imagine the reticence we would intimately feel in making the choice to go to war. With only a small standing army, taxes would naturally have to be increased to pay for mobilization, so we would think carefully about when and why to do it. We would never reelect a President who sent our soldiers on a colossally expensive fool’s errand in Iraq, as we did in 2004 (if by a tiny margin), a blunder which are still paying for in lives and treasure. We would never maintain bases in advanced industrialized countries like Japan, Italy, South Korea, and Germany, all with their own armies, financially and technologically equipped to defend themselves. One thing is clear: If we paid for war more directly, a lot would change.

    An important caveat remains the unemployed and indigent. How would we design the system to accommodate for the underprivileged? In a pure consumption-based taxation model, the bag of chips a bank teller buys costs the same as the one bought by the pensioner, the widow, and the public housing resident. To avoid punishing poor people with a system that makes basic items and services quite a bit more expensive, appropriate vouchers and government benefits would have to be arranged. Food stamps, unemployment insurance, and public housing could all still exist, but their funding would have to come through subsidies provided by other consumer products.

    What about government programs that have no tangible connection to average consumers, agencies like NASA and the Peace Corps? One option is to cut them, which in the case of moon exploration and expensive space toys for scientists to play with, I for one would shed nary a tear. The Peace Corps is relatively cheap to run (compared to NASA at least), however, and if we wanted to keep it and other small humanitarian agencies, we might have to designate a special tax or find a logical connection to a related consumer product. We’d probably start having to pay for the Smithsonian museums too.

    Romantic idealism at its most ambitious? Merely as an intellectual exercise, this flight of fancy can teach us a lot though. At least it helps clarify the powerful disconnect we necessarily feel under the current scheme with the way our income-based tax revenues are spent on our behalf. After all, our employers take care of the hassle of paying taxes for us. Most of us don’t even look at the numbers until February or March. What would it be like if we noticed several times a day, observing different taxes levied on all the consumer choices we make all the time. We’d start paying attention. We’d start holding specific government programs more accountable; otherwise, we’d vote with our feet in our consumption patterns. Would it be such a bad thing? Of course, not everyone would pay attention to these new taxes and some people frankly wouldn’t care. But at least their negligence would be paid for, and the SUV-driving, chain-smoking, junk-food eating, trash-tossing warmongers would subsidize the consequences of their choices instead of leaving it to others to clean up the messes their habits make. Now that’s my idea of freedom.