2AC – Turn

O’Neill 20 – Lecturer in Moral & Political Philosophy in the Department of Politics at the University of York.

Martin O’Neill, “Power, Predistribution, and Social Justice,” Philosophy, vol. 95, no. 1, January 2020, pp. 71-72, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/power-predistribution-and-social-justice/02449FCC840979032236220D38D11A4F.

In their book The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel diagnose the conceptual errors embedded in the view they call ‘everyday libertarianism’. 22 This is, in effect, the view that there is a domain of economic activity, free of government intervention, that has conceptual (if not temporal) priority over really existing economic activity that takes place in the presence of government tax-and-spending. This ‘everyday libertarian’ fallacy explains what goes wrong when an individual thinks of their pre-tax income as in some sense robustly all ‘theirs’, with government intervention through the tax system then conceptualised as the expropriation of something that would otherwise belong to them. As Murphy and Nagel point out, what counts as somebody’s property is itself defined by the full system of property rights, of which the tax system is a part. The tax system is not some alien extrusion into the property system, but a constitutive part of it. Moreover, given that an individual’s market earnings will typically depend on a background of legal, social and physical infrastructure – from contract-enforcement to public roads – which itself depends on the tax system, it is not as if there exists some kind of normatively privileged possible world in which we somehow can have the benefits of the tax system without being taxed, and against which we should set the normative benchmark of our property entitlements.

Hence, what we might call the Murphy-Nagel objection to Hacker’s initial characterisation of predistribution is that there is something confused in talk of economic distributions ‘before government collects taxes or pays out benefits’ even when that before is understood as indicating a kind of conceptual rather than temporal priority. The mystification may be of a slightly different kind, but it persists in moving from the temporal reading of the phrase to the conceptual reading. Moreover, there would be an odd tension in Hacker’s position if it were to need to make use of this kind of conceptual prioritisation of pre- tax-and-spend economic activity. For bear in mind that, in Hacker’s instrumental case for the shift in focus from redistribution to predistribution, his argument is that the backlash fostered by redistributive policies feeds into ‘the conservative critique that government meddles with “natural” market rewards’. In other words, the political psychology of redistribution, in which people resent the government’s apparent appropriation of ‘their’ pre-tax income, is one that involves, and indeed reinforces, the conceptually muddled ‘everyday libertarian’ view to which Murphy and Nagel take exception. Given that Hacker’s instrumental objection to redistributive politics is that it feeds this muddled way of thinking about the relationship between government activity and economic rewards, it would therefore be odd if Hacker’s canonical characterisation of predistribution – conceived as an alternative strategy to familiar forms of redistribution – itself embedded its own version of this same kind of conceptual mistake.