Conservatives often level the charge against progressives that they tax too much, that the taxation levels demanded by ever-expanding progressive government programs place the common man under undue financial strain. But they only talk about formal taxes, taxes levied explicitly by governments—and formal taxes are only half of the story.
Bad governance has costs beyond taxation, beyond even the direct hits to the economy that conservatives charge progressive initiatives with causing. These costs are some of the most visible to the common man, but they go unnoticed nevertheless; many today are reluctant to see policy problems as policy problems, rather than unfortunate inevitabilities. I like to think of them as informal taxes: the revenue doesn’t go to the government, and the penalties of noncompliance aren’t as severe as for formal taxes, but they still exist, and are created by progressive misgovernment. Consider the policy of forced busing, which progressives championed in the ’70s. Specifically, consider its effects.
After some ten years of legal battle in the state courts, mandatory busing began in Los Angeles in the Fall of 1978. The plan was limited to grades 4 through 8 and the effects were devastating on those schools in the plan. An astonishing 60 percent of the 20,000 white students to be bused never showed up at their minority receiving school, and some individual minority schools lost over 80 percent of the bused white students. Most of these white students moved to the suburbs or transferred to private schools. … regated. If these figures sound shocking, consider the geography of Los Angeles: white and minority concentrations live so far apart that the average bus ride was nearly fifty minutes one way, and some bus rides actually lasted ninety minutes! …
White flight from mandatory busing is not confined to Los Angeles. Indeed, massive white flight has occurred in nearly every central city undergoing court-ordered mandatory busing. But the federal courts have paid little attention. White enrollment in Boston public schools, which began busing in 1974, has dropped from 57 percent to only 35 percent today; white enrollment in Denver schools has likewise declined from 57 to 41 percent over a similar period. Although some of this white decline is due to natural demographic factors, analysis shows that about half of it has been caused by the busing.
In short, busing led to widespread White exit: either to the suburbs or to private schools. But neither of these forms of exit are free. Living in the suburbs imposes not only the cost of buying a new house, which is not small change by itself, but often the temporal and financial costs of a longer commute; and private schools aren’t cheap either.
Things today aren’t much better. Many cities are unlivable and ungovernable; many public schools no longer make any but the most perfunctory attempts at pretending to have anything whatsoever to do with education. This is not inevitable. These conditions are policy problems: results of misgovernance. And this misgovernance has costs: if you have to send your children to private school, if you have to live in the suburbs, that’s money that, if your area had a better government, you could spend on other things.
Even when the children graduate from those private schools, the invisible taxes still have costs. Colleges impose budget cuts that slash faculty rolls while never touching the ever-expanding diversity bureaucracy, some of whose employees make six figures. As Alex Kurtagić put it, every tolerance officer is the absence of a cancer researcher. Progressivism in academia not only has the cost of diverting resources away from medical research; it also shows up in the rising cost of tuition. Some of that $50k a year is going to people who, whether they’re victim-studies professors or six-figure diversicrats, get paid just to push their ideology.
Remember: these costs don’t arise naturally from the æther, inevitable and uncaused: they are the result of progressivism. If you have to send your children to private school because the public one is dysfunctional, if you have to drive to work because the public transportation is unreliable and unsafe, if you’re paying $50,000 a year to a college that hires victimologists and diversicrats while cutting the teaching ranks, if you can no longer find a place to live in an area both affordable and civilized—you are paying an invisible tax.
-
Mark Power
