Taxing Citizens By Height?

It's all about redistributive justice, whatever that is.

Part of our motivation for writing for Scragged is that we like to counter as much of the ongoing liberal nonsense as we can.  Once in a while, we run across a liberal idea that so utterly blows our minds that we have trouble believing that the writers are serious.

The latest such paper was "The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution" by N. Gregory Mankiw and Matthew Weinzierl of the Harvard Business School, no less.  Their views were published as Working Paper 09-139.  The abstract says:


The first few times we read the abstract, we thought that the paper had to be a parody.  We later found it on the Harvard Business School web site where it has every appearance of being a genuine work product of Harvard University, intellectual home of Prof. Gates of recent fame.

Even then, we had trouble accepting the thought that there was such a concept as "optimal redistribution of income."  Yet not only is there, it apparently has garnered Nobel laurels.  The paper said:

Our results can be seen as raising a fundamental question about the framework for optimal taxation for which William Vickrey and James Mirrlees won the Nobel Prize and which remains a centerpiece of modern public finance. [emphasis added]

We understand the concept of "optimal taxation."  We've referred to the Laffer Curve, which points out that when the tax rate is 100%, government gets no revenue at all because nobody does anything that's taxed so heavily.  Every time the Republicans have managed to cut taxes, government income went up because the economy boomed.

There is a severe problem with that philosophy of taxation according to these Harvard professors:

More than a century ago, Francis Y. Edgeworth (1897) pointed out that a Utilitarian social planner with full information will be completely egalitarian.  More specifically, the planner will equalize the marginal utility of all members of society; if everyone has the same separable preferences, equalizing marginal utility requires equalizing after-tax incomes as well.  Those endowed with greater than average productivity are fully taxed on the excess, and those endowed with lower than average productivity get subsides to bring them up to average.

In other words, these Harvard folks are looking for ways in which the government can arrange taxes and welfare payments so that everybody has the same after-tax income.

The advantage of taxing height, they point out, is that a) taller people make more money than shorter people and b) height is easy to measure.  As evidence, they cite authors such as Anne Case and Christina Paxson who wrote that


The paper cites many other works which explore various taxation strategies to bring about the "optimal redistribution of income." They aren't seeking ways for government to maximize its tax revenue by encouraging economic activity, mind you; the goal of this research is to discover ways government can redistribute income simply for the sake of redistribution.

They aren't worried at all that high tax rates discourage people from working and lead to loss of government revenue:  "fairness" is more important than economic growth.

They're Serious, They Really Are

When we Googled the phrase "optimal redistribution of income", we found "Extremal and game-theoretic characterizations of the probabilistic approach to income redistribution" which was published in the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications and is available online.  The abstract says:

In this paper, we cast the problem of income redistribution in two different ways, one as a nonlinear goal programming model and the other as a game theoretic model.  These two approaches give characterizations for the probabilistic approach suggested by Intriligator for this problem.  All three approaches reinforce the linear income redistribution plan as a desirable mechanism of income redistribution. [emphasis added]

This paper was written by two professors from Texas state universities and one from UCLA.  The sponsorship note says:

This research was partly supported by ONR Contract No. N00014-82-K-0295 with the Center for Cybernetic Studies, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

ONR stands for Office of Naval Research.  The only reason we can see for the Navy to spend part of its research budget sponsoring research on income redistribution is that we've observed that all bureaucrats like to increase their budget.  The more money they can shovel out the door, the more money then can ask for next year.

To our shock and dismay, we find that optimization of income redistribution is not only an active field of academic research, it's being supported by our tax money.

The abstract of the Harvard paper said:


These professors seem to have convinced themselves that the government must tax people according to attributes such as height because without such taxes it will be impossible to capture "intuitive notions of distributive justice."

This is yet more evidence that liberals regard all income as belonging to them, and that they believe that the government must distribute everyone's income according to their intuitive notions of "distributive justice."

Ignoring Human Nature

The difficulty with these "models" of redistributive taxation is that they take no account whatsoever of human behavior.  Suppose you're overperforming by working very hard and get taxed for the "excess above average."  How long are you going to work that hard?

There is a natural tendency for people to follow whatever incentives they're given; people will compete to earn the least so that they can receive the greatest subsidies and profit from the labor of others.

30 years ago, a teacher in a public school in northern Massachusetts was trying to get her 6th grade students to learn arithmetic.  "You'll need to know this to get a job," she told them.  "Why should I get a job," one of her sharper students replied.  "I'm going on welfare like my mom."  If a 6th grader can figure this out, why can't a Harvard prof?

Karl Marx's fine-sounding economic model "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" doomed the Soviet Union to lose the Cold War because they couldn't match our military spending.  As factory workers found that their pay had little if anything to do with how hard they worked, productivity declined.  The money they earned became worthless because there was nothing much to buy.  The situation was summed up in the proverb, "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

Despite all the historical evidence that redistributive taxation destroys the economy so that there's nothing left to redistribute, our ivory-tower theoreticians persist in writing about newer and more complex mathematical models of more and more sophisticated redistribution schemes at our expense.

Making things happen in society is all about providing incentives.  Income redistribution, like every other liberal social policy, distorts incentives to do well, to make progress, and, yes, even distorts incentives to help other people.  Why help your neighbor?  Just let the government do it.

The power to tax is the power to destroy; liberal impulses to tax more and more of the economy are just another cover for progress towards totalitarian government. Margaret Thatcher put it best when she observed:


This paper reminds us, as if we needed reminding, how wise our Founders were to protect property along with life and liberty when they wrote the Constitution.  They must have known some pretty goofy liberals in their day to have felt so strongly about property rights.

How sad that we've let our national thought pattern get so far from property rights that liberals can speak of "redistribution" and "justice" in the same paper, and spend our hard-earned tax dollars doing it!

Reader Comments
Well I'm no Harvard professor (although that might just be a compliment at this point) but it seems to me that if the goal is taxing someone based upon his ability doing something like taxing him based on his height is a bad measure.

Height can not in anyway cause income to increase, businesses don't give raises based on height after all. Instead, assuming their numbers are correct, height is correlated to higher income. There are plenty of tall people that also have mental handicap after all.

People that are overweight tend to make less money than people with healthy amounts of body fat, should we give them a tax credit?

If you're interested in knowing what someone's income potential is, would looking at that persons income be a far better way to do it? How does taking more money from a 6'5" person earning the same amount as a 4'5" person make the world more 'fair?'

I agree with the article, I find this utterly unbelievable.

As a final thought, if we want everyone to have the same amount why don't we have 100% taxes and cut 45% off the top to run the government then redistribute all of the money to everyone evenly. Wouldn't that be the 'fair' thing to do? Far more 'fair' than taxing based on height.
September 2, 2009 12:53 PM
jonyfries, that's a pretty good definition of Communism right there. Except, of course, that "some are more equal than others" and not everybody gets exactly the same.
September 2, 2009 3:09 PM
Given the stated goal of equalizing after tax earnings is there really any other way to achieve that end?

A height tax makes the tall slaves to the short. Just as equal distribution makes the productive slaves to the unproductive.
September 2, 2009 3:13 PM
If you'd done a little research you would have discovered that Mankiw (former chairman of Bush's council of economic advisers) was writing a sort of "modest proposal" in an attempt to discredit income redistribution.

Read here:

Kind of sloppy of you to miss this if you ask me.
September 2, 2009 4:56 PM
I hope you're right, Werebat. But reading that link, it's still not clear to me exactly how they feel about the issue. At least the recognize the reality about how Obama feels.
September 2, 2009 4:59 PM

I thought the irony and true intent were pretty clear.

Here's a collection of the man's columns:

They might serve to further clarify his true opinions to those who miss the irony.

Even without this, he more or less comes out and states his true intent in the original paper:

"This paper can be interpreted in one of two ways. Some readers can take it as a small, quirky contribution aimed to clarify the literature on optimal income taxation. Others can take it as a broader effort to challenge
that entire literature."

The paper is an attempt at a reductio ad absurdium.

Offensicht should have been able to see that.

September 2, 2009 5:32 PM
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