The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. ~ Chinese Proverb
“That will be thirteen ninety-nine plus a dollar and one cent for tax,” said the clerk at Orchard Supply Hardware. I handed him my Visa card. After leaving the store with my wife on a beautiful Saturday morning in Monterey, the world looked suddenly rosier. I felt a profound sense of freedom. The reason was that I had paid $1.01 in tax, rather than the $1.04 I would have paid had the tax rate been 7.75% instead of 7.25%. The word for what I felt was eudamonia, a word I remember from my college study of Aristotle for a feeling of well-being. I felt a love for my fellow Monterey County residents, or at least 38% of them. I felt that in the politicians’ rush to take away our freedom, my allies and I had slowed it down and surprised the hell out of a ruthless, well-funded juggernaut. In the process, I discovered how even a fairly badly organized small group that is willing to make a moral case, take the offensive, and not back down when attacked can beat a much bigger group that thought it had the moral high ground and didn’t. Why, you might ask, would I get this excited about paying an outrageous tax instead of an even more outrageous tax? Had I, a man who believes that taxes should be close to zero, gone off my rocker? Maybe, but that’s not how I see it. Let me explain.
Four days earlier, Tuesday, December 2, 2003, the votes on the all-mail election had been counted. The issue on the ballot: should the sales tax rate be raised from 7.25% to 7.75% to fund Natividad hospital, a government-run, mismanaged (but I repeat myself) hospital? That wasn’t the ballot language, of course. The government officials who put the sales tax proposal on the ballot would never try to sway voters. No. Instead, the “Impartial Analysis by County Counsel” stated that the tax would “avoid life-threatening reductions in Natividad Medical Center’s healthcare delivery system.” No bias there. Just the facts, ma’am.
These are the opening 3 paragraphs of an article I wrote in January 2004 titled “The Reluctant Activist, or Not Only Can You Fight City Hall, You Can Actually Win.”
It’s one of the articles I promised to post in response to Janet Bufton’s post titled “The Other Kind of Romance in Politics,” EconLog, December 12, 2024. She had pointed out that it’s important to work for change when you’re in a democracy and not just give up on it. At least that’s what I got from her post. This is one of my stories of committing a lot of time to working against a tax increase.
Another excerpt:
This was new territory for both the pro-tax and anti-tax sides. The anti-tax side had to ask itself: how do we spend our $4,000, all in voluntary contributions, and our time, through November? The pro-tax side had to ask itself: how do we spend our $450,000, much of it collected from union members who had no say in how their money was used, on signs, incessant scare advertising on TV, and massive get-out-the-vote phone banks. And apparently some on the pro-tax side asked themselves, “How much time should we spend stealing the anti-tax side’s signs every night.” Almost 1,000 of our “No on Q” signs were stolen during the campaign, a fact we were to state often on talk-radio interviews.
I had come to this fight reluctantly. Not that I favored the tax, but rather, that I, like you, have a life. I have a wife I’m deeply in love with, and a daughter about to go off to college. I’ve been working on an academic article and a second edition of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. And there’s a certain amount of time in the week that I want to use to goof off – surf the TV, surf the web, take walks through the neighborhood. Was I willing to commit to thinking about this issue, writing letters, and talking to people for about five hours a week?
And, hearing from the “silent minority.”
When I had first joined the campaign, I had wondered what, if any, response I would get from my colleagues at the Naval Postgraduate School and from people generally in the community. A number of my colleagues have commented in the past, generally favorably, when I have an article in Fortune or the Wall Street Journal. But local politics is different for two reasons. First, a much higher percent of my colleagues and of my neighbors read or listen to local media than read Fortune or the Wall Street Journal. Second, local issues tend to generate more passion, I think because people feel more in control of local issues and feel hopeless about their ability to control national issues. I’m known somewhat in my town of Pacific Grove for my 10 years of coaching young girls in basketball, which began when my daughter started in 3rd grade and continued long past her participation because I enjoyed it so much. But, other than that, I’m somewhat anonymous in my community. So would people’s attitudes to me change?, I wondered.
I’m happy to report that they did. I noticed it first at a Navy school retirement party for a colleague. I went up to say hi to a senior economist colleague, one whom I’ve always liked and respected as an economist, but who, partly because he’s in a different department, I have not talked to at length for more than a decade. “I want to thank you for all you’re doing for us taxpayers. You’re performing a real public service,” he said.
In the community generally, I received an even more positive response. I ran into people in my everyday life who volunteered to me that they liked what I was doing and thanked me for it. After the campaign ended, a number of people volunteered that they and their spouse had voted “No.” One woman who had a daughter attending the same high school as my daughter wrote me a nice note thanking me and when I called her to acknowledge her note, we talked for half an hour. When I called a neighbor about a completely unrelated matter, she told me she had voted No and that she had been an employee at Natividad for 20 years and it was so badly run that it was beyond hope. So one of the most positive unintended consequences was that I felt like more a member of my community and more like a respected community leader.
Read the whole thing, which is long.
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