I think the $60 vehicle registration fee should never have been scrapped. I think the $50 million a year it brought in could fund better bus service. But if I voluntarily send in $60, knowing that no other car owner has to, then I’m just a sucker

It’s hard to know how to react to this week’s statement from Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong on the alleged proof that Torontonians oppose any increase in taxes.

“The deputants who come down to City Hall to say that they are prepared to pay more taxes, when we give them the option, they came up short,” he told council’s executive committee on Wednesday, according to a report in the Toronto Sun. He was speaking of an option given to Toronto taxpayers since 2012 to remit more money than they owe in taxes, voluntarily. This year, only 218 people availed themselves of the option, giving a little less than $20,000 in total. “They talk big on wanting to pay more taxes but when the public is given the option to pay more taxes they basically said no.”

Not since Shaquille O’Neal was taking free throws in the NBA has someone failed so frustratingly to get a point. I was raised to believe the polite reaction, when confronted with a blunt statement so stupid, is to ignore it out of pity for the speaker. But since in this case the speaker is a city councillor, the chair of the public works committee and a member of the executive committee that helps steer the government of the city, my pity is reserved for the citizens of Toronto he has been elected to lead.

And since it is apparently possible for a man to rise to such a station without being able to understand how and why the entire taxation system works, perhaps the more charitable approach is to view this as an educational opportunity.

If you, or I, or Councillor Minnan-Wong, or any of us were to crack an introductory political science or economics textbook, we’d learn about “collective action problems.” These arise when a group would benefit from some course of action if they all did it together, but the individual members of that group have rational reasons not to undertake that action alone.

The “tragedy of the commons” is the classic illustration, in which a group of shepherds share a field in which their sheep graze. It is important that animals don’t eat too much, because if they do the field will have no more grass on it and all them will go hungry. But an individual shepherd would benefit by letting his own sheep eat as much as they want. If some shepherds are letting their herd feast, then any shepherd who voluntarily puts his sheep on a diet is just sacrificing for nothing, since the grass will soon be gone anyway. Without rules that are enforced to limit every sheep’s diet, all the shepherds will have the incentive to let their own sheep be gluttons. That’s why you create a government: to get everyone following the same rules, to make the system function, and function fairly.

It doesn’t always work: even with governments aware of the problem, we still fished the Atlantic fishery to near-extinction, and we’re still failing, around the world, to deal with climate change, which is the mother of all collective action problems.

But taxation is a solution to a collective action problem: We’ll all benefit, individually and collectively, if the government has enough money to do the things we need it to do. But everyone has to contribute or it is both unfair and ineffective.

Let’s look at the case Denzil Minnan-Wong was talking about this week.

I’m someone who would not mind paying more in taxes. I think the $60 vehicle registration fee should never have been scrapped, for example. I think the $50 million a year it brought in for the city could fund better bus service across the city. But if I voluntarily send in $60, knowing that no other car owner has to, then I’m just a sucker. Because my $60, by itself, won’t make any difference to the city, it won’t fund much more than a single hour of a single bus driver’s wages. Bus service will not improve for anyone if I send in $60. And to add insult to injury, the benefits from any microscopic improvement in city service it does produce will be enjoyed equally by everyone in Toronto, even though I’m the only guy paying the bill.

Imagine if the city said that since it doesn’t have the money to build the downtown relief subway line, it would simply let those who think it should be built show up with a shovel and start digging the tunnel. Would you quit your job and start making a hole? Would your refusal to do so indicate you didn’t think the tunnel should be dug at all?

What about other areas? Should people who believe we need better policing be out solving crimes to demonstrate they are serious? Do you need to collect your neighbours’ garbage and take it to the dump to prove you support a curbside waste-disposal scheme? Does someone’s failure to let homeless people sleep on their couch mean they don’t believe the government should run a shelter system?

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Of course not. And a failure to submit voluntarily to pay more in tax than required doesn’t mean people aren’t willing to pay more in taxes if everyone has to. It just means they understand how taxes and government work better than at least one member of council.

In one sense, at least, Denzil Minnan-Wong’s statement has a kind of self-fulfilling logic. After all, who would want to pay more in taxes if they knew a guy that short-sighted was going to be making decisions about how to spend it?

Star columnist Edward Keenan appears weekly.

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