THREE weeks ago, I asked my wife whether we could institute a new rule that whoever gets up last in the morning should make the bed. The burden of this rule might not fall equally, but it's hard to predict who would bear it more: she gets up first more often than I do, while I find unmade beds more annoying than she does and am less put out by making the bed. Anyway, I don't think either of us consciously tried to calculate out the relative cost/benefits, and my wife quickly agreed to the rule because it seemed basically fair and, while she values made beds less than I do, she does place a non-zero value on them. Compliance has been spotty, but that's a different issue.

But imagine, now, that my wife had instead said: "Since you're the one who thinks the bed needs to be made, why don't you make it?" What response would she have been likely to receive? I would think it would have been an emotional response, rather than a cool and reasoned one. This doesn't mean that a cool and reasoned rebuttal of the position isn't possible or convincing. It's just that it's probably not the first response that would come to mind.

I think this may help Tyler Cowen understand why the argument that people who think taxes should be higher ought to voluntarily pay more taxes themselves tends to elicit emotional responses, rather than cool and reasoned ones. Mr Cowen allows that the argument is "juvenile", in the sense that he was already referring to it in high school, but thinks it is probably nevertheless right. This is incorrect. The argument is juvenile in the sense that people older than high-school age should not take it seriously.

Mr Cowen begins by referring to a version of this argument made by Steven Landsburg in April, who suggested that Barack Obama was not sincere in his desire to raise taxes on the wealthy because he did not, himself, send in more taxes than he actually owed. I'm going to speak to this version of the argument first, and then move on to Mr Cowen's own version, which is a bit different.

Mr Landsburg's argument ran thusly: Mr Obama believes repealing the Bush tax cuts would be a good idea. Say Mr Obama could contribute an amount one-millionth the size of the Bush tax cuts. Then Mr Obama could do something one-millionth as good as repealing the Bush tax cuts all by himself. Hence, he should.

Now, I believe that repealing the Bush tax cuts would be a good idea because it would dramatically reduce the size of the federal budget deficit, which would reduce the risk of ratings agencies downgrading US government debt, and also reduce the interest rates the government has to pay years down the line, once we get out of our current liquidity trap. That deficit reduction would also make it less likely that Congress will, in the future, decide to make large cuts to Medicaid or to the subsidies envisioned in the Affordable Care Act in order to narrow the deficit. But if Barack Obama sent in an extra $200,000 in taxes this year, it would not make it one-millionth less likely that S&P will decide to further downgrade the creditworthiness of US government debt, or slightly reduce the interest rates on US treasury bonds in 2018. Nor will it make it one-millionth less likely that Congress will decide to slash Medicaid or the Affordable Care Act's subsidies. The effect on these decisions will not be very small; it will be zero. An individual who decides to pay more taxes than necessary does not have a small effect on government finances and decisionmaking; he has no effect at all, for roughly the same reason that I cannot huff and puff and blow down the Empire State Building, not even a little bit. The dynamic Mr Landsburg fails to account for here is that large-scale action by large-scale actors is not just an aggregation of millions of tiny actions by tiny actors. Big collective things are qualitatively different from little individual things. Said the vertebrate to the microbe.

There is a second dynamic which Mr Landsburg fails to account for as well: free-ride problems. For example, let's say that Mr Landsburg does not believe that taxes should be higher. It follows that he believes that the government is currently funded at a sufficient level to accomplish the tasks he thinks it should perform. If Mr Obama or anyone else gives the government more money, Mr Landsburg should logically conclude that he should now have to pay even less, since the government needs less of his money to be funded at what he considers an adequate level. And he should push in the political arena for tax rates to be lowered to the point where they cancel out the revenue effect of Mr Obama's contribution. In this fashion, anyone who voluntarily contributes more to the common kitty simply creates an incentive for others to contribute less, and ends up paying those other people's dues for them. The more people join a movement to voluntarily pay more taxes, the more others will be inclined to shirk.

There are a lot of other issues I could add here; an argument that is very wrong is usually wrong in many ways. But I'm going to move on to Mr Cowen's argument, which is more subtle.

Mr Cowen doesn't say that people who want higher taxes should pay more taxes. He doesn't mention taxes. Instead, he asks: "Should redistributionists feel compelled to give more of their own money away?" By shifting the issue from taxes to the ill-defined "redistribution" and "giving money away" (further on he uses the term "charity"), Mr Cowen avoids the government large-actor/decision-point problem. But he raises a more serious problem: "give more" compared to what?

For example, I'm not sure what Mr Cowen means by a "redistributionist", but I certainly believe that rich people should pay more taxes and that government should provide subsidies so that every American gets health insurance. So I probably fit the bill. Hence, the argument would be that I should give "more" of my money away. And I agree! I should give more away than just paying my taxes, which is why I contribute to various charities and non-profit organisations.

Surely this can't be all that Mr Cowen means to say, because it's trivial; the argument disappears. But what does he mean to say, then? Is he saying that since I believe taxes should be higher, I should give away more of my income to charity than someone who doesn't think so—Mr Landsburg, perhaps? But why? I don't know how much Mr Landsburg gives to charity, which charities he gives to, or what he's trying to accomplish by doing so. And my giving more money to, say, NPR or to a traditional-puppetry school for orphans in India, will do nothing whatsoever to get every American health insurance, which is (partly) the goal I envision for higher taxes. What charity could I contribute to that could conceivably lead to the establishment of universal health insurance in America? I could donate to the advocacy organisation Physicians for a National Health Program, but that can't be the kind of charitable giving Mr Cowen has in mind. So how does my belief that taxes should be higher have anything to do with a comparison of my charitable giving to Mr Landsburg's or anyone else's?

Or maybe he means "more than they are giving now?" If this is held to be true for all values, the function runs to 100%, which is a problem; but that's also a traditional precept of Christian morality, and I think a wide variety of people do in fact live with the sense that they should basically always be giving more to charity. Mr Cowen closes his post by saying: "The best response is to accept the argument and admit one's partial moral inferiority: 'The people who give more, yes, in some important ways they are better people than I am.'" Again, fine by me, and if you went among the progressives and asked, "Do you think you ought to be giving more to charity?", I have a hunch the answer "yes" would be widespread. So what?

But I don't really think this is what Mr Cowen means. I think he actually means to imply something more like what Mr Landsburg said: that people who think taxes should be higher ought to start by contributing extra themselves. And I think that misconstrual of what taxes are is the reason why this argument tends to elicit emotional responses. Like my wife's hypothetical answer to the proposed bed-making system, this argument makes a basic mistake about social rules and communication. It takes a proposal about the rules for a collective activity, and responds as though there were no collective and no basis for having rules. My wife would never have responded with an answer like that, because she's not a jerk. Nobody with a normal understanding of social behaviour would respond with an answer like that, unless they were deliberately trying to be insulting. And I think people would generally assume that Tyler Cowen and Steven Landsburg are probably nice, decent people who understand normal social behaviour. So the sense when you read an argument like this one is that these people are deliberately pretending not to understand the rules of normal social behaviour, which feels insulting. Hence, I would think, the emotional responses.