Stop Microlooting the Tax Code

The demand for hyper-specific tax exemptions is just a more respectable manifestation of the same impulse that leads people to justify shoplifting.

Dear readers,

Nobody thinks they should have to pay for anything anymore. I will get to how this applies to the tax code, but let me first talk about shoplifting’s rebrand as “microlooting,” a term proposed by New York Times opinion editor Nadja Spiegelman. Spiegelman interviewed writer Jia Tolentino, who openly bragged about shoplifting from Whole Foods, justifying her theft on the grounds that corporations steal from their workers, so why shouldn’t we steal too, especially if we’re out shopping for our neighbors as part of “mutual aid” activity?

…Every week I would go get groceries for Miss Nancy, my now family friend who lived nearby, and she wanted to go to Whole Foods. She wanted food from Whole Foods. And I was like, OK, great. And so I’d be getting Miss Nancy all of her groceries, and then I would finish, and I’d be like, oh my God, four lemons, I forgot four lemons. And on several occasions I was like, I’m just going to go back, grab those four lemons and get the hell out.

For Tolentino, this is frivolous anarchy-chic (“I think that stealing from a big box store — I’ll just state my platform — it’s neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action”). The streamer Hasan Piker emphatically agrees with her in the interview: “I’m pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers.” People have good reason to mock both of them over this defense of shoplifting,¹ but the truth is that a lot of people are looking for more-formally-acceptable ways to get out of the social contract, and I’d like to show them some of the scorn that’s been shown to Tolentino for her lemon theft.

One of the key problems with Tolentino’s defense of shoplifting is that the system would fall apart if everyone did what she did. If we all stole our groceries from Whole Foods, there would be no Whole Foods; Tolentino depends on other people honoring the social contract so lemons can be available for her to steal. Yet lots of people who know it would be wrong to steal from the supermarket want to write special treatment for themselves into the tax code that could not sustainably be offered to everyone — and increasingly, politicians are pandering to these requests.

It started with Donald Trump and “no tax on tips,” a proposal that Kamala Harris then copied. The idea is that certain kinds of work — hospitality work, apparently — deserve better treatment than other work by traditional wage-earners or proprietors. This got written into the 2025 tax law, along with a special tax break for seniors. Now, politicians all around the political spectrum are proposing to cut their own holes in the tax base for preferred groups. No income tax for teachers. For veterans. For police. A special new tax break for renters. No property tax for seniors.

Vegetables and fruits, including a bevy of lemons, were stacked neatly inside the produce area as employees prepared for the grand opening of Whole Foods Market in Commack, New York on April 2, 2019. (Photo by Steve Pfost/Newsday via Getty Images)

Just like someone has to pay at Whole Foods, someone has to pay income tax. But politicians are increasingly indulging voters who say: don’t tax me, I’m special; tax someone else. This causes a problem for financing necessary operations of government, but it’s also morally wrong to seek out special treatment that could not sustainably be offered to everyone. We need to bring back an ethic in this country that says we hold ourselves to the same civic expectations that we impose on others. If we expect others to pay taxes to finance the government services we rely on, we should understand that implies an obligation to pay taxes of our own — in similar amounts to other people with similar financial resources.²

To some extent, the breakdown of the ethic of shared responsibility arises from a perception of widespread cheating throughout society. It would behoove politicians to take cheating more seriously, because better enforcement would improve social trust — Republicans should not defund IRS enforcement or pardon scammers, and Democrats should not justify fare-beating or look the other way when social service programs get macrolooted. But I put most of the blame here on a public that’s looking for excuses to shirk their own civic responsibilities. There’s always cheating going on somewhere that you can use to justify why you personally shouldn’t have to pay to uphold the system, but other people’s bad behavior cannot justify our own — that’s the classroom rule we were all taught, but a lot of people seem to have forgotten.

It’s worth noting that, while even as many left-wing Democrats with expansive ambitions for government spending have been jumping on the tax-cuts-for-special-people bandwagon, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an exception. She demonstrates she knows the progressive project depends on getting the broad public to pay taxes and feel that they’re getting something for it.

"This race to try to see who can be exempt from participating in society is not a conversation that I'm interested in," she told Sahil Kapur of NBC News last month. "I'm a Great Society Democrat, and I believe in building that together. And I think that the discourse around 'Everyone, let's all be like billionaires and opt out of our taxes,' I don't find it an inspiring message."

AOC is right, and what she says there applies regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum. Everyone who isn’t an anarchist is committed to some sort of joint governing project that relies on an understanding that taxes are the price of a civilized society, not a burden that can be placed only on those we deem morally unworthy. The necessary tax rates depend on how big a government you want, but all these systems rely on people paying taxes.

The environment of decreased social trust is making people miserable, and I understand politicians’ impulse to tell each individual voter he or she is special and deserving of special exemptions from societal expectations. But I also think there has to be a hunger in this country for a return to a more grown-up society, where we set high standards for others and for ourselves and we all share responsibility for making institutions work. That means not stealing lemons from Whole Foods. But it also means being willing to pay the income tax.

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Have questions for me? Send them to josh@joshbarro.com and we’ll be coming at you with another edition of the Mayonnaise Clinic soon.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. One of the especially mockable elements of the interview was when Tolentino and Piker both said they were against stealing from libraries but in favor of stealing from the Louvre. The Louvre, like a library, is a government-owned institution that preserves cultural heritage on the behalf of the citizenry. But despite their socialism, Tolentino and Piker are in favor of looting the government when the aesthetics are cool enough.

2. It’s important to note that tax proposals like “no tax on tips” are not based on ideas of vertical equity, or the principle that people with more financial resources should bear an escalating burden to pay for government. These policies treat taxpayers differently even when their incomes are the same, and therefore they constitute violations of the principle of horizontal equity, which is the idea that similarly-resourced taxpayers should pay similar amounts of tax.