George Will’s latest book-length essay collection, One Man’s America, includes a great 2006 piece explaining why social conservatives and social liberals would both benefit from a government that refrains from using the tax code to moralize:
As strongly as social conservatives deplore commercialized sex, liberals deplore cigarettes, Big Macs, firearms, fur coats, SUVs, pornography not printed on recycled paper, pornographic movies produced by nonunion studios, holiday trees provocatively labeled “Christmas trees,” and much more.
But do we really want to march down this path paved with moral pronouncements? When government uses subsidies to moralize, as with tax preferences for bonds that can be used to finance this but not that, government is speaking. It is expressing opinions about what is and is not wholesome. And once government starts venting such opinions, how does it stop?
Government could spare itself the stress of moralizing about so many things if it decided that the choices people make with their money is their, not its, business. And government could avoid having opinions about so many things if it would quit subsidizing so many things.
When in doubt, get the government out of the way.
