"All collective undertakings require trust. From the games that children play to complex social institutions, humans cannot work together unless they suspend their suspicion of one another. One person holds the rope, another jumps. One person steadies the ladder, another climbs. Why? In part because we hope for reciprocity, but in part from what is clearly a natural propensity to work in cooperation to collective advantage. Taxation is a revealing illustration of this truth. When we pay taxes, we make quite a lot of assumptions about our fellow citizens. In the first instance, we assume that they will pay their taxes too, or else we would feel unfairly burdened and would in due course withhold our own contributions. Secondly, we trust those we have placed in temporary authority over us to collect and spend the cash responsibly. After all, by the time we discover that they have embezzled or wasted it, we shall have lost a lot of money. Thirdly, most taxation goes towards either paying off past debt or investing in future expenditures. Accordingly, there is an implicit relationship of trust and mutuality between past taxpayers and present beneficiaries, present taxpayers and past and future recipients—and of course future taxpayers who will cover the cost of our outlays today. We are thus condemned to trust not only people we don’t know today, but people we could never have known and people we shall never know, with all of whom we have a complicated relationship of mutual interest.
(...) But who is ‘we’? Whom exactly do we trust?"
Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, Highlight Loc. 654-65; 670.
