A tax on men? It's dafter than it sounds

If we start picking holes in our contribution to the social good, we end up on dangerous ground

California has long been the world's social laboratory. Reaganism and environmentalism, aerobics and new age cults are just a few things to have emerged from the West Coast and entered the mainstream.

Now the state has come up with something new, in the form of June Stephenson, a feminist psychologist. In her new book, Men Are Not Cost Effective: Male Crime In America, she argues that a special tax should be imposed on men because they are the main perpetrators of crime. This case for a "penis premium" has a logic behind it. Everywhere in the world the majority of crimes are committed by men, while women and men share a duty to pay for the police and criminal justice system through their taxes.

Worse, there are growing signs that young men may be becoming a separate and disconnected warrior class, bolstering their fragile masculinity through a return to territoriality and aggression. Many young men, unable to play the role of dominant breadwinner, no longer seem to have a clear role. Few can go off to war to prove their manhood, so instead we have lawless masculinity as young men dominate public space, stake out their territory, threaten women and undermine people's sense of community. For many feminists, it confirms the view that women are the "fair sex" and men the "brutish" one with a genetic propensity to violence, aggression and crime.

According to this analysis, some form of "gender hypothecation" might seem entirely fair. Indeed, you could go a step further and argue that men should have to pay for all the women's aid centres that pick up the costs of out-of-control men.

But there is more to it than gender equity. The "penis premium" actually goes with the grain of change in taxation policy as a whole. Many American states already have hypothecated taxes so that people can see where their money is going. Oregon, in a much-vaunted experiment in health care, toyed with the idea of charging higher health taxes for smokers, heavy drinkers and hamburger junkies. In Britain, too, the desire to match duties with rights is gaining ground, not just among Conservatives, who are holding parents to account by charging them fines for the misdemeanours of their children, but also among New Labour.

It may not be long before students have to pay for the costs of their own education, and local neighbourhoods for their own rubbish collection. And in the long run there is a momentum towards introducing charges for schools and health, so that users pay more.

If you go down this road, it is logical to charge men an extra tax for the costs of crime, fat people and smokers a health tax because they are more susceptible to heart disease, the stupid an extra education levy since they cost more to teach, and workaholics a health tax because heavy stress makes them more likely to get sick. Indeed, with the advance of genetic knowledge, it becomes possible to imagine all sorts of new ways of fine-tuning taxes to individuals' strengths and weaknesses.

Once you take this kind of approach to its logical conclusion, of course, all sorts of absurdities emerge. Thus, for instance, charging groups for the crimes they commit would lead to extra taxes for blacks and working class people, while failing to take account of some of the social and economic pressures which lead these groups to commit more crime. Moreover, this kind of zero sum politics means that the obvious counter to a crime tax for men would be to introduce a higher welfare tax for women, who benefit far more from welfare than men do over the course of their lives.

The fundamental problem with such an approach is that it institutionalises a divisive blame culture: every group is looking to pin blame on others. There are dangers in this, precisely because there are signs that values are fragmenting, with the young bearing the brunt of the resulting psychological disorders, according to a psychosocial report published this week. If people promote a divisive blame culture, they should not be surprised if, for example, today's shrinking workforce begins to think about opting out of the inter-generational contract and stops paying for the pensions or care needs of the elderly because their own are not guaranteed.

The danger is that this approach ultimately takes us closer to a sectionalised society made up of separate groups pitted against each other and battling to get their space and their own resources in an increasingly competitive environment. This kind of divisive politics is a route back to Hobbes's description of man's brutish nature and a "war of all against all", which justified, in his view, a Leviathan state to regulate and nurture the common good.

In America, rampant sectionalism is the unintended consequence of political currents on both the left and right. On the radical left, the separate agendas of blacks and women, gays and the disabled have helped to create not only assertiveness instead of submission, but also a much more fractured society in which they are pitted against each other in competition for scarce resources. On the right, the parochialism and selfishness fostered by people such as Newt Gingrich is equally corrosive, manifesting itself in resistance to tax and gun controls, and in the desire to stop "our boys" going to fight in a foreign land. And, indeed, in California it is reaching a new pitch with this year's proposition to prevent any form of positive discrimination.

Thankfully, Britain has still not gone far down this road. The Mori state of the nation poll this week showed how much, even now, the British public is committed to basic rights to health care for all, to cite just one example.

But the dangers are real. Here, as in the US, there exists an apparent hunger for scapegoats and groups to stigmatise. Politicians, whose role it should be to unite, all too often find it easier to play on division. And if last year single mothers seemed to top the list, this year it is young men who are being victimised by the right's desire to toughen up boot camps to teach them discipline, and by feminist spokeswomen who find it hard to recognise that young men, too, might have genuine problems.

The problem is that once a group is stigmatised, all too often its members begin to behave in ways that fit the stereotypes. And once they are disconnected, it becomes harder to have communication across social boundaries and harder to solve seemingly intractable problems. That is why we should hope that the kind of divisive politics symbolised by this week's suggestion of a "penis premium" remains just another wacky idea from California and not a harbinger of things to come.