I had hoped that conservative enthusiasm for keeping as many people as possible paying income taxes would peter out after the 2012 election, when the sentiment led Mitt Romney to make his politically damaging remarks about the allegedly irresponsible “47 percent” of people who don’t pay them. But it continues as a piece of conservative folk wisdom, and Veronique de Rugy and George Will have both recently voiced it on NRO. People who don’t pay income taxes, Will writes, have “a vanishingly small incentive to restrain the growth of a government that they are not paying for through its largest revenue source.”

In years of debating this issue, I have never yet found a proponent of this theory — the theory that taking people off the tax rolls makes them more likely to support big government — who has provided a scrap of evidence for it. I’m not looking for peer-reviewed social science. Just show me:

1) that increases in public support for government activism have coincided with increases in the percentage of the population without income-tax liability, or that decreases in both have coincided with each other; or

2) that the groups of people who have mostly left the income-tax rolls over the last two decades — parents leaving because of the child tax credit and voters in the Silent Generation and early Baby Boomers leaving because of retirement — have become more pro-government activism; or

3) that voters make a sharp distinction between payroll and income taxes and consider themselves to be getting off free if they pay only the former.

I don’t believe we have good reason to believe any of these things. For example, the percentage of people paying income taxes was rising before and during the Great Society years. And our federal government was much smaller during the century-plus when nobody at all paid an income tax than it has been since then. (The Founders were intensely concerned about limiting federal power but don’t seem to have considered a make-everyone-pay-income-taxes strategy for achieving that end.)

If the Will/de Rugy theory were right, it would place proponents of smaller government at a dead end. Their anti-tax instincts would be at war with themselves. They would have to raise middle-class taxes today in order to deliver a payoff of lowering middle-class taxes in a hypothetical future. Luckily, there is no reason to think the theory holds water.