(I know how you FReepermales are about these things.)
Posted on 11/19/2002 10:32:08 PM PST by scripter
"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration."
–The 16th Amendment
What are we to make of the idea Washington is floating of replacing tax on income with a national sales tax? The Cato Institute has described it as "simpler, more efficient, pro-growth and fairer to taxpayers." And I must be missing something because I thought we already paid taxes on products and services. In addition to states where a sales tax already exists, sizeable portions of the prices we pay are taxes. The quandary as to whether an indirect consumption tax is better than taxes on income masks what's probably in the offing.
Once a tax is pushed through it seldom disappears. Last I looked, government at all levels was consuming approximately 47 percent of the national income and growing. A reversal of the trend is almost unheard of among developed nations. To keep the State in style, consumption taxes will have to go through the roof. On the plus side, the consumer can opt out, something he can't do with a tax on income. On the downside, should he "choose" not to purchase, the consumer may starve or be destined to a rather austere life.
In all likelihood, "tax reform" will leave us with the income tax in addition to more consumption taxes. Hopes realistically must be much more modest. Let the idea of a tax reform, for once, engender a discussion about First Principles, the kind Americans of the 19th century had and were capable of having.
However contemptible taxes on consumption are, Frank Chodorov insisted that taxes on income and inheritance were "different in principle from all other taxes." In the seminal work, "The Income Tax: Root of all Evil," he elaborates:
The government says to the citizen: "Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide."
Fundamentally, taxes on income imply a complete denial of private property, which is what socialism is in all its permutations; it rejects man's absolute and natural right to his property and vests property rights in the political establishment. The 16th Amendment did just that. When they incorporated the Amendment into the Constitution, Americans said a resounding "yes" to socialism.
Make no mistake: What's staving off communism is not the Constitution. If it so chooses, Congress has constitutional imprimatur to raise taxes to 100 percent of income, an odd thing considering the Declaration of Independence vests the source of man's rights in the Creator, not in government.
Philosopher Ayn Rand explained the source of man's rights with reference to man's nature. "Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his survival," she wrote in "Atlas Shrugged." Be it the nature of man or divine law, "congressional law" is never the source of man's rights – it is merely entrusted with protecting the rights with which man is imbued.
This, the 16th Amendment corrupted.
In order to survive, man must – and it is in his nature to – transform the resources around him by mixing his labor with them and making them his own. Man's labor and his property are extensions of himself. As Chodorov elucidates, the right of ownership is an extension of the right to life. If ownership is not an absolute right but is instead subject to the vagaries of majority vote, then so is the right to life.
Statists will always counter by claiming that if not for the State, man would be unable to produce. Poppycock! Production predates government predation. Government doesn't produce wealth – it only consumes it. What, pray tell, would government have fed off if man were not hard at work well before the advent of the bureaucracy? That's like saying that the tick created the dog! As usual, the statists have it topsy-turvy. First came man – he is the basic unit of society, without which there can be no society. And without man's labor there is no wealth for government to siphon.
However you slice it, there is no moral difference between a lone burglar who steals stuff he doesn't own and an "organized society" that does the same. In a just society, the moral strictures that apply to the individual must also apply to the collective. A society founded on natural rights must not finesse theft.
The Founders intended for government to safeguard man's natural rights. The 16th Amendment gave government a limitless lien on a man's property and, by extension, on his life. The Amendment turned government into the almighty source – rather than the protector – of man's rights and Americans into indentured slaves.
Yes, been saying this for 40 years.
I like very much the author's inclusion of quotes from Chodorov - that government in its vaunted position above the individual will "recognize your need, not your right" to your own income - and from Rand, who showed in full living color through all her fiction works, including Atlas Shrugged, that "rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his survival," and what the end of man is when those rights are infringed or denied.
As much as I admire Ilana Mercer for the quotes incorporated into this article, and for the basic argument put forth herein that man's income is man's property and thus to be protected by the American Constitutional ideal rather than confiscated by the American Congressional machine, I must take issue with the following maxim: In a just society, the moral strictures that apply to the individual must also apply to the collective. I understand that in context Mercer was stating the obvious fact of nature - that stealing is wrong whether by the individual or by a collection of individuals. Our Representative form of government is a collection of individuals, and stealing by the government is as base and evil as any armed robbery is.
However, the author's statement by itself expresses perfectly the moral and cognitive reasoning behind the Socialist creed - in a nutshell: Man has inalienable, individual rights, therefore a collective of men, called Society, has duplicate and equivalent rights. This simply is not the case. As Rand showed in her works, both fiction and non-fiction, the surest way to bring about the demise of the individual is to ascribe to a collective an individual's nature and need of nurture. To allow government the role of that collective's mind or decision-making process is furthering the lie; men have minds, a collective of men does not. Such a philosophy and such a practice goes against nature and produces nothing but destruction, as evidenced by any nation that has fallen prey to it. We are beginning to see the results of such wrong thinking in our daily lives here in America.
I'll shut up now, with this closing thought and a link:
The history of the income tax is as corrupt as its results.
(I know how you FReepermales are about these things.)
For a long time now, a friend and I have been pushing the idea of redoing tax law to conform to the hierarchy among governments, rather than allow the hodgepodge of assertions of taxing authority we have today.
Here's how hierarchical taxation would work:
In short, each level of government would have the power to lay and collect taxes only on the level immediately below it. If proximity to your oppressor stiffens your will to resist, that might have curative powers for our heavy degree of overtaxation. Anyway, a town tax bill for 45% of your income would certainly raise your eyebrows.
It would also be well if the original force of the Constitution's Article I, section 8, paragraph 1 uniformity provision were restored. This might be easier under a hierarchical system, because all states are equally represented in the U.S. Senate.
Fantasy? Of course. Nothing like this is politically possible in the foreseeable future. But just to suggest the idea gets people talking about federalism and the relations between the citizen and our various governmental structures, which can't be a bad thing.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com
I think that's quite good. It is much more in line with what the Founders intended than is the bizarre, convoluted system(s) that currently exists.
Knock out the 17th amendment, and you'd have a grand slam.
SIGN THE PETITION AT HTTP://WWW.VOTR.ORG. Then find out how you can do more to end America’s peculiar SPRING MADNESS.
The recent elections seem to indicate that we MAY have an 18 month window to get this done.
LET'S ROLL ON IT!
It isn't just the "libs".
In short, each level of government would have the power to lay and collect taxes only on the level immediately below it.
This is something that I have championed for years. However, there is no such bill in Congress and no significant debate in this direction, so until we can generate more interest in that concept, I will continue to support the second best tax reform concept, the National Retail Sales Tax (NRST). I like all direct taxes to be levied at the lowest level of government for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that each county could determine what method of taxation they wanted. The loonies out on the left coast could have an income tax and we in Texas could have a sales tax. Competition between counties and states would naturally determine the best tax system and keep taxes low.
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