Tax travesties (Leftists Argue Against Property Rights)

Boston Globe ^ | Jan.26, 2003 | Liam Murphy

[SerfsUp]

Bush is wrong: It's not "our money"

PUBLIC DEBATE ABOUT the Bush administration's latest tax cut proposals has largely revolved around their economic impact: How will they affect the deficit, public and private spending, investment, employment, and productivity? These are vital concerns. But there is another aspect of the debate-and an increasingly prominent part of tax politics in recent years-that is seriously confused. This is the issue of "tax fairness." The idea that there are standards of fairness that apply specifically to taxes is an illusion that threatens to distract attention from what really matters.

[ancient_geezer]

They are the authors of "The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice."

Says it all.

There was good reason why Karl Marx and the Communist Party makes the progressive/graduated income tax the 2nd plank of the Manifesto of the Communist Party.

We should never forget nor overlook the philosophical underpinnings of that choice, which truly condemns private ownership at any level:

"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state ... . Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property ... . These measures will, of course, be different in different countries. Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in he hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. "

[carenot]

Bump

[kcar]

Wake me up when the civil war begins. There's no basis for arguing with certain people, who accept absurdity as a founding premise, making them happily immune to having their arguements reduced to that. Like talking to a crazy person.
All rights begin with property. Your property in yourself and the extensions of your efforts = freedom of thought, speech, self defense, and establishes the basis of voluntary contracts. How much of your property does the government need to extract by force from you to pay for collective defense? Should be very little (< 5%). I think serfs paid less than we do as a percentage of income earned. At > 50% we are grossly overtaxed.

[squibs]

Sadly I have to agree with you there.
But I won't mention the topics I've noticed the most.

[Taxman]

Thanks for the ping, Dr. Zoo. Will I see you at CPAC, my FRiend?

Now, to the issue at hand: This essay deserves a more complete reply than the one I am going to provide, but upon encountering "These are questions of social justice and efficiency, not of tax fairness," I had to find and post this article by my late FRiend, Dr. Balint Vazsonyi:

MORE WORDS WE USE
By Balint Vazsonyi
[First published June 9, 1998 in The Washington Times]

"Social Justice" is a phrase that warms the heart. It conjures up images of a society in which no one feels left out, left behind, or otherwise cheated by fate, people, nature, or the Creator himself.

There is a slight problem: such a society does not exist.

If millions upon millions have been deluded into searching for "social justice," it is because social justice displays the irresistible charm of the temptress and the armament of the enraged avenger; because it adorns itself in intoxicating clichés and wears the insignia of the highest institutions of learning. Like a poisonous snake, it radiates brilliant colors. Like the poppies in The Wizard of Oz, it lulls the mind to sleep.

The easiest targets happen to be civilized people who care about the fate of others. Americans, especially, are famous for their concern for fellow humans, and support of worthy causes. They have fought two world wars to rescue Western Civilization, without thought to material gain.

Advocates of social justice point to the downtrodden, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised. Advocates of social justice insist that, in order to demonstrate a "social" conscience, a person must resolve to eliminate poverty, eliminate suffering, eliminate differences among people. The assumption is that society can and will reach a state in which all its members enjoy just the right quantity and proportion of attributes, possessions, and good fortune in relation to all other members -- and to their own expectations.

The word "eliminate" is peculiar to the thinking of those who advocate social justice. What are the practical implications?

In order to eliminate poverty, agreement must be reached on terminology. Poor by what standard? Poor in Albania or Zaire is very different from poor in Switzerland or the United States. Poverty, then, is relative, and in relative terms, there will always be "poverty" as long as some people have more and others have less. Two possibilities arise. One is to establish the authority which will take possession of all goods and distribute them evenly among the populace. This would have to be a continuous process because the more gifted and more industrious will keep accumulating more than the others. The second option is to concede that it is all nonsense.

The elimination of suffering presumes even greater divine powers. The worst offenders propose to eliminate suffering through various government decrees and executive orders. These same people speculate about "the elimination of differences," a truly disturbing phenomenon.

One possible answer may be an affliction peculiar to people who apply the word "social" with great frequency. I will refer to it as "Compartmentalized Brain Syndrome," or CBS for short. Sufferers from CBS have more or less the same information as the rest of us in the various compartments of the brain. But traffic between the compartments has broken down. No connection is made between two bits of data, even within the same subject matter, such as tax rates and tax revenues.

By way of illustration, a United States senator recently complained bitterly about the diminishing interest young people show in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The same senator fully endorses multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is code for the gradual elimination of Western traditions. A person who fails to recognize the connection between declaring the Western canon irrelevant, and the decline in the appreciation of Bach's music, is suffering from CBS.

The same may be said of persons who speak of "the downtrodden," "the dispossessed," and "the disenfranchised" in today's America. Clearly, no law in the United States would ever create or permit any such thing. CBS sufferers nonetheless refuse to notice that people are different, and that differences of abilities, aspirations, family circumstances, and a variety of other factors will always produce a wide range of results. Alternatively, they view people in terms of conditions that existed in times past, as if slavery or segregation were still with us, or women's suffrage not yet adopted. Persons afflicted with CBS tend to hold opinions that fly in the face of common sense, and the opposite of common sense is nonsense.

The ultimate nonsense is the search for social justice. This is not intended as an insult to the millions of highly respectable persons who have been deluded into adopting social justice as their goal. But they ought to recall all the vile deeds, all the horror that have been brought upon humanity in the name of that search. Also, if subjected to honest scrutiny, the very concept of "social justice" defies both reason and experience. Worse still is the presumptuous implication that, were social justice possible, certain persons are better able than others to judge what it is. (How does such an implication square with the doctrine that "we are all the same"?)

Sadly, all attempted definitions of social justice amount to one of the following:

(1) somebody should have the power to determine what you can have, or (2) somebody should have the power to determine what you cannot have, or (3) somebody should have the power to determine what to take away from you in order to give it to others who receive it without any obligation to earn it.

In the end, even Dorothy woke up to the fact that reality is this side of the rainbow.

Dr. Vazsonyi had 20 years of direct contact with "social justice." He knew whereof he spoke.

I'll have more, later, on these two fools' essay. It is literate drivel, designed to side-track the legitimate argument we need to have about government in the 21st Century and private property.

[Taxman]

Geezer is carrying yo' load here, Bro!

[Publius6961]

But in fact we don't own our pre-tax income, and what we do own is defined by a legal system of private property in which taxes play an indispensable role.

Does anyone else besides me remember a stand up comedian of the 50s and 60s by the name of Professor Corey?

I don't think this guy is doing stand up comedy though. That makes it scary.

And I'm still scratching my head. If we don't own our pre-tax income, who does? And if it's the collective? What is that and what empowered it?
I suspect illegal drugs had a major role in the creation of this article.

[SerfsUp]

And if it's the collective? What is that and what empowered it?

Of course, the collective is so abstract that we must have a committee to represent the collective, interpret the needs and desires of the collective and act in the collective's interests.

Who gets to be on this committee? The people who decided we needed the comittee in the first place.

And if you're not on the committee? Well too bad for you. Your interests may be found to run contrary to those of the collective.

At its core, "social justice" is another tired revolutionary propaganda slogan for that most timeless element of society: thugs and criminals who seek to steal what others have earned honestly.

[Taxman]

See post #25

[USMA '71]

1. Modern property rights are not part of nature. They are created and sustained by a legal, political, and economic system of which taxes are an essential part. 2. The question, How much of "our money" may the government take in taxes?is logically incoherent, because the legal system, including the tax system, determines what "our money" is.

Wrong on both accounts!! The "Market place" will spring up with or without government and IT will set the definition of what money is. This guy needs to take a remedial course in Applied Logic.

[Poohbah]

Please tell me what 'goods' are provided by a 'collective'?

Your problem is that you're using the wrong definition of "good" to frame the question.

In terms of merchandise, the short answer is: nothing.

In terms of basic societal needs--the common defense, protecting the populace from criminal activity, a system of adjudicating civil disputes--those "goods" (as in "locking up murderous psychopaths is A Good Thing") can't be produced on a purely individual level; some level of consensus and agreement is necessary.

The problem is that the liberal twits lump all manner of activity in "social goods," even when they are most assuredly NOT good things.

[Bigun]

Geezer is carrying yo' load here, Bro!

And doing a FINE job at it to!

As has been said by others on this thread, the writers of this piece of garbage undoutably have never ventured outside the bounds of thier little ivory towers and are thus completely ignorant of anything in the real world! I doubt that anything I might say would alter that!

[Hemingway's Ghost]

They do not agree with my point of view on taxes, but their arguments are reasonably worded and coherent.

This is a deliberate troll or you're insane. The authors' argument couldn't be more incorrect. Private property is a natural law right that preceeds government of any type. Begging the question that the definition of private property needs to be redefined in these modern times is hardly a reasonably worded or coherent argument for anyone except for the slow or dim-witted.

[steve-b]

Nonsense. The article is weasel-worded in a manner worthy of the Sink Emperor himself.

The key fallacy, disguised under a mountain of bull$#!^, is that private property rights ultimately derive from natural rights that precede the state.

The author's lame attempt to dismiss this by contrasting Locke's example of simple property rights (a man producing something worthwhile from a patch of wilderness) with modern complex forms of property (shares of a mutual fund) is utterly unpersuasive. The latter ultimately rests on the former, just as the navigation of Voyager II to Neptune ultimately rests on the work of Galileo and Newton. Governments take a role in facilitating the process, just as electronic computers facilitate space probe course calculations, but neither the government nor the computer creates the underlying reality.

[SerfsUp]

But in fact we don't own our pre-tax income, and what we do own is defined by a legal system of private property in which taxes play an indispensable role.

This claim may seem outrageous, but a little reflection shows that it must be so. Notice that we couldn't, as a matter of logic, have unrestricted property rights in the whole of our pre-tax income, because without taxes there would be no government, and consequently no legal system, no banks, no corporations, no commercial contracts, no markets in stock, capital, labor, or commodities-in other words no economy of the kind that makes all modern forms of income and wealth possible.

This is delberate obfuscation of the meaning of the word "property".

Property is defined in terms of recognition of ownership, and a willingness to recognize property rights appears naturally in humans at an early age. If two children trade a baseball card for a stick of gum, both of them will recognize that property rights have been transferred, independent of recognition by any government body.

Property rights can and should be established by contracts between parties, with the legal system's role restricted to arbitration of disputes. The legal system does not define property -- that is the domain of the people, freely contracting with one another.

The government's role is merely to protect property rights when two private parties freely contract to exchange those same rights.

[Taxman]

Thass true. Thought you might appreciate his effort to marginalize the LIEberal/Socialist/Marxist LIE, though, by publicising, once again, the sheer stupidity of the Communist Manifesto.

What did you think of Dr. Vazsonyi's essay at post #25?

[Bigun]

What did you think of Dr. Vazsonyi's essay at post #25?

Dr. Vazsonyi RARELY misses and he CERTIANLY did not do so in this case! He is SPOT ON TARGET!

[SES1066]

Good point, you were correct that I was equating 'good(s)' with material items. In my defense, this is the venacular of the authors since money is, at the base, a symbolic representation of material goods. As you point out, there is definitely, a 'good' coming out of communal decisions and actions which defines the need for society and government.

These writers state that what is earned through labor does not belong to the laborer but rather to a nebulous structure of agreements and laws. In doing so, as mentioned in other posts, the definition of property and ownership is subject to interpretation and manipulation. It is no accident that these are law professors since these arguments are the meat and drink of their profession.

Thanks for your reply, I appreciate the chance to reflect and consider deeper.

[Grit]

...because without taxes there would be no government [as we know it], and consequently no legal system, no banks, no corporations, no commercial contracts, no markets in stock, capital, labor, or commodities-in other words no economy of the kind that makes all modern forms of income and wealth possible.

Grit's edit to turn lie into truth.