Perpetual deficits can only lead to fiscal insolvency. Yet, liberals claim towering public debt is efficacious, a sacred talisman, magically creating prosperity and peace. But, if better societies resulted simply from massive government wealth confiscation, paradise would have flourished in Russia, instead of the smoldering hell on earth the Marxists created. Bizarrely, leftist politicians warn we cannot stop spending tidal waves of borrowed money or unacceptable injustices will occur. The misuse of tax policy to create certain economic death for America meant to push us into socialism is the topic of this essay.
I. USA's Colossal Deficit Spending Will Result in Tax Slavery
If an idea merely attracts eminent supporters, even the most outlandish notions become respectable. Deficit spending, or "Keynesian Economics" is such a theory, standing for the idea that during economic slowdowns there must be government deficit spending to replace lost investors or the markets will suffer irreparable harm. In fact,
many experts argue that such government interventionism helped expand the Great Depression from a relatively mild dip into the largest economic disaster America had ever seen.
With decades of unprecedented US deficits forecast, a worst case scenario has the Government claiming assumption of all debts and property so economic implosion does not occur. But are these alarming events orchestrated to insure a meltdown to give politicians the opportunity to seize the economy and institute an emergency socialist state?
II. Why High Taxes Produce Poverty
A. Liberalism & High Tax Regimes
Why do worshipers of liberalism perpetually demand higher taxes? Since leftists tend to dismiss religion, one can interpret the call for high taxes a secular act of sacrifice for the deified state. After all, just because someone is an atheist, it does not mean they have lost all religious instincts.
B. Effects of High Taxation
What results when taxes skyrocket? It's a Marxist trope that wealth is always stolen from the poor, so increasing taxation can only punish thieves. But further, when one examines the underlying core beliefs of Marxists, government is the only rightful owner of property since all things must be held in common for justice. So to increase tax revenue merely moves society's capital from the hands of wrongdoers to bureaucrats who can then return it to the poor, from whom it was unjustly taken.
Despite liberal claims, there is no correlation between increasing tax rates and improved quality of life. Contra, after basic needs are accounted for, each penny in increased tax revenues actually decreases quality of life. Because income is property, and the more people are deprived of their property the less options they have to express their free choices in pursuit of life and liberty. And consider this --once the government has confiscated all income, there can be no liberty. Ultimately, what right does government have to take more taxes than is absolutely necessary? To accept that is to make government the god of men.
C. Leftist High Tax Goals
First, higher taxes are justified either through an appeal to the "rights" of the poor, underclass, etc. Also, government needs to drastically increase services to establish a "just" reign. And third, because of an "emergency," more revenue can always be claimed. Obama has invoked all three in his rampant spending mission.
Taxes are typically increased by liberals for wealth redistribution, or in the name of "Social Justice." But what is Social Justice? According to Friederich A. Hayak, in his
Law, Legislation and Liberty, II, The Mirage of Social Justice, the concept is a muddled conflation of the idea of property equality and justice. Hayak quotes John Stuart Mill, Utilitarian philosopher who high-mindedly and destructively helped create the enduring socialist myth. He writes,
Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it; that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens should be made in the utmost degree to converge.
Such a broad and ill-defined definition of justice was bound to create disaster if seriously applied to society. In addition, the goal is not to preserve or increase wealth so that all members of society might gain via Reagan's "rising tide which raises all boats." Instead, this is a species of the progressive religion which "means well" and yet achieves the opposite outcome, or according to Hayak, is "the immoral consequences of morally inspired efforts."
D. Why High Tax Results in Poverty
The real reason expanding taxes creates growing poverty, after a certain threshold, is that government takes revenue away from the producers and hands it over to those whose efforts, by definition, only disperse wealth. For example, when we wildly increase welfare, taxed income formerly used to maintain and expand businesses are frittered away upon well-meaning but dilatory activities. Meanwhile, the economy shrinks as increasingly less resources are available to pay and support workers.
Further, Thomas Sowell, in
Applied Economics, Thinking Beyond Stage One, describes how high tax regimes drive out businesses over time, leaving less companies to pay higher taxes, while fewer workers vie for an increasingly scarcer pool of welfare revenue. It's a vicious cycle.
III. The Murderous Demand for "Ethical Socialism"
A. Defining Socialism
What is socialism? Generally, the idea government owns all rights to production and delivery of all material goods and services. What this presumes is government has an inherent right to confiscate all privately created business and products. Yet, when this has occurred as in China or the USSR, massive sprees of government murder followed.
But, setting aside this inconvenient fact, is it really true only group ownership of goods can bring justice? In other words, is socialism truly an ethical approach to property? Or was Jefferson correct in the
Declaration:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness (Locke calls this "Property").
B. Moral Tax Policy
What is the intent of moral tax policy? Adam Smith's views, from
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nation, are
summed
up:
Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.
C. No Property, No Liberty
Can Liberty exist when government holds all property rights? According to Calvin B. Hoover, in
The Economy, Liberty and the State, this is impossible. Consider as an example China's Great Leap Forward, Chairman Mao's attempt to modernize the country by making it instantly communist. Mao ordered 750 million peasants off their land onto farm communes following Marx's writings. The outcome? Jasper Becker, in
Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine, estimates perhaps 40 million Chinese starved to death, or were killed by sickness due to malnutrition, or murdered for not cooperating. Once the Chinese lost their land they also were deprived of political voice and freedom.
Richard Pipes, in
Property And Freedom, claims historically speaking, there is no development of freedom without property rights and rule of law. So claims a paradise of freedom and prosperity will result from government confiscating increasingly larger amounts of income is both intellectually void, and historically false.
IV. Implications of High Taxation
A. Revenue Implications of High Taxation
According to George Laffer, the highest tax revenues do not flow from the highest tax rate, due to lowered productivity caused by undue loss of profits, tax avoidance, lack of worker motivation, and business relocation. This was proved by Reagan's tax revolution which saw 20+ years of business growth after he dropped taxes.
The US House offers this analysis:
The Reagan tax cuts showed reducing excessive tax rates stimulates growth, reduces tax avoidance, and can increase the amount and share of tax payments generated by the rich. High top tax rates can induce counterproductive behavior and suppress revenues, factors that are usually missed or understated in government static revenue analysis.
B. Moral Implications of High Taxation
Consider this Catholic perspective on the morality of high taxation:
Income should not be distributed; it should be earned. There is something morally wrong with coercively taking people's money and punishing diligence. That's exactly what "redistributing the wealth" does: We give government the power to determine who is in need and who isn't. We take away a person's ownership of their work. Creation belongs to the creator. Do we have a Christian duty to share our God-given blessings with others? Definitely. But not through government coercion.
C. Religious Implications of High Taxation
It is implied by high taxation government has a unique place in the cosmos, boasting a spiritual quality that is even godlike. But a biblical posture shows Yahweh is opposed to monolithic government which claims spiritual roles. For example, when the Tower of Babel was built in Genesis 11:1-9, Yahweh frustrated the effort with linguistic and racial diversity:
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other..."Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth."
But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel--because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
The biblical God associated big government with humanistic endeavors meant to replace his role. In the New Testament, Babylon the city morphs into Babylon the Great which is the worldwide humanistic project meant to replace the Lord in government, education, business, law, family, and religion. And such massive government cannot be executed without massive secular tithes.
V. Conclusion
Lower taxes means prosperity and freedom; higher taxes means socialism, slavery and eventual death of a country's economy. As the Heritage Foundation puts it:
There is a distinct pattern throughout American history: When tax rates are reduced, the economy's growth rate improves and living standards increase. Conversely, periods of higher tax rates are associated with sub par economic performance and stagnant tax revenues. In other words, when politicians attempt to "soak the rich," the rest of us take a bath.
Government cannot create paradise on earth by confiscating all wealth and building a Babel of social welfare programs. Instead, man destroys God's gift of Liberty when he attempts to co-opt His throne. Instead of paradise, and by engaging in deluded idolatry, progressives have left a legacy of the enslavement of man in the name of perverse and disproved secular religion.
Is tax revenue really the entire strength of a nation? In the Genesis story of Joseph in Egypt, to save themselves during 7 years of famine, Egyptians sold themselves into Pharaoh's slavery in exchange for food, till all they owned was themselves. Likewise, today Obama proposes Americans avoid a contrived economic apocalypse by embracing his call for perpetual deficit spending and permanently skyrocketed tax rates. Like ancient Egypt, if Americans follow this vision, we will all end up slaves. Yet, we won't be saved since the logical outcome is government will again own everything as we morph into default communism.
