Progressives since Marx have lectured us that the ruling classes keep down their rivals with regressive taxes. And hidden taxes are the most insidious of all taxes. So, one would think, if the Left today cares for anything beyond its own power, that it would oppose most vigorously huge, crippling regressive taxes which were carefully hidden in the structure of government.
But, among its many flaws, the Left today is not even the Left. It is true to nothing but power. It is precisely the sort of self-imprisoned exploitive class that Marx condemned.
Consider the current nightmare that most poor and middle class families face in buying those most basic recurring commodities: food and fuel. Aside from medical care, the cost of food and of fuel is rising much faster than any other areas of the consumer price index. In the last eighteen months, calendar 2007 and the first six months of calendar 2008, the cost of food and the cost of fuel (in whatever way that is measured) rose faster than medical care and much faster than wages.
Health care costs, long the boogeyman of American Leftists, is taking an increasingly smaller share of the overall income of the poor and the middle class than groceries and gasoline. But even that dramatically understates the problems that ordinary Americans face. Medical care costs reflect an improvement, often a dramatic improvement, in the quality of life for most Americans. New medications, new treatments, new diagnostic tools – all of these have combined to give Americans the best health care system in the world.
The loaf of bread or gallon of gas that ordinary Americans buy, on the other hand, is no different than the loaf or gallon that they bought five or ten years ago. The rising cost of ordinary staples, which are qualitatively identical but which consume an increasingly greater percentage of the income of ordinary Americans, is precisely the sort of nightmare that Marx predicted and hoped would happen.
The difference is that this squeeze between affluence and subsistence is not being caused by the avarice of “capitalists” (whatever that terms is supposed to mean), but this squeeze is instead the direct product of a highly regressive system of indirect taxes on those staples. “Tax,” in this sense, does not mean necessarily an actual and formal tax. The Left works much more effectively in taxing activity by imposing mandates, by prohibiting normal economic activity, by inventing systems of internal tariffs and trade restrictions (called, of course, by other names)
Corn, the building block of so much of our food, has incredibly become scare because of the political demand that Ethanol be used in motor vehicles. Oil cannot be extracted in many of the most promising areas of our nation because of the political demand for spiritual purity in environmentalism. Interference is taxation, although it is an indirect tax on economic transactions necessary to produce food and fuel. The exploding costs of these necessities would have looked to Marx like the machinations of elites – and Marx would have been right.
These elites are not people who have acquired political power through wealth but rather people who have acquired wealth through political power.
The purpose of the willful destruction or the crippling price inflation of those goods which ordinary people must have to live is to prevent ordinary people from thinking about their political exploitation or organizing themselves to resist this exploitation. The deliberate impoverishment of people – which is just what we see happening today – is intended to do just what the Inner Party in Oceania did in Orwell’s classic, 1984. One of the most effective ways of making people wretched is through a highly regressive tax on essential goods, like a government induced escalation of food and of fuel, and then a concealment of that tax by making it so indirect that people rail against retailers of the goods or producers of the goods or anyone but those deliberately causing the misery.
How can people who profess to care about the poor and middle class support highly regressive indirect taxes on essential goods? They cannot do so and pretend to believe in the welfare of the people. They can only do so if they seek power above all else. It made no economic sense for slave-owners to keep slaves illiterate or for Nazis to persecute Jews. The Nazis also planned to reduce the educational level of Poles so that a Polish intelligentsia would never exist. This made no economic sense.
Those on the Left today are not concerned with making economic sense. They are concerned with being political overlords of our society. Squeezing the poor and middle class into helplessness is an excellent path to that hated domination.
That is just what we see happening today with the regressive hidden taxes of the Left.
Bruce Walker has been a published author in print and in electronic media since 1990. His first book, Sinisterism:// Secular Religion of the Lie, has been revised and re-released. The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity, has recently been published, and his most recent book, Poor Lenin’s Almanac: Perverse Leftist Proverbs for Modern Life can be viewed here: outskirtspress.com.
