Taxes: Theft or Duty?

As goofy as Ron Paul is about defense and foreign policy, he is mostly right about domestic policy, namely that there should be little of it — especially at the national level. This is from his exchange with David Gregory on Meet the Press (October 23, 2011):

MR. GREGORY: Let me, let me ask you about the role of government. You’ve said about taxation, in a way that doesn’t minces words, the following: “Taxation is immoral,” you told the Libertarian Party News. Would you scrap the tax code altogether?

REP. PAUL: That would be a pretty good idea, a pretty good start. I, I can qualify it if I’m allowed. Taxation is theft when you take money from one group to give it to, to another, when you, when you transfer the wealth. Now, taxation could be accomplished with user fees and, you know, highway fees and gasoline taxes and import taxes. But the income tax is based on the assumption that the government owns you, owns all of your income and provides the conditions on which they allow you to keep a certain percentage. That, to me, is immoral, and the founders didn’t like it. That’s why the Constitution had to be amended in 1913.

Not eloquent, but fairly near the mark.

Government has essentially one legitimate function, which is to protect citizens from predators, foreign and domestic. That covers national defense and domestic justice (including the enforcement of contracts and prosecution of fraud). Those functions could be provided by private agencies, but — because of the danger of warlordism — they are best provided by government and funded from a true flat tax.

A proper division of labor would place defense in the hands of the national government and justice in the hands of State and local governments. This would eliminate the ability of the national government to criminalize conduct for the sake of imposing its will on everyone. For the same reason, the provision of justice should be devolved to the lowest possible level within each State.

I see no need for State and local governments to do more than provide justice, though the government of a very small community — say, not more than 150 persons — might legitimately do more if authorized by the community, following rules explicitly and regularly adopted by consensus. Expanding the scale of government action beyond the jurisdiction of a small community courts runaway statism and precludes the provision of services (utilities, highways, etc.) by private actors, which are subject to discipline by market forces.

With that background, I turn to the October 20, 2011, issue of The New Republic and “Don’t Mess with Taxes: A moral defense.” Excerpts of the editorial (in italics) are accompanied by my comments (in brackets and boldface):

Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard law professor now running for U.S. Senate, is getting a lot of attention for the video of a speech she made recently. It wasn’t just because she was taking on Republican talking points more forcefully than most Democrats do these days. It was also because she was defending an idea almost nobody in American politics dares to champion anymore, at least explicitly: She was defending the idea of taxes. [Elizabeth Warren is all wet.]

In recent decades, Republican politicians and key allies, most notably anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, have succeeded in demonizing taxes, as if the very concept of a tax itself were immoral. [Not quite. See above.]

But there is nothing wrong with asking [asking?] people to pay taxes. On the contrary, there is something very right about it. Nobody [nobody?] questions whether society [the state] can require people to serve on a jury or, in times of war, to enlist in the military. [So soon is Vietnam forgotten, along with its main legal legacy: all-volunteer armed forces.] So why do we question whether society [the state] can require people to pay for the government whose services, and protection, they enjoy? [Most of us do not “enjoy” government services, other than defense and justice, and even those that we do “enjoy” would be provided more efficiently by private firms.]

The moral case for taxation rests on two separate, but related, principles. The first is distributional. History teaches us that capitalism is an excellent economic system for generating wealth. But history also teaches us that capitalism will create losers as well as winners, often because of forces beyond any individual’s control. Whether it’s accident or illness, mismatched skills or misallocated resources, large numbers of people will inevitably find themselves in financial difficulty—without a job, without savings, and without enough money to pay for the basic necessities of life. It can be crippling for them and crippling for their children, so that poverty, like affluence, becomes its own sort of inheritance. [And that’s another thing better left to the private sector: charity. Charity-by-government is an inefficient way of taking from the few to give to the many — but it yields votes, as in “tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect.”]

A civilized society recognizes this problem and vows to mitigate it. [A state, driven by power-lust, is not a society, and cannot claim to be civilized.] If capitalism does not offer everybody at least some realistic hope of upward mobility, it cannot survive. [But it does offer that hope, and it will survive unless the minions of the state have their way.] Here in the United States, a part of our solution has been to enact government programs that offer the needy minimal allotments of sustenance (food stamps) and shelter (housing choice vouchers), that provide the less affluent with cash (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) and college tuition (Pell Grants), and that guarantee all citizens pensions (Social Security) and health insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act). These programs cost money. And the money has to come from somewhere. [These programs are self-defeating because they (1) create dependency, (2) reduce the incentive to better oneself, (3) reduce the incentive to save for one’s future needs, and (4) drain resources from growth-producing investments that create jobs and higher incomes, and allow people to save for future needs.]

The second reason we need taxes isn’t about the least fortunate; it’s about public goods. You’ll frequently hear conservatives argue that taking money from people, particularly successful people, is unfair because they, not the government, earned that money. But that’s not quite right, for reasons Warren explained very well in her monologue. Behind every successful individual is a set of public investments that past generations made. Could Bill Gates have made his fortune without government-financed education and technology? Could Sam Walton’s stores have spread across the country without government-sponsored roads on which goods and customers travel? “You built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea?” Warren said. “God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” [“Public goods” are a crock. Elizabeth Warren is all wet.]

[O]n the morality of asking [asking?] people to pay taxes, there should be no debate at all. Taxes are an act of citizenship [coercion]. We should all be proud to pay them. [Speak for yourself, kemosabe.]

Other than that, I found the punctuation and spelling to be impeccable.

As for the question posed in the title of this post: theft, all theft, because even essential protective services are not funded equitably.

Right On!

Jeffrey Lord, writing at The American Spectator (“Iran Bomb Plot Sinks Ron Paul’s Credibility“):

Remember Congressman Paul back at that Fox debate in Iowa saying to Chris Wallace that the threat from Iran was “small”? That “Iran does not have an air force that can come here…. They can’t even make enough gasoline for themselves…” This was in addition to Paul’s attack on former president George W. Bush for signing an executive order designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a “terrorist group.” All are of a piece in the consistent Ron Paul theme that many see as a McGovernite foreign policy. Not only far-left wing philosophically but with a startling — and dangerous — naïveté about the nature of America’s enemies.

Comes now the news that lo and behold Iran is being accused by the FBI — with the charge backed up by House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, the Kentucky Republican — of plotting not one but two attacks on American soil. The targets being the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. and the Israeli Embassy….

All of which is to say, Congressman Paul’s theories about Iran have just been blown to smithereens.

Iran didn’t use an air force to get to America — it had an Iranian, American-naturalized citizen Manssor Arbabsiar — already here.

Suppose instead of a plot to blow up a Washington restaurant — among the charges — with a conventional bomb, Arbabsiar and his cohort had managed to smuggle in a nuclear weapon? What did Paul write in his book The Revolution in addition to scorning the idea that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was a danger?

I had said all along that Iran posed no imminent nuclear threat to us or to her neighbors.

This time around, luck was on America’s side. Iran didn’t — yet — have the capacity to smuggle in a nuclear weapon. But they were within a whisker of getting a conventional bomb and killing hundreds –on American soil.

An act which all by itself could easily be defined as an act of war.

But the real casualty here?

The Ron Paul movement.

The congressman has just been shown to be wrong about Iran — big time.

Ron Paul is not the only so-called libertarian who has been shown to be wrong. Paul — along with many so-called libertarians and great swaths of leftists — likes to preach the gospel of benign neglect: Leave others alone and they will leave us alone. This is such jejune nonsense that I find it hard to believe that sentient adults profess to believe it. But a dangerously high number of them do.

Rather than repeat the long list of posts that I have written on this subject, I refer you to the list at the end of “Nonsense about Presidents, IQ, and War.”

Abortion and the Fourteenth Amendment

“Assessing the Presidential Candidates on Abortion, Supreme Court,” by Robert George, includes this intriguing passage:

Many believe that we need a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade. However, Section Five of the Fourteenth Amendment expressly empowers the Congress, by appropriate legislation, to enforce the guarantees of due process and equal protection contained in the Amendment’s first section. As someone who believes in the inherent and equal dignity of all members of the human family, including the child in the womb, would you propose to Congress appropriate legislation, pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment, to protect human life in all stages and conditions?

Political reasons aside, why not? George asked his question of Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney at the Palmetto Freedom Forum on September 5, 2011. Ron Paul’s objection is of special interest. According to George,

Ron Paul responded to my question not by embracing judicial supremacy, but by denying that the 14^th Amendment authorizes Congress to legislate to protect the unborn. Interestingly, Paul himself has a perfect pro-life voting record–in Congress. In his view, however, the abortion question is one that the Constitution leaves ultimately to the individual states, not the national government.

In his exchange with me, Congressman Paul argued that reading the 14^th Amendment broadly enough to empower Congress to protect the unborn would be inconsistent with the 10^th Amendment–the constitutional provision reminding us that powers not delegated by the Constitution to the federal government are reserved to the states and the people. But the Constitution, in its 14^th Amendment, plainly does delegate to Congress power to enforce its guarantees of due process and equal protection. Congressman Paul, like the other Republican candidates, believes that the unborn, no less than those human beings at later developmental stages, are members of the human family–in other words, persons–entitled to the same protections as others. And he is right to believe it.

I am hard-pressed to understand Paul’s objection. If the Constitution grants a power to the central government, then the central government possesses that power. Should it be up to the States, individually, to decide the abortion issue? If it should, then why not leave slavery up to the States, individually? In other words, why should the Fourteenth Amendment any less binding than the Thirteenth Amendment? It seems to me that Paul is more enamored of “States’ rights,” than he is of liberty. And make no mistake about it, abortion is anti-libertarian.

P.S. Paul Linton, a pro-life lawyer and special counsel to the Thomas More Society, enters a dissent:

Conclusion

The Supreme Court’s abortion decisions can be overturned only by an overruling decision of the Court itself or by a federal constitutional amendment. Congress has no power under § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to define the unborn child as a “person” for purposes of § 1 of the Amendment, when the Court has held (in Roe) directly the opposite. Removal of the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction over abortion cases would not affect the binding force of those decisions and would actually prevent a differently constituted Court from overruling Roe and Casey. The proposals made to the Republican presidential candidates at their “Tea Party” forum do not offer a realistic means of overturning Roe v. Wade and do not deserve the support of the pro-life community.

Roe can be overturned only by a decision of the Court itself overruling Roe or by a federal constitutional amendment–neither a federal statute enacted under § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment defining the word “person” as used in § 1 of the Amendment, nor a statute removing the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction over abortion cases would have that effect.

This is where “departmentalism” comes in. William J. Watkins Jr. explains departmentalism by way of example:

Departmentalist theory is perhaps best examined in the context of President Jefferson’s approach to the Sedition Act. Upon entering office, Jefferson ordered the cessation of all federal sedition prosecutions and he pardoned those who had been convicted. In 1804, Jefferson received a letter from Abigail Adams criticizing his handling of the Sedition Act controversy. Mrs. Adams argued that because the judges had upheld the Sedition Act, President Jefferson had overstepped his constitutional bounds when terminating prosecutions and pardoning offenders.In a polite response, Jefferson reminded Mrs. Adams that “nothing in the constitution has given [the judges] the right to decide for the executive, more than the Executive to decide for them.” Both branches, continued Jefferson, “are equally independent in the sphere assigned to them.” Jefferson recognized that the judges, “believing the law constitutional, had a right to pass a sentence of fine and imprisonment, because that power was placed in their hands by the constitution.” However, this did not bind him when performing his duties as chief executive. Because he believed the Sedition Act was unconstitutional, he “was bound to remit the execution of it.”

It is conceivable that a Republican-controlled Congress could pass the law suggested by Robert George, and that a Republican president would enforce the law. Perhaps even a Democrat president would enforce the law as long as he was confronted by a Republican-controlled Congress and popular opinion on the morality of abortion, which has been shifting toward the pro-life position. The Supreme Court would be well advised to make like the Three Wise Monkeys.

My main concern is that the precedent of blatant departmentalism on a salient issue would be a dangerous one. Use of the doctrine would invite a Democrat-controlled Congress to conspire with a Democrat president to ignore, say, a Supreme Court ruling that overturns Obamacare or the McCain-Feingold Act.

P.P.S. In “Human Personhood Begins at Conception.” philosopher Peter Kreeft presents the arguments commonly used to explain why the unborn child is not a human person and then shows clearly and simply why each of these arguments cannot possibly be true.

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