Individualism
Page 9
“In the speech at the Tax Policy Center, Obama promised to give 150 million American workers a tax break of up to $1,000 and reduce taxes for some 10 million lower income homeowners. Also, the Illinois Democrat said, he would eliminate all income taxes for the estimated 7 million seniors who make less than $50,000 a year.
“In New York, nearly 10 million workers and some 486,000 homeowners would see tax relief, says the Obama campaign. At the same time, he would raise top rates for capital gains and dividends up to or near their previous levels of between 20 and 28 percent.
“Republican National Committee spokeswoman Lisa Miller, said, "In their '08 budget proposal, Obama and his Democratic colleagues are proposing the largest tax increase in the history of our country, but while on the campaign trail, he promises $80 billion in relief. "Which Obama should we believe?"[7]
Here we have the key to the kind of leadership Obama provides. He is a panderer who makes promises based upon how many votes he can get. Once in power, he will have to cleverly switch his positions in order to break many of his promises. In other words, he’ll try to convince you that he has kept his promises when, in fact, he has done nothing of the kind. His tax policy will be placed solely on the backs of the rich.
The arguments favoring a progressive income tax are essentially the “technocrat” argument. Government technocrats consider important economic issues on the basis of how the numbers work and what they can accomplish by tweaking tax rates and qualifying incomes. The goal, whether they realize it or not, is to minimize the damage of the tax system by tweaking various factors such as tax rates, tax brackets and exemptions. This approach is essentially a “political” approach where the various groups in the economy exert influences upon politicians in order to advance their own interests. This approach gives the appearance that it is the people who determine the tax system and that everything has been decided democratically. The prevailing opinion is that no one should oppose such a system because it reflects the will of the people.
Ilana Mercer has made my point when she wrote about a proposed national sales tax:
“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 [this was written in 2002]. 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. (My comment: I don’t agree that the source of man’s rights is the “Creator” and I think the Constitution was ambivalent on what actually constituted the Creator since you can rationalize that the “Creator” is nature and still honor the Constitution. However, her point is correct; the government is not the source of man’s rights.)
“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.”[8]
The technocrats who defend progressive taxation and talk about how best to ensure economic growth while still “siphoning” as much as possible for the government are the statists about which Ms. Mercer is writing. They focus their mathematical skills on finding just the right balance between tax rates and exemptions completely ignoring the debate about whether they have a right to even a penny of our money…and they have no such right.
Our culture took a wrong turn when the Greeks established democracy. This, as well as the practice of voting into exile the most prominent men, created a form of tyranny which today we call the tyranny of the majority. In response, the Founding Fathers created constitutional rights for individuals that the government could not violate. The very concept of a “right” was intended to keep the majority from imposing cruel and tyrannical treatment upon any Individual (even a rich one). Although the Founding Fathers certainly knew the story that Plato told about the tyranny of democracy, they chose a different type of republican system of government, while rejecting Plato’s solution in “The Republic” which was a dictatorship of philosophers.
The Founders also, undoubtedly knew about the views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who fostered a concept called the “General Will.” Rousseau proposed that the General Will was an expression of reason in the group. Although he tried to derive the General Will from the “Sovereignty” of the Individual in nature, he assumed that the General Will would always be right. Although he tried to restrict the General Will to mere principles that would guide legislation, the idea that the General Will is more important than the Individual became very popular. This is collectivism and the key mistake made by Rousseau (and later Kant) is that he assumed that pro
per moral action should be essentially altruistic and collectivist rather than egoistic and individualist. This premise meant that the General Will would always be about doing good things for others, and therefore people should always want the General Will as an expression of what is good for all.
This mistake entrenched altruism and self-sacrifice in our culture and paved the way for the very majority rule for which we criticize the Greeks. It meant that government could violate the rights of individuals only if the majority decided that it was good for the general well-being. It entrenched altruism into government policy and started the decline from a free constitutional republic onto the slippery slope of ever widening government power, government forced altruism, government programs, progressive taxation and the resulting economic chaos.
Certainly the Founding Fathers wanted to prevent a majority from imposing its will upon the individual. And I submit that a civil society would not consider it right for the majority to impose taxes (or anything else) on any dissenting individual. Further, a proper society would never accept the idea that the “collective good” which cannot even be defined, is a goal of a free society. If there is such a thing as a collective good, it cannot be achieved by the subjugation, enslavement or taxation of a minority. If, as a free man, I do not want to pay taxes, it is my right to dissent and refuse to participate. If the majority voted that I must pay taxes, that act is a violation of my rights as a sovereign individual. If I do not want to participate in Obama's march toward a collective melding of all differences into a coercive "change" that is also my right, regardless of what Michelle Obama says.
Contrary to Rousseau, there is no dynamic, mystical or practical principle that can validly assert that a group can only do what is right. In fact, history has shown the opposite to be the case. Majorities throughout history have done some of the most abominable things. Two of those are socialism and progressive taxation.
In a proper society, any desire to collect taxes should only be done among the willing. In other words, in a free society, all associations, decisions and cooperative endeavors can only be undertaken by those who chose to participate. If a group of people wants to pay taxes and send money to the government only those individuals who choose it should participate. Those who do not participate are free to do as they please. No argument about the “need” of the government, or a group of any kind, should be more important than the right of an Individual to voluntary association and participation. And more importantly, this principle applies to rich and poor equally. That is what equality is about.
The government violates Individual rights when it forcibly takes money from one citizen and gives it to another. Our government was not intended to be one that redistributed income. Secondly, many of the proper functions of government do not require a massive bureaucracy and they can be financed by means of use charges and voluntary contributions. Even if we had to fight a major war, the finances for the army would mostly be furnished through the voluntary contributions of the people whose rights are being defended.
As I wrote in a forthcoming book about today's progressives:
“If we look at how progressives, skeptics and nihilists operate today, we find that their method of using knowledge reveals the consistency of their inconsistent views. You will notice that these people always argue from negative viewpoints that analyze specific issues out of context. They accomplish their political intention, which is to ensure that people do not see the contradictions in their views, through a selective focus and selective arguments.”
Also “Thinking out of context has created intellectual and psychological disintegration and has led to the personal and moral disintegration of most men living. The uncertainty and insecurity created by this mode of thinking leads to anxiety. Altruism and collectivism become the hallmarks of our society and men are viewed as draft animals who must do as they are told lest they be given the whip (government gun). Why? Altruism drops the context of how man survives (his mind) for the sake of a promiscuous out-of-context self-sacrifice to others (collectivism). Through this process, the collective imposes altruism on an entire society by dropping the context of freedom and free exchange and by introducing force as the arbiter of all social issues.
“The problem with out of context thinking (especially with altruism and collectivism) is that it assumes that the individual’s goals, values, ideas and knowledge are meaningless and of no significance. A proper human life requires a consistent context (reality, values, action) and the ability of the Individual to relate all of his actions to that context. The individual’s personal value context is the “infrastructure” of his life, the foundation that sets the terms for how he will act and what he will pursue. The personal value context makes it possible for a person to correctly make all the decisions in his life especially the most important ones. When the culture becomes dominated by out of context thinking, the result is the disintegration of living.”
To complete the theme of this chapter, I’d like to finish the quote in the first paragraph by Ayn Rand. She put into Ellsworth Toohey’s mouth the following:
“It is always safe to denounce the rich. Everyone will help you, the rich first.”[9]
And this, unfortunately, is also true. Everywhere, when the rich are before us, we see that they feel guilt for being rich and too often bend over backwards to convince us that they are not proud of their riches. Until the productive rich become proud of being rich, until they know that they represent “The Fountainhead” of all that is good about man, until they fight against the confiscation of their property, people like Barack Obama will receive high praises and total freedom to loot. Until they stop voting for their own demise, they will be their own worst enemy.
The answer to Barack Obama and his redistributing friends is also provided by Ayn Rand. Francisco says to industrialist Hank Rearden in her novel "Atlas Shrugged":
"You, who would not submit to the hardships of nature, but set out to conquer it and placed it in the service of your joy and your comfort—to what have you submitted at the hands of men? You, who know from your work that one bears punishment only for being wrong—what have you been willing to bear and for what reason? All your life, you have heard yourself denounced, not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements. You have been scorned for all those qualities of character which are your highest pride. You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgment and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been called antisocial for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. You have been called ruthless for the strength and self-discipline of your drive to your purpose. You have been called greedy for the magnificence of your power to create wealth. You, who've expended an inconceivable flow of energy, have been called a parasite. You, who've created abundance where there had been nothing but wastelands and helpless, starving men before you, have been called a robber. You, who've kept them all alive, have been called an exploiter. You, the purest and most moral man among them, have been sneered at as a 'vulgar materialist.' Have you stopped to ask them: by what right?—by what code?—by what standard? No, you have borne it all and kept silent. You bowed to their code and you never upheld your own. You knew what exacting morality was needed to produce a single metal nail, but you let them brand you as immoral. You knew that man needs the strictest code of values to deal with nature, but you thought that you needed no such code to deal with men. You left the deadliest weapon in the hands of your enemies, a weapon you never suspected or understood. Their moral code is their weapon. Ask yourself how deeply and in how many terrible ways you have accepted it. Ask yourself what it is that a code of moral values does to a man's life, and why he can't exist without it, and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the evil is the good. Shall I tell you why you're drawn to me, eve
n though you think you ought to damn me? It's because I'm the first man who has given you what the whole world owes you and what you should have demanded of all men before you dealt with them: a moral sanction." [10]
In conclusion, taxation of Individual and corporate incomes should never have been authorized by the vote of a majority. And people like Barack Obama who take it for granted that the government has a mandate to establish collectivism should be understood for what they are; people who use force against individuals and their property to accomplish their ill-advised goals. The most moral people in our society are those who produce the very products and services that make our lives easier and more comfortable. They save us thousands of hours of labor, increase our ability to enjoy our lives and make us all wealthy in the process. It is time they knew it and stood up for themselves. No one else will do it.
Certainly, Obama would not say that he hates the rich. He would never openly criticize people who could vote for him. He is not like Hillary. He might even defend the rich if it meant a vote. The difference on this issue between Obama and Hillary is clear; she openly criticizes and taunts the rich. She intends to make life harder for them. Obama, on the other hand, calls Individualism "famous" but he does not claim to be an individualist. He says we "reward" the rich but he never says they don't deserve their rewards. He just wants them to be useful and concerned with the whole. He wants them to be his draft animals, happy and content that after doing the back breaking work, they'll have some of the grain they've refined.
A Primer against Racism
"This you must always bear in mind: what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of part it is of what kind of whole; and there is no one who can hinder you from always doing and saying the things which are in accord with nature of which you are a part." -Marcus Aurelius