The number of millionaires I know is
small, I think, but my experience is exactly the opposite of yours –
none of them think they aren't taxed enough. This serves to
illustrate a point I often make: the rightness or wrongness of a
matter is not determined by the reactions of those affected by it.
That one millionaire says he is not taxed enough – a situation
easily remedied by writing a check made out to the United States
Department of the Treasury, a remedy of which I would be curious to
ask your friends if they have ever availed themselves – and that another
says he is taxed enough cannot be the basis for action
regarding taxation. Similarly, that I think that tolls are a valid
method for raising revenue for road maintenance and the next fellow
doesn't is another example of how differing opinions can't be the
basis for policy decisions. When considering matters that affect
people's lives with the power of the law, the only rational and just
arbitrator is principle.
To illustrate, we know that the act of
extortion is wrong. However, extortion occurs. One business owner
on the block may reason that, considering the effectiveness of
“protection” afforded so far by the extortioner, the money spent
to prevent the extortioner from himself becoming a looter is well
spent, because the cost of protecting himself from both the
extortioner and the rest of the criminal world would be much higher.
Another business owner on the same block may think the demands of the
extortioner should be answered with a shotgun blast to the
extortioner's head, and the same goes for any thief who presumes it
to be acceptable to take what the business man owns.
Neither opinion – nor the one held by
the extortioner - is relevant as to whether or not extortion is
wrong. That extortion is wrong stands on its own as an inviolable
principle. As such, there is no circumstance when it is right to
extort.
Let us suppose that the extortioner
gathers 3 other people who agree with him and visits a business to
make his demands. The presence of the 3 in the “support group”
changes nothing. Then, let's suppose the extortioner gathers 50, or
1000. No matter; extortion remains wrong. Let us suppose the mayor
of the city and the governor of the state express their support of
the extortioner's business plan. No matter; extortion remains wrong.
Let us suppose that the matter is brought before the legislators and
they rule it acceptable. No matter; extortion remains wrong.
There is no point at which an
individual wrong becomes a collective right, and there is no point at
which an individual or group achieves a position to establish principles
dealing with justice anymore than they can establish principles that
deal with mathematics.
To say that a group of 10,000 citizens
or the legislators could make extortion acceptable is the mental
equivalent of saying that either group could rule that oxygen is no
longer necessary to sustain human life.
The point is: neither opinion, nor
situation, nor legal definitions determine the truth, in which are
found, among other things, what is right and wrong.
And so it is with taxation; what one
millionaire says as opposed to another is meaningless as to the
rightness of wrongness of tax policy. With life comes a principle
that tells us that no person has a legitimate power to force another
person to do or not do something, unless that other person has first
done the same. There is no measure of public opinion or support that
can change this. There is no legislative body that can change this.
Therefore, every time force is exercised by one against another in
the absence of force already exercised, a moral crime has been
committed. I cannot walk into your driveway and drive off with a car
that is parked there unless the car is mine and you took it from me
in the first place. This is just as inviolable as the formula that
tells us that the product of any number multiplied by zero is zero.
From this, we know that any millionaire
- anyone at all, in fact - that is taxed against his will is the victim of a moral crime,
regardless of the amount he is taxed, and the perpetrators of the
crime should face punishment in just the same manner as the thief who
climbs through a second story window and makes off with the
silverware.
The final principle to point out in
this matter is this: it is never right to do what is wrong, even in
order to get the chance to do what is right. I may have a friend
with a problem wherein his car is in need of a $1500.00 repair and he
hasn't the money. I have the ability (but nowhere near the nerve or
inclination) to drive to North Carolina and knock off a series of
convenience stores and return with the proceeds and give them to my
friend. I will have solved his problem, but I will have not done
what is right. Robin Hood did not steal from the rich and give to
the poor - he returned money that the rich had stolen in the first
place.
Because I tend to respond to posts in
order of the things mentioned in them, I will say that I appreciate a
great deal the wisdom your friends express in acknowledging that they
did nothing to deserve their elevated status. This is why I don't
say I'm proud to be an American. To do so would be arrogant; I had
nothing to do with the process. Rather, I am grateful to be an
American, as it was something that was given to me. I will say this
also: I am not at all convinced that having wealth, either by birth
or by initiative, is necessarily good luck. Of those that I know,
none of the wealthy evince any greater degree of happiness than I. With only one exception, all of them spend an inordinate amount
of time and stress maintaining their wealth, and I see in them the easiest and
most likely victims of the adage that tells us we are owned by our
possessions. On the odd occasion when I have mentioned that nearly
all of my possessions would fit in my 2-door Blazer with enough room
for a passenger, I typically received a longing sigh, but yet I know
not a single one of them would trade places with me.
I understand that a rich man has –
let us not say advantages, but rather, abilities – that a poor man
does not when it comes to ordering his responses to the things life
throws at him. But this is irrelevant to the principles I've pointed
out. That he can “afford” to pay 35% of his earnings when the
average man cannot has nothing to do with whether or not he should.
We could likewise say that the rich man can “afford” a robbery
that reduces his assets by $10,000.00 but the average man can't, so
there should be no complaints heard from the rich man.
The amount of taxation a person pays –
which is a separate matter entirely from whether or not he should pay
them – can, again, only be determined by principle. There are
those that say – and I'm taking license here by saying “those”
but I did literally hear one person on TV say - that the truly rich
should be taxed 75% of their total wealth, and did so with a straight
face. He based this on nothing more than how much he thought they
“needed”. A clearer illustration of the lunacy of situational
ethics could never be had.
So then, how can we determine how much
a person should pay in taxes? Again, by principle, but first we have
to do away with the common flights of fantasy that get accepted as
reality by the intellectually lazy.
One would be the egregious belief that
taxes are, in part, justified to “pay for the privilege of living
in such a great country”. This is akin to the local BMW emporium
saying part of the reason a 750Li is so expensive is because you're
buying it from such a great dealer. Har-har.
The reason a BMW 750Li is so expensive is because the
people who own it say “This is how much you have to give us in
order to get one.” Period. They may build into the price their
silly belief, and we can argue all day about whether or not it's
worth it and whether or not the people who own it are crazy for
believing it is – I'm sure some of them do, it isn't, and I do -
but you still aren't going to drive one off the lot without paying
for it – or stealing it.
You see, BMW and its dealers are offering
what is known as “goods and services”. They offer you the
opportunity to enter into a voluntary relationship wherein both
parties have the freedom to agree or disagree on the value of an item
that one owns and the other does not. Neither BMW nor its dealers
have the power to use the threat of coercion or force to get you to
come to the lot, or pick a particular model, or pay a certain price.
This voluntary basis of property exchange is the only moral one
available.
This leads us to the next form of
lunacy that pervades our society: that the rich – for whom there is
no actual definition – should pay more of their income as a
percentage. Taking a trip back to our BMW dealer, we find that
Nancy Pelosi has bought the dealership and is telling a guy that's
worth 7 million dollars he has to pay three times as much for the
750Li as the other guy that's worth $750,000.00 Understandably, we
who live in the rational world decide to shop somewhere else.
The last madness I'll deal with is the
one that says taxes are paid in part to cause certain results in society.
Deciding once more to visit the whacky lady and her BMW palace just
to make sure we weren't hearing things, we find the multi-multi
millionaire Nancy telling the 7 million dollar man that in order to
buy that 750Li he also has to contribute an additional 29% of the
cost of the car to a fund that is used to buy cars for those making
less than $100,000.00 a year plus another 15% to fund road construction. Now convinced beyond all doubt that
either this dealership is owned by someone who is insane or we have
walked onto a location set for a new iteration of The Twilight
Zone, we leave to find a pharmacy and pick up some aspirin.
