Taxation as a Tool of Moral Corruption
Robert McCain has written the column I wish I had thought to write two weeks ago. I’ve had this thought buzzing around my head like a gnat lately and I haven’t been able to get my hands on it.
This whole bailout idea repulses me on a level that I’ve been at a loss to truly explain. I believe it’s a horribly bad economic idea to throw gobs of good money after bad. I believe that we’re being sold a bad deal because the real panic isn’t nearly as bad as the panic inside the MSM newsrooms. I further believe that much of the panic-mongering, indeed the very fundamentals of this entire situation was built on purpose by progressives hungry to create the exact situation we’re in right now. I believe that if we’re not very careful, we will find ourselves in a far more socialist and far less prosperous and free state than we’re in right now.
But none of those reasons adequately explain why the very notion of a massive bailout gives me a sick little twisting feeling in the pit of my stomach. Well, Robert nailed it for me.
Whereas transactions in a market economy are voluntary and peaceful, the actions of government are essentially coercive, backed with the threat of violence to those who disobey. What government does, it does “at the point of the bayonet,” so to speak. Therefore, the fearsome power of government ought to be constrained to limited and specific purposes — defending the life, liberty and property of citizens.
When government begins to meddle in the economy, picking winners and losers, using appropriations and fiscal policy to transfer money from one group of citizens to another, it divides society into two classes, taxpayers and tax consumers, punishing the former in order to reward the latter.
Such a policy is not merely misguided, it is immoral — indeed, it is sinful, as I told the Christian homeschoolers — and by displaying the spectacle of government engaging daily in legalized theft, the welfare state tends to corrupt the morals of its citizens.
Yeah, that’s it. That’s it exactly.
I can’t help but think that the progressives who want control of this country are more than happy to use the power of the government to corrupt the morals of America so those morals can be rebuilt to comport with the religion of the state that they themselves will lead.
In other words, they need to replace the morals we have now with the morals they want us to have which not condidentally includes themselves as the ultimate arbiters of that new moral code.
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Category: General
