Source: http://www.thefreedomfactory.us/everyone-has-to-pay-taxes-or-america-will-fail/
August 29, 2008
With the Earned Income Tax Credit many of these patriots even receive handouts by the federal government, taken from the rest of the chumps who pay taxes. When a large percentage of the population has no vested interest in the fiscal solvency of the state, they are prone to demand increasingly irresponsible programs until a crisis forces change. The Romans called the crisis ”civil war” after which a dictatorship was established.
“If, as now happens, 60% of the people in our democracy can force 40% to pay the bills, what’s to stop 65% from making 35% pay it all? Since no one wants to pay taxes, what’s to stop 90% of people in a democracy from making 10% pay it all? Or why not let 99% of the country off the hook, as long as the remaining 1% picks up the tab?”
This is the inevitable consequence of inadequately constrained democracy, as illustrated by the British historian, Alexander Tyler, in his lifecycle of civilizations. ”A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”
It’s a tried and true axiom of reality/economics that when something is free it loses value, i.e. if you get free healthcare you are less circumspect in your consumption of those resources. My friend’s father runs a manufacturing plant that had an odd thing happen…when the company decided to give free healthcare to its employees, there was a sharp increase in people taking sick days and heading to the doctor. Crazy, right? Can you guess the solution? Not many people liked him, but when my friend’s father introduced a nominal co-pay there was a drastic reduction in the number of people getting sick. If only all diseases could be so easily cured!
When a large percentage of the country’s citizens get away without contributing anything to funding our government, they have little stake in how it is run. They care only for what they can get out of the system, without any thought to the consequences of how these free goodies are delivered. You can see the apathy everywhere! Voting is a joke. How can you take a system seriously when something as preposterous as our current income tax system is so entrenched that far superior alternatives like the Fair Tax are considered impossible to enact?
I hope America can get its act together and fix one of the only safeguards to ensuring our Democracy doesn’t devolve into apathetic, dependent, serfdom. The rich should pay more taxes since they derive greater benefit from government, but the middle class and poor also derive benefits for which they must pay their proportionate share. Pandering to these majority voting blocks by promising to stick it to the rich even more sounds great from a podium, but has only one inevitable outcome.
About the author: Rob Viglione is a writer, hedge fund manager, real estate broker, and Humanist. He is General Partner and managing director of Viglione & Partners Assurance Group, L.P., a derivatives trading firm, and is President of SoCal Real Estate Advisors, Inc. Rob founded The Freedom Factory and www.learnobamanomics.com, on which you can find his recent book "Obamanomics: A Guide to Investing Over the Next Administration". He wholeheartedly believes that people must take responsibility for their own lives, better their own conditions and the world around them. In this spirit, he co-founded the Viglow Scholarship Foundation in 2004.
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