We Can Not Allow Class Warfare To Work Again!

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

Thomas Sowell notes in this article, Trashing Achievements, a very corrosive form of class warfare has emerged in this campaign from desperate Democratic candidates from the courthouse to the White House. For instance, Sowell recounts this recent statement from the Democratic Senate candidate in Massachusetts,

To cheering audiences, Professor Warren says, “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You build a factory out there, good for you, but I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate.”

This argument is wrong for many reasons, including:

• It assumes that your successful neighbors don’t pay taxes—but they do. And, what’s more, no matter where you slice it—the top 1%, 2%, 5% or 10%—the earners at these levels pay most of the taxes collected at every level of government in this country.

• It assumes that the group Professor Warren calls “the rest of us” pays all the taxes that pay for the schools and the infrastructure in this country—but they don’t. While virtually everyone who has a job pays into Social Security and Medicare, those programs don’t pay for the education and the infrastructure that Professor Warren is talking about. As for the federal income taxes that do contribute to pay for those programs, almost one half of the country’s population is exempted from paying those taxes.

• It assumes that the problem with government budgets is that we aren’t raising enough revenue to pay for education and infrastructure, but those programs are not driving the increase in the public debt. What is driving the widening gap between tax revenue and public spending are the growing costs of social entitlements, public-sector pensions, layers of unnecessary bureaucrats, mounds of new regulations, and fraud and waste in the procurement process.

• Finally, and most importantly, it assumes that government in our society always came first, and that all we have accomplished is a result of government giving us benefits. But any “benefit” bestowed by government had to come from taxes, and those taxes had to come from citizens or their businesses, and those citizens and businesses had to accumulate property and income to pay for those taxes. In the end, it is the source of private property and income—jobs and business, from the farm to the town square to the factory—that came first to pay for government.

In fact, Professor Warren’s argument turns the history of this country on its head. The national government did not even appear in the United States until the colonists were here for almost 150 years—living and working on farms and in small communities. In fact, from the 1630s to the 1750s, the European governments with colonies here largely left the colonists to govern themselves. It is the productive farmers and businessmen who owned property who paid the first taxes from their earnings to pay for the schools and the canals and the roads. They continued to pay the taxes to enlarge the infrastructure during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, and they were the ones who shouldered the burden of 70%-90% marginal tax rates for decades after the New Deal programs were enacted. And it still takes the production of private income from the efforts of the private job creators to pay for all those schools and roads that Professor Warren talks about.

Government didn’t come first in America. Productive, entrepreneurial citizens always have come first in this country.

The left’s class warfare rhetoric shows what is at stake in this election. If the Democrats don’t understand our country’s history, and don’t understand the consequences of the tax and spending policies they have enacted, they can’t be trusted to fix the problems that face this country. If they do understand our history and these consequences, then they are lying to the American people to stay in office—and we must not allow them to succeed.

Not this time, and not ever again.

It is time to move beyond this corrosive class rhetoric if we are ever going to stabilize and modernize our country to meet the challenges of the 21^st Century in a way that preserves and strengthens the inalienable rights we’ve been given.

It is time for a change in White House and the U.S. Senate.

It is time for all good citizens “to come to the aid of their countrymen” and make this change in the November Election.

So, we now know it’s a tax—its time to abolish it!

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

Over the last few weeks (most of which I spent on a family vacation outside the country), I read the recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions from the 2011-12 term and tried to write this post several times. However, none of the drafts seemed to convey what I felt needed to be said. I think with the passage of time and more thought, I can now say what I’ve wanted to say.

I was very disappointed by the ruling upholding “Obamacare”. However, as we conservatives near the end of our primaries and begin to approach the last lap of the campaign toward the November finish line, I believe the U.S. Supreme Court gave us a great gift this term—though, admittedly not the one we wanted—if we will now seize that gift, and then use it to defeat Obama and send Romney and the Republicans to Washington.

The Court reminded everyone in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius and Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC that there are real limits to the delegated powers of the federal government contained both in the body of the original text of the Constitution, and in the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. In fact, Justices Roberts’ and Kennedys’ opinions in Sebelius, in which the limits of the Commerce Clause and Spending Clause powers were clarified by a majority of the Justices, contain some of the strongest re-iterations of, and re-commitments to the Founders’ original design of Federalism to be found in any opinions from the Court in the last 100 years. Amazingly, even two of the Court’s most liberal justices (Breyer and Kagan) agreed with the limitations of the Spending Clause, and that those limitations had been violated by Congress. Moreover, the Court struck a strong balance in Arizona v. United States between the delegated powers over foreign affairs and naturalization held by the federal government and the general sovereign powers retained by the states.
Even the bizarre ruling by Justice Roberts and the four liberal justices to uphold the individual mandate (and, therefore, most of the law) was, in an odd way, a gift—maybe the most important gift of all. As he found the mandate to really be a tax, Justice Roberts had to acknowledge (expressly and implicitly) truths that Americans should know deep in their DNA, but we sometimes forget:

• when we create any government, that government has to be funded by taxes so the power to tax is given to government;
• the power to tax is the most coercive, and potentially despotic power that government holds;
• the power to tax delegated to the federal government has expanded since 1789 by constitutional amendment to include direct taxes on individuals, and it has been used to implement many coercive policies over the last 100 years; and
• the only real constraint on the exercise of the power to tax is political, not legal—that is the only effective constraint is the one exercised by the people through their right to vote and to petition their government.

In the end it is that last power—the rights of the people to alter or abolish their government through their votes and through their direct petitions to their elected officials—retained by individual citizens, which we always have exercised to control taxation. All Justice Roberts’ opinion did was to remove the final decision as to the Democrat’s abuse of the taxation power from the courts and return it where it belongs—to the people to punish and change. In doing so, he pitched that ball right into our wheelhouse; all we have to do now is control the swing of our bat and make contact.

From the original Boston Tea Party, to the Coolidge and Kennedy tax reductions, to Howard Jarvis’ Proposition 13, to Kemp-Roth and the Reagan Revolution, and now to the Tea Party Movement, we have met the challenge of excessive taxation and defeated it. We must be vigilant and do so again with our votes this fall. In the meantime, we must support those state politicians, including Governor Perry of Texas and Governor Scott of Florida, who are using the clarification of the limits of the Spending Clause to fight the expansion of the federal strings of Medicaid into their states; and petition other state governments to do the same.

So, we now know our mission for the fall election (if any of us out there still were confused)—to abolish Democrats’ abuses of the tax and spending authority by abolishing both the Obama administration the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate. As we’ve now been reminded, we still have the power to correct these abuses, let’s exercise it.