TAXING THE RICH
In deciding how to extricate ourselves from the burdens of our national debt, we need to cross-apply something we have learned about countering insurgencies.
To defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, our best experts say, we need to do three things: stabilize the military situation, rebuild the lives of the people, and work with a functional Afghani government to continue those efforts. The problem, as it was in China after World War II, then Vietnam in the Vietnam War, is corruption—systematic, endemic corruption that has become a way of life. No rule of law, no human rights, no economic transparency can withstand the corrosive effect of individuals seeing governmental authority as their path to personal enrichment.
Now shift to one of the most contentious debates in our own society, that of the right to levy taxes. No matter how sacrosanct the Bill of Rights AMENDMENTS to the Constitution may be, the 16th Amendment, which enabled the progressive income tax, is ignored by some as if it had never been enacted. Someone who is rich got there by his or her own efforts, goes their argument, and The Government does not have any right to what they have earned.
But without the social stability, the privacy, and the complex system of expectations that makes it possible to take reasonable risks to gain ample rewards, being rich would be impossible. Being powerful, in a world of ruthless and dangerous competition, perhaps, but not the kind of affluence that has made this country the envy of the world. Say what one may about strong government, the fastest way to appreciate it is to live for any length of time where it does not exist: in the so-called Democratic Republic of the Congo, for instance, in which the great idealist of Joseph Conrad’s novel “The Heart of Darkness” ends by gasping out “The horror! The horror!”, and where little has altered that summation in a century.
Taking half the yearly income of someone who is super-rich amounts to nothing more than sending some of the money back to those from whom it was taken. The money was not earned, in the sense that a roofer earns his daily pay by sweating his way through a strenuous and perhaps dangerous day, but rather was made—that is, made off others. Using that money to create a strong, effective, and responsive government will allow the superrich to enjoy luxuries beyond the wildest dreams of those who are in the employ of the businesses they own. That should not be taken for granted, and in the great scale of things, it ought to be regarded as enough.
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