It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong - Andrew P. Napolitano [127]
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The real tragedy of public finance is that it acts as the great enabler for all of government’s most tyrannical actions. How could wars be fought without money? How could we give aid to corrupt regimes without a source of revenue? As Frank Chodorov, a well-respected critic of taxes, warns, “We cannot restore traditional American freedom unless we limit the government’s power to tax. No tinkering with this, that, or the other law will stop the trend toward socialism.” If we are really, truly committed to the cause of liberty, then we must cut off tyranny at its source: Public finance.
The Evil of Taxation
The basic evil of taxation is that it degrades the individual by flouting his natural rights. Taxation in essence establishes a legal right on the part of the government to your property and the product of your labor, a right which precedes and trumps your own. The government’s claim of right, however, extends to all of your property, not just what it actually takes; otherwise, it would not be able to raise taxes whenever it chooses. Consider in this regard the text of the Sixteenth Amendment, passed in 1913: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” It is clear from the text itself that there are no constitutional restrictions on what Congress may take (unlike the original Constitution). Thus, whatever portion of your own property it declines to take is simply whatever it, in all of its infinite professed wisdom and charity, decides you may keep. Our retained income has become not a right, but a privilege granted by government. This scheme is one of the fundamental legal precepts of socialism: The government decides what it will take from you and what you may keep from it.
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This is also the strictest application of Positivism: If the government can say when our natural rights protect us from aggression and when they do not, then there can be no such thing as natural rights. This tenuous, subjective nature of our rights is itself reflected in the distinction between taxation and theft. Theft does not mean a taking of your property, but whatever the government determines to be an unlawful taking of your property. Thus, the contemporary understanding of theft extends from lawmakers, and not the Natural Law or any ethical principle. Although natural rights and taxation could theoretically be reconciled if free choice was somehow involved, as we shall see, it is in the nature of Big Government that this will always be an unattainable ideal.
Because natural, inalienable rights are transgressed, the people become subhuman by losing free will. One of the most important property rights is the right to choose how your property is used. If the state is able to take property and allocate it to a different use than the individual would have chosen, then the will of the individual is servile to the will of the state. Even if the entire value of the labor you produced is returned to you in the form of governmental services, you have still lost the freedom to choose what should be done with that value. Although the economic consequences of enabling centrally planned investment and spending decisions are disastrous (not to mention the disincentive to labor caused by the reallocation of income), the real tragedy is the cost to human liberty.
Given this inextricable link between property and freedom, it should not be surprising that one of the major civil rights statutes during the Reconstruction era gave African Americans