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Saturday, January 27, 2007

Looters and Leeches of the Democratic Party

Redistribution by progressive taxation is a theme that comes directly from the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848.

If you have never taken the time to read the Communist Manifesto, then you should, read it, compare it to the Democratic party and their talking points.

It will be very enlightening.

If you do not believe this is where the Democrats are leading us, just look at Hillary Clintons words in June of 2004:

Addressing a Democratic fund-raiser yesterday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., told wealthy supporters the government will need to take money away from them for the "common good."

Clinton headlined an appearance with other women Democratic senators in San Francisco, where donors gave as much as $10,000 to California Sen. Barbara Boxer's campaign.

"Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you," Clinton said, according to the Associated Press. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you.

"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
My feelings and opinions on the Agenda for the Common Good can be found here.

Progressive Taxation:

The term "progressive tax" is frequently applied in reference to income taxes, where people with more disposable income pay a higher percentage of that income in tax than do those with less income. The term progressive refers to the way the rate progresses from low to high. The opposite of a progressive tax is a regressive tax, where the tax rate decreases as the amount to which the rate is applied increases. In between is a proportional tax, where the tax rate is fixed as the amount to which the rate is applied increases. Progressive taxes reduce the tax incidence of people with smaller incomes, as they shift the incidence disproportionately to those with higher incomes.

The idea of a progressive income tax has garnered support from economists and political scientists of many different ideologies. Karl Marx, argued for a progressive income tax in The Communist Manifesto:

Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883, London) was a German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. Marx addressed a wide range of issues; he is most famous for his analysis of history, summed up in the opening line of the introduction to the Communist Manifesto (1848): "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Marx believed that the capitalism should be replaced by communism.

Looters and Leeches.

In a piece I wrote back in October I showed the multiple ways that the Democratic Party uses the Communist Manifesto for a number of their talking points.

The problem I see with this type of dangerous thinking is it is the rich, the big companies, that employ the rest of the world. To punish them, by raising their taxes is biting the hand that literally feeds you.

The rich make their money from work, they create and they produce, then they PAY people to manufacture what they have produced. It is capitalism and it what makes the world go round, as the saying goes.

Without this system, you would have no new products, therefore you would have no products to produce, who makes money then?

What if Bill Gates decided he did not appreciate being punished (taxed more than anyone else) and closed his company ( Microsoft)down.....how many jobs would be lost? How many livlihoods would be destroyed? How many employees would no longer have a job to support their families?

Those that work for huge orginizations or subsidaries of giant conglamorates, if the owners, shareholders and CEO's of these companies decided that their hard work in building the companies was not worth being punished and just shut the doors, how many of YOU would be jobless and have no income at all?

What exactly makes a person believe that they "deserve" a higher percentage of what somebody ELSE created and produced?

By what right?

Those that would propose this are no better than looters and leeches of humanity.

We should be encouraging the producers to produce instead of taxing them more.

As is true of many similar measures, progressive taxation has assumed its present importance as a result of having been smuggled in under false pretenses. When at the time of the French Revolution and again during the socialist agitation preceding the revolutions of 1848 it was frankly advocated as a means of redistributing incomes, it was decisively rejected. "One ought to execute the author and not the project," was the liberal Turgot's indignant response to some early proposals of this sort. When, in the 1830's they came to be more widely advocated, J. R. McCulloch expressed the chief objection in the often quoted statement:

"The moment you abandon the cardinal principle of exacting from all individuals the same proportion of their income or of their property, you are at sea without rudder or compass, and there is no amount of injustice and folly you may not commit."

In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels frankly proposed "a heavy progressive or graduated income tax" as one of the measures by which, after the first stage of the revolution, "the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeois, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state." And these measures they described as "means of despotic inroads on the right of property, and on the condition of bourgeois production ... measures ...which appear economically insufficient and untenable but which, in the course of the movement outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.".

Their statement that "proportionality is a principle, but progression is simply hateful arbitrariness,"' or John Stuart Mill's description of progression as "a mild form of robbery."

Ater the first onslaught for progressive taxation had been repelled, the agitation for progressive taxation reappeared in a new form. The social reformers, while generally disavowing any desire to alter the distribution of incomes, began to contend that the total tax burden, assumed to be determined by other considerations, should be distributed according to "ability to pay" in order to secure equality of sacrifice" and that this would be best achieved by taxing incomes at progressive rates.

An explanation of this development that is usually offered is that the great increase in public expenditure in the last forty years could not have been met without resort to steep progression, or at least that, without it, an intolerable burden would have had to be placed on the poor and that, once the necessity of relieving the poor was admitted, some degree of progression was inevitable.

On examination, however, the explanation dissolves into pure myth. Not only is the revenue derived from the high rates levied on large incomes, particularly in the highest brackets, so small compared with the total revenue as to make hardly any difference to the burden borne by tile rest; but for a long time after the introduction of progression it was not the poorest who benefited from it but entirely the better-off working class and the lower strata of the middle class who provided the largest number of voters.

It would probably be true, on the other hand, to say that the illusion that by means of progressive taxation the burden can be shifted substantially onto the shoulders of the wealthy has been the chief reason why taxation has increased as fast as it has done and that, under the influence of this illusion, the masses have come to accept a much heavier load than they would have done otherwise. The only major result of the policy has been the severe limitation of the incomes that could be earned by the most successful and thereby gratification of the envy of the less-well-off.

Looters and Leeches.

This means that progressive taxation necessarily offends against what is probably the only universally recognized principle of economic justice, that of “equal pay for equal work”. If what each of two lawyers will be allowed to retain from his fees for conducting exactly the same kind of case as the, other depends on his other earnings during the year-they will, in fact, often derive very different gains from similar efforts.

A man who has worked very hard, or for some reason is in greater demand, may receive a much smaller reward for further effort than one who has been idle or less lucky. Indeed, the more the consumers value a man's services, the less worthwhile will it be for him to exert himself further.

The problem of progressive taxation is, of course, an ethical problem, and in a democracy the real problem is whether the support that the principle now receives would continue if the people fully understood how it operates. It is probable that the practice is based on ideas which most people would not approve if they were stated abstractly.

That a majority should be free to impose a discriminatory tax burden on a minority; that, in consequence, equal services should be remunerated differently; and that for a whole class, merely because its incomes are not in line with those of the rest, the normal incentives should be practically made ineffective-all these are principles which cannot be defended on grounds of justice. If, in addition, we consider the waste of energy and effort which progressive taxation in so many ways leads to, it should not be impossible to convince reasonable people of its undesirability.

Yet experience in this field shows how rapidly habit blunts the sense of justice and even elevates into a principle what in fact has no better basis than envy.

In what reality does a person agree that they should produce, they should create, they should employ the masses, then they should also allow those same people to reach into their pocket and steal what they have earned with their own ability?

Completely exempting the vast majority of the population, means that the impact is not only primarily, but exclusively, directed against the very affluent. While the sharply graduated rates among those who were subject to the tax meant that a clear signal was being sent:

The greater your material success, the more you achieved, the less of your achievement, you would be permitted to enjoy.

With the advent of the "New Deal"--the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt on March 4, 1933--a veritable pestilence of Leftwing theorists, propagandists and academics, descended upon Washington.

While many of these were agenda driven Socialists of various hues; they were generally described as "Liberal" or "Progressive," and generally credited with a profundity, which none of them ever actually demonstrated. There was little deviation in the approach of such men to economic and social issues from that of a consistent ideology, reflecting commitment to a Socialist/Egalitarian value system.

Under their influence, the Federal Government assumed a whole new role: The ultimate support system for the poor and needy. And the concept of "tax and spend" became a recognized approach to American Government.

Under Roosevelt, the pretense of an ideologically neutral tax system was abandoned. By the time Roosevelt died, the maximum marginal rate among higher income taxpayers, had soared to 91%.

Although the War had been cited in justification for the generally very high, yet sharply graduated rates, the Left resisted all post war efforts to afford tax relief to the more successful.

The theorists and propagandists, who had infested the New Deal at every level, were now dug in, both in Government and Academia, as well as in the popular media; and from these bastions, bitterly assailed all efforts to return to a more capital friendly tax system.

The tactics, these employed, have been used ever since to maintain very high rates as part of a socialistic mechanism to redistribute wealth.

Taxes in and of itself is a form of robbery. But the system of discriminatory taxation universally accepted under the misleading name of progressive taxation of income and inheritance is not a mode of taxation. It is rather a mode of disguised expropriation of the successful capitalists and entrepreneurs.

After so many years of our country fighting to rid humanity of Communism, are we now embracing it within America?

Yes one political party is embracing it.

We are encouraging people to NOT produce by handing them monies they did NOT earn and we are punishing those that do produce by taxing them more..... how backwards is that?

Cato Institute, Sept. 1996, written by James A. Dorn:

Conservatives and liberals alike fall into a populist trap by trying to justify some progressivity in order to satisfy the majority's preference for greater income equality. Elevating the principle of democratic rule above the protection of individual rights to achieve equality of result, however, violates the very rules of just conduct that lie at the heart of a free society. A flat-rate tax is consistent with a rule of law and with the principle of nondiscrimination. Everyone would pay the same tax rate, and income from all sources would be taxed only once; there would be no double taxation of interest and dividends. If the flat-rate tax were applied to consumption rather than income, the current bias against saving would disappear and economic growth would increase.

[...]

Those who support progressive taxation pretend to be on the moral high ground but, in fact, they have no ground to stand on. Envy, not justice, is at the root of the argument for discriminatory taxation. That is why those who most strongly advocate progressive taxation are in favor of the welfare state. "Law is the bond of civil society, and justice is equality under the law," wrote Cicero. If we are to restore civil society and move from tax socialism to tax justice, we need to abolish progressive taxation, institute a fair flat tax and limit the size of government. Otherwise, class warfare and welfare will prevail.

Read the Principles of communism, written by Frederick Engels in 1847 and then pick up your newspaper, look at the Democratic talking points and understand that this is where we are heading, especially in relation to the subject of progressive taxation.

Some excerpts should scare the hell out of all of us.

#14- What will this new social order have to be like?

Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society.

It will, in other words, abolish competition and replace it with association.

Moreover, since the management of industry by individuals necessarily implies private property, and since competition is in reality merely the manner and form in which the control of industry by private property owners expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separated from competition and the individual management of industry. Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement – in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods.

In fact, the abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry – and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand.

#16- Will the peaceful abolition of private property be possible?

It would be desirable if this could happen, and the communists would certainly be the last to oppose it.

Read the whole thing. It is where we are heading if we do not step up and speak out and put an end to it here and now.

You do not bite the hand that feeds you and continue to be fed.

Looters and Leeches.



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