TAXING

The new administration emphasizes fairness. If you’ve worked hard all your life and have finally started to make some money, you are going to pay more taxes. Some of this money will be passed out to people sitting on a porch. You can be sure they will think it’s fair. You, however, may not agree.

Ayn Rand would have asked the porch sitters: What is your moral right to the earnings of others? Of course, there is no moral right, and there’s nothing fair about it either. What’s more, there’s a lot of damage that goes with high taxes. The great economist Ludwig von Mises made these fitting comments:

"Progressive taxation on income and profits means that precisely those parts of the income which people would have saved and invested are taxed away."

"If the present tax rates had been in effect from the beginning of our century, many who are millionaires today would live under more modest circumstances. But all those new branches of industry which supply the masses with articles unheard of before would operate, if at all, on a much smaller scale, and their products would be beyond the reach of the common man."

People who want to improve the country through high taxes are taking a page out of the Marxist playbook. It’s not so much they want to save the country as to rule the country. Their views are rooted in envy coupled with an abysmal lack of understanding about how capitalism works to benefit the masses. Their minds have been poisoned against capitalism by the impractical nonsense of leftist professors and intellectuals who never had the guts to venture out. High taxes are just another milepost on the road to ruin. We are doing all the wrong things to foster prosperity. It’s more than tragic.