A Few Words About Everyone’s Favorite Subject

     I found this over at 90 Miles From Tyranny:

     It’s not perfectly correct, though the underlying sentiment is spot on. However, it makes a good introduction into the overall subject of taxation: why it’s done, what it’s supposed to fund, how it’s executed, and why Americans have come to hate even the mention of it.

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1. The Why.

     The rationale for taxation is moderately complex, but comprehensible by anyone who can read English:

1. There are things that must be done for the benefit of the entire polity.
2. Those things must be paid for.
3. However:
   • No one receives a sufficient individual benefit to volunteer to pay for them;
   • Anyone who avoids paying for them would get the benefit anyway.
4. Therefore:
   • Payment must be made legally mandatory and enforced;
   • The government must determine the amount and perform collection and enforcement.

     Don’t yell at me. I didn’t come up with it. It’s the generally accepted rationale. It’s been the generally accepted rationale for centuries. It’s been called the “public goods” or “externalities” argument. It says nothing specific about what will be funded or how lavishly. Some fine minds, including those of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, have defended that rationale as inescapable, and have devoted their subsequent attention to the omitted specifics.

     From this point forward, remember that a “rationale” is something employed in the service of rationalization: i.e., composing a post hoc justification for something you’ve already decided to do – something you’re determined to do regardless of any and all other considerations.

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2. The What.

     What specific undertakings, as referenced in Item #1 above, “must” be paid for but “justify” taxation by the criteria listed under Item #3?

     Today in the Land of the Formerly Free, there are innumerable such activities and projects. No living man could list them all. And – drumroll, please – if we omit those things under the Departments of Defense, State, and Justice, only a vanishingly small percentage of Americans benefit, directly or otherwise, from any particular one of them.

     However, in aggregate, it is arguable that for any particular American, there’s a measurable chance that one or more of those activities and projects does bring him some benefits. Possibly it’s even a better-than-even-money chance. And that is the version of the Washington Monument Defense that protects the tax system. “It’s good for everybody! What’s that you say? You’re against it anyway? Very well then; we’ll eliminate your slice.”

     Columnist Russell Baker pinned this back in the Sixties, when income tax reform was being hotly discussed. As he put it, everyone is in favor of simplifying the tax code...with the exception of the portion upon which your personal calculations for survival are based.

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3. The How.

     Taxation in pre-Enlightenment societies was conducted by the undisguised use of armed force. Soldiers went door-to-door raking in the loot, skimming off some portion, and toting the rest of it back to the King or the local fief holder. Taxation in modern societies is largely deemed “voluntary.” In the American system, you fork it over through “withholding,” and possibly in an annual “adjustment,” because if you fudge your busybody neighbor might tattle on you, after which the IRS will send armed men to your door and haul you off to live in a reinforced concrete box guarded by other armed men, who will shoot you if you try to leave.

     (Why, yes: I did have to send an “adjustment” to Washington this year. A rather large one, at that. However did you guess?)

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4. The Hatred.

     The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don’t know when it’s through if you are a crook or a martyr. – Will Rogers

     America’s best beloved humorist has nailed it exactly. Everyone knows that taxation is excessive, that the burden is unequally distributed, and that special interests are cleaning up at our expense. Everyone knows that regardless of the legal and pseudo-ethical rationales taxation is indistinguishable from armed robbery. And everyone knows, especially between January 31 and April 15, that the great majority of us have become liars and fabulists in a despairing attempt to keep some of what we’ve earned.

     Why shouldn’t we hate it? It’s made us hate the sight of our pay stubs. It’s made us hate the nameless others who benefit from it. It’s made us hate a government that’s no more “of the people, for the people, and by the people” than any private-sector con job.

     Most terrifying of all, it’s made us hate ourselves.

     Our forebears failed to realize the danger. They were caught in the toils of envy, class animosities, and ersatz “progressivism,” as so many are even today. They failed to restrain the Omnipotent State when it was still within our power. Indeed, many of them cheered as they watched Leviathan burst its Constitutional chains.

     And here we are, in this year of Our Lord 2019, forking over ever more of our pittances to governments that do little more than fatten political insiders and ne’er-do-wells, and make us beg permission even to ply our various trades.

     Perhaps I’ll expand on this later. Just now it’s time for Mass.

What They Will Never Do

     As just about everyone in the English-speaking world already knows, late last night the Senate passed the tax reform package on a party-line vote, 51-49. (Tennessee’s Senator Bob Corker was the lone Republican to vote against it.) The bill includes provisions that not everyone will like – it will hurt homeowners in high-tax states such as New York and California – but it achieves several important things, including the repeal of the “individual mandate” provision of ObamaCare. There will be a joint House-Senate conference to resolve differences in the chambers’ bills. I predict that the most important features will survive.

     The reduction of tax rates is one of the few steps Congress is willing to take in the name of limiting the federal government. It’s highly indirect. It doesn’t usually have any significant effect on the rate of growth in government. But at least it gestures toward the notion – widely though foolishly held – that what we earn by our labor is our rightful property.

     What Congress is absolutely unwilling to do is actually shrink the federal Leviathan. Nor will the tax reform bill result in any such shrinkage.

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     You might have read coverage of the fusillades over the bill in which various Democrats complained that it would “increase the debt.” Republican arguments that reductions in tax rates are usually followed by economic growth that results in higher federal tax revenues get no respect from them. But that’s a pretty thin cover for the Democrats’ real objection to lowering tax rates. They’ve never been sincerely concerned about the national debt. They certainly weren’t concerned about it during the Obama years.

     The Democrats don’t want you and me thinking that our income is ours, to be disposed of as we, not they, prefer. Any suggestion of that sort terrifies them. It implies a limitation on their power, if not by Constitutional provision then by ethical principles.

     No federal court has ever challenged the unlimited power of Congress to tax. Indeed, income tax rates as high as 91% have passed muster when challenged in court, usually on the holding that Congress’s taxing power, being explicitly delegated by Article I, Section 8, is beyond the reach of the judiciary. Ironically, an important event of the Constitutional period involved an implicit limitation on Congress’s power to tax. Here’s the relevant clause of the Constitution as it was ratified:

     The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

     Specificity was a particular concern of the Framers. Compare and contrast the version of the Taxation Clause above with the following, which was proposed in its place:

     The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises; to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

     Did you spot the difference? If not, look at the punctuation marks after the word Excises in each version. A semicolon says that what precedes it is independent of what follows. A semicolon would separate the taxing power from the specific purposes for which taxation was authorized. It would have authorized Congress to collect taxes for any reason or none.

     Gouverneur Morris wanted the semicolon. Others among the Framers, James McHenry prominent among them, argued against it. As the American Revolution was largely a revolution in opposition to taxation and in defense of property rights, the comma was maintained.

     But if taxation is licit only for the legitimate purposes of Congress, then we must know what those purposes are.

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     If you haven’t read Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution recently, that’s where the legitimately delegated powers of Congress are specified. The Framers intended to limit Congress to those powers and no others. In the two centuries and more since the ratification of our Supreme Law, the federal government has chiseled away at its limitations under a variety of rationales. Yet the combination of that section and the Tenth Amendment should have left no doubt whatsoever that if it isn’t explicitly delegated to Congress in Article I, Section 8, then Congress has no power to do it.

     Yet when Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House during the crossfire over ObamaCare, was asked what Constitutional provision authorizes Congress to legislate on medical insurance, she indignantly replied that “That is not a serious question.” But it was quite serious. That she wasn’t willing to answer it doesn’t change that. Her problem, of course, is that the answer is “None.”

     Pelosi is on record as saying that Congress’s power is unlimited, owing to the General Welfare clause. Constitutional scholar Richard Epstein has demolished this claim, noting in particular that the phrase isn’t the “general welfare,” which is so ambiguous as to be meaningless, but the “general Welfare of the United States,” which is much more specific. As if amplification were needed, there’s the eighteenth clause of Article I, Section 8:

     To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

     If Congress’s power were truly unlimited, what purpose would that clause have served? In the exercise of unlimited power, no imaginable enactment could fail to be “necessary and proper!”

     But unlimited power is what every statist wants – and the Democrats are ur-statists. But let’s not categorically exclude the Republicans from that characterization.

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     I predict that if the final bill to emerge from the conference committee is reasonably close to the one passed by the Senate, there will be an increase in the rate of American economic growth that will add substantially to federal revenues. I also predict that no matter what those revenues might be, Congress will overspend them, adding to the national debt.

     There’s no amount of money that can’t be overspent. Congress’s fatal power:

     To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

     ...amplified to infinity by the Federal Reserve system, guarantees it. The object of any particular expenditure will be the exercise of an anti-Constitutional power nine times out of ten. Yet no court will rule against such an exertion of power.

     What Congress will never do is concede that there are any limits to its legislative powers. To do so would deprive federal legislators of what they prize above all other things: power. It would also deprive them of the ability, via “earmarks” and other devices, to purchase the votes they need to remain in office.

     The tax reform act will probably be good for American citizens. It will probably increase federal revenues enough to be “revenue neutral” or better. But the debt is guaranteed to increase even so. Remember the pattern of the Reagan years:

Fiscal Year	Federal Receipts, $Billions	Federal Expenditures, $Billions	Annual Deficit, $Billions
1980	517.1	590.9	73.8
1981	599.3	678.2	79.0
1982	617.8	745.8	128.0
1983	600.6	808.4	207.8
1984	666.5	851.9	185.4
1985	734.1	946.4	212.3
1986	769.2	990.5	221.2
1987	854.4	1004.1	149.8
1988	909.3	1064.5	155.2
1989	991.2	1143.7	152.5
1990	1032.0	1253.2	221.2

     [The above figures were taken from the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2001 edition.]

     If you can look at the table above, which shows federal revenues growing swiftly but federal expenditures rising even faster, and still persuade yourself that “tax rate reductions cause the debt to grow,” you and I don’t share a common understanding of arithmetic, much less of political dynamics. My point is made: Congress will spend every dollar it gets and quite a few more. What else could we expect from a body that claims unlimited power over everything?

     They won’t relinquish that power by their own act. It must be taken from them...and a “balanced budget amendment” won’t do it. The completion of that thought is left as an exercise for my Gentle Readers.

New Directions In Totalitarian Outreach

     [Owing to this important article on Congressional overspending, I’ve chosen to resurrect the following piece. It first appeared at Eternity Road, though I can’t remember exactly when. -- FWP]

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     Columnist Robyn Blumner cites a few choice notions from British economist Richard Layard's new book, Happiness: Lessons From a New Science:

     It turns out, according to the author, that people measure success by looking at those around them. Keeping up with the Joneses is killing our inner peace. Even as we acquire luxury items, the other guy has more. Layard calls it a "hedonic treadmill."

     But there are other forces at work beyond our own affluenza, including the government's approach to the people it serves. When a nation embraces a culture of community well-being over a "you're on your own" attitude, happiness gets spread around. "Our fundamental problem today is a lack of common feeling between people --- the notion that life is essentially a competitive struggle," Layard says. He points to the Scandinavian countries as among the happiest because they "have the clearest concept of the common good."

     Layard endorses the high tax rates of these nations as a way to reduce overwork, making it less valuable. It also has the added benefit of giving government the resources to provide a broad array of social services that tend to make people's lives more secure, such as universal health care.

     And high taxes reduce income disparities, leading to a general sense of relative well-being. Layard says that studies find that the more equally a nation's income is distributed, the higher the level of average happiness. He is not talking about communism, but a shrinking of wealth disparities.

     No, Ma'am, he's talking about communism. He's using "a shrinking of wealth disparities" as a stalking-horse, a utilitarian lure with which to lead people into taking the claims of early Marxian communist theory seriousy -- even though in no country that has experienced communist rule has "a shrinking of wealth disparities" actually taken place.

     There are so many logical and rhetorical problems with Layard's thesis that it would be impossible to cover them all in a single essay, even at your Curmudgeon's habitual excessive length. But it's vital that at least the most important ones get a cursory evisceration.

     First, there's the hedonic treadmill. Now, this is an important line of thought, one not to be dismissed lightly simply because it's used by some as a bludgeon against "consumerism" and capitalism in general. But the hedonic treadmill is only a worthy concept when seen in its appropriate context: the passage of the years of an individual life.

     For the treadmill to catch at Smith's ankles, he must insist on perpetuating all his pleasures and diversions as he ages, rather than slough the pleasures of youth while adopting new pleasures and diversions as appropriate. For it is the multiplication of pleasures, all contending for space on Smith's agenda, that pulls the hedonic treadmill's belt. But since the typical man does, albeit with some regret, relinquish the pleasures of youth when the time comes to do so, he remains able to walk at a comfortable pace; the treadmill does not snare him. And our friend Smith is nothing if not typical.

     Layard's use of the hedonic treadmill is tendentious; he wants us to see it statically, as a trap that arises from increases in wealth and that's not countervailed by any other dynamic. Yet we all age. More, even the pleasures of youth change over time, as anyone who can remember how different the diversions of the Sixties were from those that the young enjoy today would realize at once. Time permits nothing to stand fast; it's ludicrous to imagine that our frivolities would be exceptions.

     Second, there's nothing but opinion behind the assertion that "people measure success by looking at those around them." Some undoubtedly do, but these are probably the least happy of all persons. They've relativized and externalized their desires; their wants are no longer their own. In effect, their sole motivation is the assuagement of their envy. But your Curmudgeon has known thousands of persons in his half-century on this ball of mud, and can only think of three to whom the charge would stick.

     A nation whose citizens are mainly actuated by envy is one which will experience no significant advancement. Its members will spend as much time (or more) trying to retard one another's gains as they'll spend working on their own fortunes; this is the logical consequence of a relativized desire system. History provides numerous examples of such societies -- and all the Twentieth Century's experiments in income-leveling, including all the Communist states that have passed into the dustbin of history, are among them.

     But the crown jewel of absurdity, the acme of counterfactual contention, is here:

     Layard endorses the high tax rates of these nations as a way to reduce overwork, making it less valuable. It also has the added benefit of giving government the resources to provide a broad array of social services that tend to make people's lives more secure, such as universal health care.

     Seldom have so many nonsensical notions been crammed into a fifty-word paragraph. Let's go through them in detail.

     High tax rates do not reduce overwork. They deprive the worker of a part of his incentive to work more; this is true. But Americans' interest in increasing their hours was no less during the days of our highest marginal income tax rates than it is under the much lower ones of today. They merely added another item to their agendas: tax minimization, whether by contriving clever bartering schemes, earning part of their incomes "off the books," or outrightly lying to the IRS about their deductible expenses.

     More, Layard's argument for high tax rates combines all the following:

• The revenue funds "a broad array of social services";
• Those services "make people's lives more secure";
• The above, combined with the destruction of incentives to earn more, is what people would really prefer if they could get in touch with their inner Rousseau.

     Every word of this contention is demonstrably false. When tax rates rise past the Laffer crest, the marginal revenue they garner becomes negative. Thus, there is no net financial gain to the State from the elevation of the rates past that point. The Reagan anti-tax revolution of the Eighties established this beyond any possible counter-argument:

Fiscal Year	Federal Receipts, $Billions
1980	517.1
1981	599.3
1982	617.8
1983	600.6
1984	666.5
1985	734.1
1986	769.1
1987	854.1
1988	909.0
1989	990.7
1990	1073.5

     Thus, despite the "heartless" Reagan tax cuts -- the Kemp-Roth rate reductions of 1981 and the Packwood tax reform act of 1986 -- federal revenues soared by 107%. Congress overspent the funds gathered, but in doing so did not provide any more social services than in previous decades. Indeed, federal social services remained close to constant in proportion to the populations served. However, something did increase rather dramatically: federal expenditures on the salaries and perquisites of federal employees:

Fiscal Year	Federal Employment, Thousands	Federal Wages Disbursed, $Billions
1980	2987	58.0
1981	2909	63.8
1982	2871	65.5
1983	2878	69.9
1984	2935	74.6
1985	3001	80.6
1986	3047	82.6
1987	3075	85.6
1988	3113	88.8
1989	3133	92.8

     Thus, while the federal workforce expanded by 4.8%, federal wages paid increased by 60% -- and every other cost account tied to federal employment increased in proportion. Perhaps those federal employees felt that their lives had become more secure, but it's doubtful that their increased prosperity had that effect on anyone else.

     With particular regard to the myth of "universal heath care," which pops up at each debate over the proper extent of government benevolence like a toadstool after a rainstorm, it is also demonstrably the case that in every country whose health care system has been nationalized under this pretense, the State has had to disguise the failure of the system as best it could by erecting a multi-tier scheme of service, under which persons unfortunate enough to be on a lower tier are compelled to wait or accept low-grade service while those in a higher tier are served with something approaching efficiency and efficacy. The stories from the old Soviet Union are legion; they're matched, in horrific quality if not in mere quantity, by the stories emanating today from France, Canada, and Britain. Socialized medicine leaves people to die rather than admit that its "universality" is a sham. This cannot be squared with any interpretation of "making people's lives more secure."

     Lastly, Layard's claim, in Miss Blumner's words, that:

     [H]igh taxes reduce income disparities, leading to a general sense of relative well-being. Layard says that studies find that the more equally a nation's income is distributed, the higher the level of average happiness.

     ...requires something more than "studies" for its substantiation. "Studies" about "well-being" and "happiness" are the most easily manipulated things in the world. They can be framed to produce whatever conclusion the "researcher" desires to reach. There are no metrics that can accurately and reproducibly capture happiness or well-being. All we have to go on is the observable behavior of people in the environments they choose for themselves from the available options. What we can observe with little effort is this:

1. No matter where in the world we look, other things all being equal, people prefer to have more money and more choices of goods from which to select.
2. As long as the possibility exists, they'll work more to get it.
3. The population flow between nations where the State tries to impede private profit and material gain by taxes, regulations, and the like, and nations where the State puts fewer and lower such barriers in the citizen's way, is heavily from the former to the latter, often despite great hazards to life and limb in the journey.
4. The most viciously invidious societies known to history have been those where the State's exactions were the highest. Individuals became obsessed with what their neighbors had managed to retain and amass. They often succumbed to the seductions of the State to become informants for it -- in hope of material reward.

     Thus, our verdict on Layard's contentions must be that they're contrary to both good sense and everything we know about the behavior of real human beings. If he's sincere, he's fatally unintelligent, naive, or ill-informed. If he's not, then he's just one more Marxist trying to seduce the unwitting into donning communist shackles. In either case, he deserves no respect whatsoever. But that's a judgment that applies to many an "economist" from the formerly-Sceptered Isle, which has been cranking out the preponderance of the Western world's Marxist polemicists with economics degrees since before World War II.

Sinking Us

     I dithered over that title. I’m still uncertain whether it should be “Countersinking Us.” But all will become clear in due course.

     You, an erudite and observant Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch, couldn’t possibly need a job, right? I mean, look at you: holder of a thousand valuable skills, rich in both knowledge and wisdom, the very epitome of the work ethic, simply brimming with foresight and good judgment. And that’s to say nothing about your manly / womanly / whateverly good looks. You could no more be long-term unemployed than Socrates could be out of epigrams.

     Still, imagine it, for the sake of a column.

     Okay, so you’re out of work. Can you weather it? Do you have savings enough to cover your obligations while you stalk the concrete canyons in search of an employer with the percipience and good sense to appreciate what a bargain you are? For a time, at least? Then you’ll probably “look local:” that is, you’ll concentrate your job search in the vicinity of your home, out to a reasonable commuting distance (which, of course, varies with the locale and your propensity for road rage.)

     But let’s imagine, incredible as it may be, that the months slip by, your bank balance dwindles, and nothing turns up. At some point you would find yourself looking at the tail end of your reserves and asking yourself, “How much longer can I remain here?”

     Right? I mean, there must be work for you somewhere. Your immediate environs out to a fifty-mile radius might be devoid of good taste, but surely that can’t be the case for the whole country! Somewhere in this hallowed land there must be a billet for you.

     Of course, it’s possible that there isn’t – that there are no longer any buggy whip manufacturers who’d profit from your skill at demonstrating the techniques of equine celeritation. Or perhaps the market for specialists in diseases of the middle toe simply won’t accommodate another practitioner. But let’s eschew such dismal ponderings and ask rather: what are the pros and cons of relocation?

     In these waning days of the Republic That Was, it’s become a rather formidable undertaking:

     Are you married? If so, you won’t be relocating just yourself. Your spouse would naturally go with you...I hope. But what if she has a job she doesn’t want to leave? And what about the kids? Wrench them out of the schools they’ve come to love learned to endure, and away from all the friends they’ve made?

     Do you own your place of residence? Can you sell it? Is there a market for homes such as yours at the moment? How much fixing-up of little nuisances you and yours have learned to endure will it take to make it marketable? How long is it likely to linger before someone snaps it up? And how much of it is yours? If you’re carrying a mortgage, there’s the little question of whether you can sell at a high enough price to cover your indebtedness – and that leaves aside whether you can extract enough equity from the sale to pay for your next home.

     Those are just the major financial considerations. There are minor financial considerations and wholly non-financial aspects to relocating as well. Having to find that new residence, with all the costs, uncertainties, and potentials for irritation and inconvenience that go along with settling in a new home. Leaving family and friends behind. Losing access to the artisans and service people you’ve grown to trust. Having to settle in a district that’s probably unknown to you, and filled with persons who might regard you with indifference or suspicion. Learning to cheer for a completely different set of “home teams.”

     This relocating business isn’t what it used to be. Maybe you should just keep searching in your current area, and do your best to get by on unemployment insurance. After all, they’ll keep extending it, won’t they?

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     Relocation didn’t always pose such daunting obstacles. When a family had a single breadwinner, when homes were less expensive (and less equipped with conveniences we’ve come to depend on), when schools were generally trustworthy and people were generally more trusting of newcomers, people were readier to move when the occasion demanded it. Those days, however, are behind us.

     The statistics bear this out:

     Labor market mobility in the United States has declined. Interstate migration is down (graph at right from Molloy, Smith, Trezzi and Wozniak) and so is in-state-migration, especially for the less well educated. Where once people responded to shocks by moving to opportunity now they are likely to stay put and retire early or take-up disability insurance. Ben Leubsdorf at the WSJ reviews some of the evidence:

     “A state typically returns to normal after an adverse shock not because employment picks up, but because workers leave the state,” economists Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Katz wrote in a 1992 paper.

     This time might be different in some ways. Three economists wrote in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper last year that compared with the prerecession years, mass layoffs after 2007 prompted a “muted” migration response and many workers instead dropped out of the labor force.

     The previous, natural response to economic incentives has been seriously damped by the increased obstacles to relocation. Nearly all of those obstacles have their genesis in public policy, particularly our unprecedentedly high and broad taxes and the laws that govern them.

     I could go into detail. I could rant and rave about the many political developments – federal, state, and local – that have impeded Americans’ mobility since World War II. I could even make dark suggestions about the motivations behind those developments. But not today.

     The point is simply this: Those developments have had many effects, not the least of which that they tend to sink us in place. Get a job, get married, buy a house, have a couple of kids...and suddenly you’re cemented to your locale. Nor is the difficulty confined to married couples with minor children. Even childless singles who rent their homes can find it daunting, given the trials specific to finding somewhere to go.

     So we’re not just teetering precariously at the edge of sufficiency. We’re also chained in place.

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     This is not to suggest that hauling stakes and moving was ever completely without costs or obstacles. There have always been disincentives to it. It’s just that they’ve never been as many, nor as large, as they are today.

     Given that the nation is inching out of a severe economic contraction with painful torpidity, those obstacles should get more consideration than they’ve been allowed these past few decades. It’s vital that work and workers should be encouraged to converge, and not be kept apart by political artifice. Note that the last halfway-sensible Democrat to occupy the White House, John F. Kennedy, called for a large tax-rate cut “to get the country moving again.” There are no longer any sensible Democrats, of course – LBJ and his Great Society pretty much rendered them extinct – but might I suggest that a Republican presidential candidate make a few comments about the matter? Seeing as to how Republicans are supposed to be opposed to high taxes and intrusive government anyway?

     Food for thought – and for reporters who might be interested in some fresh areas of inquiry with which to illuminate the differences among the candidates vying for federal offices in this year of Our Lord 2016.

Quickies: The Demons, Not The Lunatics, Are Running The Asylum.

     This left me absolutely speechless:

     Senate Democrats on Wednesday couldn't agree that federal debt is a national security problem, in a hearing aimed at assessing the long-term strategic implications of the government's $19 trillion debt.

     "A realistic discussion about it, and accepting expert opinion that this debt that we have is not actually right now a threat to our country, is I think a more realistic and honorable way of talking to the American people about it," Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday.

     What’s that you say? Federal borrowing is crowding private enterprise out of the credit markets? The interest on the debt is squeezing the rest of the federal budget near to collapse? The dollar has weakened so greatly from federal borrowing that major countries are leaving the “dollar standard?” Sorry, Ed Markey can’t hear you. It might endanger his precious social programs.

     And on that note:

     Markey also insisted that Republicans drop their interest in changing entitlement programs as they try to mitigate the projected federal debt.

     Gee, with entitlements near 70% of all federal spending and accelerating toward the stratosphere, wherever shall we look for reductions? Markey has the answer to that, too:

     Markey suggested that nuclear weapons represent one of the top targets for such debt reduction. "There's a proposal to [spend] $1 trillion of new nuclear weapon systems in our country over the next 20 years," he said. "That's a crazy number from my perspective."

     But never fear, there are other Democrats who have the answer:

     "I don't want you to leave with the impression that the Democratic side of this committee is insensitive to the deficit. We're not," said Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the panel. "I think Democrats are very concerned that there be adequate revenues in order to be able to make the investments that we think are important for the growth of our nation."

     Yes, I added the emphasis.

     Hide your cattle in the woods, Francois,
     The lord is looking your way.
     Hide your women and your goods, Francois,
     They're coming around to make you pay.

     [Tom Paxton, “When Princes Meet”]

     It’s impossible to believe that anyone that stupid could attain a seat in the United States Senate. They have to be evil...but they’ve both been there for quite a while, so what does that say about their constituents?

     “We are doomed.” – John Derbyshire

The Proposal

[Ol' Remus of The Woodpile Report, long one of my favorite Web colleagues, has produced a gem of a satirical-but-maybe-not piece that should serve as an inspiration to any of us who might someday be minded to protest local school taxation. I reproduce it here with his permission. -- FWP]

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The entire staff of the Woodpile Report, and his cat, held a closed door meeting—on account the bugs were flying—at the Woodpile Report Global Headquarters and Jiffy Screen Door Repair, ... um, Compound. The proposal was adopted unanimously, surprising none of the attendee, there never having been a tally other than 1-0, not counting when the vote is deferred due to forgetting what the matter at hand might be, in which case the vote is recorded as a tie, namely 0-0.

The Proposal was this: eligibility to vote for school budgets shall be limited to those who pay the school property taxes from which the budget is funded. Members of the school board must also be property tax payers lest they proselytize among the citizenry and studentry to the disadvantage of the taxpayer. Further, eligibility to vote for prospective school board members shall be limited to those who pay school taxes. That's it.

The proposed method was this: payment of property taxes shall be recorded with a receipt made out to one person, an actual person, that person being the property tax payer, by name. A section of this tax receipt shall be a voter registration certificate made out to the same name. No person shall be issued more than one registration certificate even if they own multiple parcels taxed separately. No voter registration certificate may be transferred to, or used by, a person other than the one named. The principle is simple: one school tax payer, one vote.

"But, but," the cry went out, "we renters pay property taxes, albeit indirectly, and our children are as affected as any others by school budgets." To which ol' Remus said, "Indirectly doesn't count. Shall your employer also be eligible to vote, however distant he may be, he being the source of your income, and by extension his customers and stockholders as well? If you move to another town the day after you vote shall we subtract your vote from the tally? As for your children, they shall take the schools as they find them, as do all the children in the district, all are receiving the same schooling even if at no cost to their parents. No dear renter, with no skin in the game you are a consumer of the worst sort, the invoice goes to others so you insist the deluxe options alone are sufficient."

"The property tax payer is mandated to extend himself beyond reason and yet you still cite imagined inadequacies," Remus continued. "You judge spending proposals not in comparison to the available means but in comparison to an ideal, and therefore your favored expenditures are without upper limit. You believe yourself free to conflate wants with needs, and worse, even in the absence of your material support you imagine your presumed happy endings to be on higher moral ground as well, so you characterize dissent as base and despicable, and so it shall always be when your part goes no further than to consume that which others are compelled to set before you."

"You are fond of the term 'fully funded'. A school is fully funded when those providing the funds say it is fully funded, not when the recipient or bystanders say it is." It was with satisfaction Remus saw the speaker stare at the floor, fidgety with shame and stunned into wordlessness by this devastating response. Remus's chest swelled with righteousness, his eyes fixed on the glorious ethereal glow emanating from the aura of truth and justice that fairly pulsated in the room. An unseen celestial chorus harmonized from above. Cold pizza on an empty stomach will do that to a person.

Another speaker rose. "Anyone old enough to fight and die for his country certainly should be eligible to vote on school budgets," he declared. On this there was instant agreement. Eyes met and heads nodded. Nothing's too good for our boys. They talked of youthful faces prematurely aged and grim from defending hearth and home from horrors too awful to name. O the humanity. Nay! We shall not exclude them from this comparatively trivial affair of the home front. Norman Rockwell would eternally reproach us from that Big Atelier In The Sky, the ghost of Audie Murphy would hector us to a deservedly early grave. Some sang the Star Spangled Banner, some chanted U-S-A.

The usual troublemakers had equipped themselves with pitchforks and set to sharpening the tines while glaring at Remus through their eyebrows, Celtic style. Others were passing around old war posters with slogans in sans serif bold about never forgetting and buying bonds to the threshold of penury and turning in used cooking oils as an act of selfless patriotism. The illustrations featured determined, ultra-fit young men in sharply creased uniforms marching under bluebird skies and billowing pennants. Others depicted cigar-chomping GIs in outright sartorial distress, and in need of an emergency shave, plunging bayonets into the chests of the enemy at less agreeable venues. "Those posters once hung on classroom walls," Remus mused, "there's no Zero Tolerance in times of actual peril." But he let all this play out before launching his rejoinder.

"Setting aside the fact that neither the school nor the township are authorized to declare war, or noticeably inclined to do so, much less empowered to send anyone off to combat or conclude a peace treaty, it's enough that any young person who pays school taxes is qualified to vote, even if unwilling or unfit for military service." A hush fell over the room, shoes shuffled nervously on the floor, hands were clasped, fingers interwoven, knuckles white. Alas, even yet there were a few glowering holdouts. Remus pushed the stick forward and bored in for the finishing shot, saying, "a moment's thought reveals potential enlistees are not in fact veterans, nor are they likely to be. Yet some of the school tax payers among us are veterans—many with no children. Where is the equity in this?" Faces reddened.

"Hear me my friends," Remus exclaimed, one hand over his heart, the other stabbing the sky. "Shall we continue to let those who do not pay decide what funding shall be provided by those who are compelled to pay? What reason may be thought too slight to warrant increased funds when those funds are provided by others? Is it not enough that all benefit alike, those who pay and those who do not? How is it those who do not pay shall decide how much less of our earnings we may keep when already we provide their children's schooling at no cost to them? Is this not injustice enough?"

Remus's oratory was attracting passersby now. Cicero was there, in resplendent toga, faint movements playing about his lips as he silently repeated the key phrases. Suetonius took a seat at his side and jotted notes should the great consul require prompting at a later time, which is probable, he being deceased and all. "Shall they also decide the cafeteria menu or disallow squirrel guns during season?," Remus added, striking his finest stentorian pose. Those in attendance, which is to say: none, including the town leftist, bent forward in rapt attention.

As the throng left Woodpile Report Global Headquarters &c. there was murmured admiration for the power and symmetry of this Proposal. Then a stranger approached and, upon learning the Proposal had been adopted, By Acclaim With Oak Leaf Cluster, was heard to say, "...one man, one vote," whereupon the crowd set upon him and discomfited him most grievously, tanned his hide when he died, Clyde, and that's it a-hangin' on the shed. If there were a shed.

For Tax Return Deadline Day

[The following first appeared ten years ago today, at the old Palace Of Reason, -- FWP]

---

To love a thing is to know and love its nature -- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

This rant will be rather ranty, so the Curmudgeon has stepped aside to let Fran write it. Stop drumming your fingers, Mr. C; this won't take long.

I've become known as an America-booster, a flag-waver who doesn't want to hear anything said against his country or anything associated with it. The charge has some substance. Among nations, America stands alone. It's the only nation that routinely exhibits decency and generosity toward other nations. It's the only nation whose denizens possess any freedom worth mentioning, whether de jure or de facto. Its people are the best people in the world: the most passionate about justice, yet also the most charitable and most willing to forgive.

So I trust Palace readers will pardon me for saying that America-bashers of all stripes, young or old, left or right, foreign or domestic, can kiss my bleeding Irish ass.

America is not perfect; even its most ardent defenders will admit that. We'll listen to anyone who has a constructive criticism or a well-meaning suggestion for us. If it strikes us right, we'll act on it.

But, if you can't present your case without running my country down, condemning it for all manner of things it did not do, comparing it to Nazi Germany and its president to Hitler, I'm not going to listen. I won't care what your claims are, and I won't care what injustices you've suffered. All I'll want is to see the back of your neck receding at red-shift speed, and if you're not inclined to oblige me, I might just wring your neck for you, because I have had enough of you and I no longer care what the consequences of shutting you up forcibly will be. DO YOU HEAR ME?

Ah. There. That feels better. Now, where was I? Oh, yes.

In David Brin's post-Apocalypse novel The Postman, he has an exchange between his protagonist, Gordon Krantz, and a secondary figure, George Powhatan, that rings a striking note for those who love this country as I do. Krantz, who's been trying to organize a defensive force for what he calls the Restored United States, has pinned a great deal of his hopes onto Powhatan, whose military prowess has become regionally known. However, Powhatan is unwilling to have anything to do with Krantz's project. When Krantz asks Powhatan if he'd ever loved anything beyond the little community his skills had secured, Powhatan's response is that he tried, once, but he'd learned that the big things don't love you back.

Indeed, it can be hard to avoid that conviction, especially on April 15.

Today is an appropriate day for meditating on the asymmetry between the individual American citizen and the 88,000 governments that claim some jurisdiction over his actions and his property. Let's follow our old friend Smith...well, okay, strictly speaking he's the Curmudgeon's friend, but allow me a little latitude here...through his day and see just how much his country loves him.

---

Smith rises at six AM, careful not to wake his wife. He immediately turns up the thermostat and hurries to the bathroom, where he showers in government-provided water. Once his house had a well, but the county made him shut it down. There might be pesticides in the water, they said. Far better to buy certifiably clean water from the government's water monopoly.

Smith's house isn't properly warm until seven, when he gets into his car. Smith has to turn the thermostat down at night to save oil. The government has put so many obstacles in the way of petroleum and natural gas exploration that the country is at the mercy of OPEC, and OPEC is widely known to be merciless. Once, when the local electric utility proposed to build a nuclear generating plant nearby, Smith thought he might convert to electric heat, but nothing ever came of it. Permission to build a fission generator is even harder to get than permission to drill an oil well.

Around eight AM, Smith reports to work at an employer where a string of innocent words, if said to the wrong person or at the wrong time, could get him disciplined or fired, because federal law has made assuaging the sensitivities of various aggressive grievance-mongering groups a higher priority than freedom of speech. Smith's employer also collaborates with various governments in reporting and dividing Smith's income, whether Smith has agreed to the role or not.

Smith's children attend government-run schools where highly paid civil servants, who work less than seven hours per day and only 180 days per year and are immune from discipline for anything short of a major felony, harangue them about how America is a genocidal nation that's raping the Earth, and her military is forcing its "consumer culture" on all the other peoples of the world.

At dinnertime, Smith contemplates the rising tide of lawsuits that seek to make just about anything that tastes good a crime to put in his mouth. It's for his own good, of course, just as it was with drugs, and alcohol, and tobacco.

Smith's wife is a little worried. She's been run down lately. Her doctor said it's probably nothing, but he's ordered a set of tests. When she asked what she was being tested for, he wouldn't say. What with the skyrocketing taxes and costs of living, the family couldn't get by without her income.

Smith's son has worries, too. He's about to turn eighteen, and there are some prominent legislators talking about reinstating the draft.

Smith's elder daughter is sixteen. She's a pretty girl, has her share of friends and a boyfriend that Smith's just a little unsure about. Oh, the kid is probably decent enough; that ring in his nose is just a youth-culture fad. Still, Smith's daughter has brought home some unsettling stuff from her mandatory Sex Education class. He wonders just how much no-holds-barred experimentation is going on under the radar of these nonjudgmental educators...or with their explicit approval. There don't seem to be any limits these days, even with all the diseases.

Smith leaves the dinner table and heads for his tiny home office to pay his bills. His mortgage payment includes taxes for all sorts of "services" he'd never asked for and wished were not offered, including some that couldn't have been designed better to ruin the quality of life in his neighborhood, by attracting loafers and parasites onto the public teat and criminals into the area.

Smith's wife busies herself with cleaning. Fatigue or no fatigue, there's work to be done. Hire a cleaning woman to help with the house? Are you kidding? That would make Smith an employer, subject to an array of federal reporting and taxing rules that could choke an elephant. Careers have been ruined for ignoring those rules. Ask Zoe Baird or Kimba Wood.

There some money left after the bills have been met. Smith contemplates extending the house or landscaping the grounds. But he'll need a permit granted by some unelected board of officials that answers to no one, and that can approve or deny any application for any reason, or none. They'll want to do a site inspection. God help Smith if they notice that his yard is damp a few days out of the year; he might be forbidden even to mow it, as a federally protected "wetland." Anyway, he hasn't yet filled out his tax returns, and there's no telling what surprises might lurk in them.

Around eleven PM, after much fevered work with calculator and pencil, Smith heads for the post office with his tax returns. There's a line wrapped around it, as there is around every post office in the country tonight. Smith has no choice; he has to get his tax return postmarked so he won't be penalized for not waiving his Fourth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

Smith gets to bed at about half past midnight, dead tired. But before he retires, he has to set the alarm clock for four AM. He has a shuttle flight to catch tomorrow, to an important business meeting. It takes off at eight AM, but because of the new security rules, Smith has to be there no later than six, and it will take him at least an hour to get to the airport in the morning traffic. He makes a mental note to leave the silver money clip his wife gave him for his last birthday at home. Airport security workers, now federal employees, have been known to confiscate such things on any pretext. The chance of getting them back is slight.

---

That's an awful lot of love, isn't it? That is, if love is a cactus shoved up your ass by a professional sadist.

It can be hard to see Smith as some sort of victim. If he's typical, he owns his own home and two cars. He might own a boat. There are bank liens on all these things, of course, but that's the price of hastened, not to say instant, gratification. If his kids are at all bright, they'll surely go to college, though the benefits of that particular rite of passage are falling off rapidly and have always been less than claimed.

Still, Smith is being hemmed in on all sides by governmental prescriptions, proscriptions, and exactions. He's not as free as his father or grandfather were, even though he's more prosperous. He's also not as safe, nor is he as capable of defending himself against predation. There are more predators prowling the neighborhood than ever, and much of the time the law is on their side.

Smith's retirement is an uncertain thing, too. He's been mulcted throughout his working life to pay into the Social Security system, but whether the system will pay him the benefits promised so long ago is becoming ever more doubtful. He's likely to have to work well into his sixties.

I'm not saying things are worse here than in some other unnamed country; quite the reverse. And we can afford the monetary part of the tab...for now. But the sense that the order of things has gone badly wrong has never been stronger.

This used to be the Land of the Free. In many ways, it still is. More de facto personal freedom is not to be found anywhere in the world. But it's far less free than it once was. It's disavowed its presumptions of freedom and shed its original libertarian nature.

The trend away from freedom and toward bondage continues to accelerate. Governments and their hangers-on continue to chip away at individual autonomy and personal sovereignty, usually under the justification of either security or what's "good" for us.

A lot of thought has gone into how to halt and eventually reverse that trend. I should know; I've written quite a lot about it. But breakthrough-quality tactics that don't come with unacceptable costs have yet to surface.

---

There's little point in dwelling on all of this. It's everywhere. If you've never felt afflicted as Smith has, you're a very atypical American. It you don't know anyone who shares some or all of Smith's complaints and fears, you died before 1914.

But you might be one of the multitudes standing on line at the post office tonight with a nine-by-twelve manila envelope clutched in your hand, possibly containing a check it greatly pained you to write. You might be asking yourself whether that check is an installment payment on your fetters. I wanted you to know that you're not alone, in a deeper sense than is covered by the folks on line with you.

The worst part about being jilted by this country is the impossibility of a new and better love. There simply aren't any. We have to save this one.

The raw materials for the rebirth of freedom are all around us. But they require a foundation of hope sufficient to build on. And whether it's justified or not, hope is the thing most lacking from the freedom-minded in our time.

It is a terrible but cherished thing to love without hope. -- Frederik Pohl, "We Purchased People"

The Beauty of Excellence and Voluntarism

Drawing by the author, done in art school from a live model, c.1979

Greetings rebels to King George and curious others...

 

What is it that brings tears of Joy to your eyes? Is it finding out you bought a winning lottery ticket? Hearing a favorite piece of movie music? Reading about a pivotal moment in history?

It happened to me once again last night, while watching an ad on YouTube - for a Volvo truck, of all things - and today I decided to figure out why.

Not surprisingly I’d searched for that particular Volvo original short after watching something else: the so-called Chuck Norris parody of Jean Claude Van Damme’s truck stunt. The computer created Chuck-short featured a retro Ken-doll Norris, of course in a cowboy hat. His beard looked sprayed-on and his face was as smooth as a 15-year-old’s. Yes, it was laugh out loud clever.

Then I tracked down the Van Damme ad (linked above). And was mesmerized. And teared up, like I said.

And now, a day later, I’m absolutely convinced that it hasn’t been seen by 62 million people. Nope, I’m betting it’s more like 6.2 - 12.4 million and like me, they’ve watched it five-to-ten times each.

Mesmerized - from the opening seconds onwards - by the haunting music of Enya…

Held by the still appealing though undeniably weathered face and poignant voice-over from Van Damme…

Amazed by this one man’s steely calm and still-unflagging athleticism…and lastly…

Wowed by the sheer beauty of the rising sun gleaming off the twin Volvo machines which so ably co-star with a real-life action hero. For what courage it must take to attempt such a stunt!

So…to the more subtle difference between the Chuck Norris parody and this original, and what I believe makes the former a video that elicits a chuckle and a grin and Van Damme’s one that earns a joyful tearing up and a lasting inward glow.

Aside from the fact the Norris video is fake, it is dependent on a show of State Force, albeit force wrapped not in the proverbial velvet-glove, rather wrapped in Christmas lights and pretty signal flares. Sure “Norris” also straddles two mighty machines, which for all I know could be held aloft by Volvo engines. But these machines are war birds of some sort, painted grey or grey-blue (and is it just me or does the one whose nose we see look to be smiling?). The planes and the soldier-heroes this video’s splitting stunt man singlehandedly holds aloft are State-trained, then retained, and finally, dispatched by the State for one purpose only: to do harm to someone or something it has deemed its enemy. In other words, They Live to Destroy. Not only that, but they do all this by means of stolen property, tax-dollars taken at gunpoint, albeit implied-gunpoint, by your friends and mine, the I.R.S.

Now consider the real ad.

Think of how that one-minute and seventeen-seconds came to be and think of what it embodies.

It’s actually very simple. There were no threats, no real or implied force; just a boat load of FREE CHOICES. Men freely choosing to develop excellent skills…and then businesses bringing those skilled men together with the raw-materials upon which they could apply their skills.

Together voluntarily, cooperatively, Volvo and Van Damme worked to create an excellent synergistic Physical-plus-Performance “product.” Volvo engineers voluntarily traded their time to design and refine the machines Van Damme was then carried atop; Van Damme himself voluntarily used his physical being; traded his time to train hard - not merely for this stunt, but to maintain his fitness over all these years - and then he voluntarily got up and stood on those magnificent truck’s mirrors, and was driven flawlessly - backwards and timed to perfection - into the sunrise.

Freedom to create Excellence. What could be more beautiful or more joyful?

Until next time, Keep Rebelling and keep creating, in whatever medium YOUR talents and skills are most excellently utilized!