DENNIS CLAYSON | Posted: Sunday, April 20, 2008 12:00 am
Tuesday was April 15, so it is time once again to evaluate our attitude toward taxes.
I can understand why a philosophically committed socialist would defend taxes and ask for more. To them, the government is the society and everything produced by that society belongs to the government. Using the term "the people" in place of the government means nothing except that it may confuse the ignorant long enough to impose something upon them they otherwise would avoid.
Why anyone else buys into the idea that taxes are something we actually should pay more of is simply incomprehensible.
Suppose a person through her own efforts and talents, over the space of years, develops a program that others would pay money to learn. She goes to her company, and they agree to allow her to sell her program through them. She finds 30 people who wish to learn her system. She spends every evening and weekends for two weeks teaching them. In return each student pays her company $670. The company keeps half the money for sponsoring the program, and pays the worker the other half in her next paycheck.
She receives an extra $10,000. It took her two months to put together her program, plus the time to teach evenings and weekends, plus the years of thinking and working that allowed her to do this in the first place.
The federal, state and local governments take almost 50 percent of her extra money before she ever gets the check.
Why?
The government would get no less money if they took none of this. They would still get the amount of her property they usually confiscate, and they would still get the amount they had planned to take out for the year.
Her skills, her energy, her desire to improve herself and her students would not exist and none of the wealth created would exist except for her efforts. The government did nothing extra except to create a disincentive for her ever to repeat this experience.
In modern economic systems there is a basic truth: free exchanges create wealth; forced exchanges destroy wealth. Even my students, educated in public schools, when asked for an example of a forced exchange, will immediately say "taxes."
This woman created wealth that would not have existed without her. Does anyone actually believe that a government can use the benefits of her talents and labor better than she can? Even though the leftists and the media are always promoting the benefits of increased taxation, I think that deep in their hearts they don't actually believe in it.
Look at the items in the news just this last week. We learned that the government had spent more than a billion dollars to create a new system for the 2010 census. They now admit that the system doesn't work, and the census will have to be done the old-fashioned way - with paper and pencil.
In other words, the government has just announced that they may be too incompetent to take the census required by the Constitution, but they think maybe it could be done if the taxpayers would give them $40 per person.
That would amount to $120 million in Iowa alone. I would be happy to subcontract this. I would do it all in six months and pocket $20 million in profits, but our incompetent government will not ask someone who can actually do this, they will simply ask for more money. "You know, we thought it would cost $40 per person, but it now looks like maybe $60 to $80 per person … Sorry about that."
When the government isn't being incompetent, it's being corrupt. A recent audit found $13,000 of our tax money being spent on steak, crab and 40 bottles of wine at one high-end steakhouse for postal workers at $160 per meal, another $1,800 for manicures, $800 on two video iPods, and it was all charged to government charge cards.
It is estimated that the United States has spent at least $102 billion since 2003 on contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan alone. Any estimates on bribes and kickbacks?
Yet we are told by both political parties and their candidates that we need to pay more taxes. The present government may be incompetent and corrupt, but if you will only put them into power and give them more money, they say, then everything will be taken care of.
If you actually believe this, you should be ashamed of yourself.