Soaking the Richpage 2
People demonstrate their base impulses when they soak
the rich, and seeing themselves as thieves isn’t liberating. Instead, the brutal
truth that the poor depend on the rich is the strongest psychological reason for
hating the rich more. Those who take must reduce their cognitive dissonance
against what they’ve learned about the immorality of stealing from others or
being dependent on others. They must convince themselves that the rich depended
on the (free) aid of many others on their way to being rich, and should repay in
a general fashion through higher taxation, though there is no assurance that
such benefit will return in like proportion to those who provided the aid. They
must convince themselves that those with means must take responsibility for the
less fortunate. They must tell themselves that no one is worth that kind of
wacky astronomical salary, only because they cannot egocentrically imagine
themselves earning it or being worth it. Such is the burden of unrequited envy.
Consumer advocate and frequent candidate for
president, Ralph Nader, wrote a novel in which the rich voluntarily save the
world through philanthropy, the conclusion being the value judgment that the
rich should be willing to pour their resources into solving the world’s poverty.
They’d still be despised for having the power to solve poverty.
Don’t all rich evade paying taxes? Tax evasion means
jail time and a big fine. But jail time and fines are cruel and disproportionate
to the crime, often committed as a civil disobedience to protest theft of
personal property and the immoral use to which the government applies most tax
dollars. If taxes were correctly applied only to the support of national
defense; prevention, detection, and punishment of violent crime; and maintenance
of the country’s infrastructure, then the logical punishment would be
restriction of the tax evader’s public services, public roadways, public parks,
and public education, all restrictions that are wholly unenforceable. It would
also be immoral to withhold military and police and fire protection from a tax
evader.
Because it is inexpedient to enforce restrictions
against using public facilities and services, the government justifies the
disproportionate punishment of imprisonment and fines. The wealthy are presumed
to make greater use of the state-funded infrastructure, so doesn’t that justify
charging them more than less-frequent users are charged? Only if the fee is
immediately applied for a specific usage, such as toll road fees, and applied to
all who make usage.
The state doesn’t imprison the jobless for not paying
income taxes, and the state waives the tax structure for the jobless. The poor
evade taxes by refusing to find a job, but they don’t go to jail for it–they are
given subsidies from a pool of money funded by the rich to help them survive.
Being poor isn’t a disease. It’s not the lack of job opportunity or education
that makes people poor, it’s the lack of their desire to pursue opportunity and
education. It’s not a conscientious objection to the capitalist system or the
culture of greed that keeps the poor from finding a job, it’s a refusal to play
by the rules that everyone else plays by. It is not moral for those who play by
the rules to be forced to aid those who don’t; we are obligated only to help
ourselves, though our government makes self-sufficiency seem ugly, untoward. The
productive are penalized, the nonproductive sympathized. The poor can’t fund the
government that subsidizes the poor, so they let the rich fund government.
The poor who don’t pay taxes still receive
tax-supported public services, while the tax evader, under penalty of law, must
pay for the services not only for himself, but for all of those who haven’t
earned enough to pay.
President Obama’s proposals on taxes, health care, and
climate change, if fully enacted as law, would mean that nearly a trillion
dollars would be redistributed from the top 30 American family earners to the
rest of society in 2012, according to Scott Hodge of the Tax Foundation. Those
earning less than $109,460 will receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes.
Those who don’t pay taxes burden the rest of us who
do.
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