As we saw last week in the \u201cGirl Scout cookies\u201d case out of Savannah, Georgia, government — which was supposed to provide a level playing field by providing courts of law and barring interstate tariffs but otherwise stay out of the way — is destroying our economy, largely to protect the jobs of all its various taxmen and enforcers, who cruise around looking for \u201cviolations,\u201d in pursuit of the chimerical goal of seizing or destroying \u201cundeserved wealth.\u201d<\/p>\n
About the only way I know to determine whether anyone is earning \u201cmore than they deserve\u201d is to see if the employers could hire anyone for half the money to do the same job. Unfortunately for the levelers, the results of this test are not likely to move most folks closer to the median, because the fact is some folk have talents, skills, and energy levels that place them way above the mean, while many others (especially if they got trapped in the government youth propaganda camps) simply don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Can professional football teams and movie studios hire somewhat less attractive or talented people to play quarterback or anchor their million-dollar productions? Clearly not, or they would.<\/p>\n
(In fact, look at how short many such careers are, precisely because such \u201cstars\u201d DO cycle so quickly. Two bad pictures or a losing season — or even a few minutes on \u201c20\/20,\u201d if you\u2019re Charlie Sheen — and you\u2019re lucky to get a job endorsing hearing aids or bone-loss cures. These \u201crich\u201d don\u2019t need higher taxes, they need investment advice. \u201cMillions\u201d sound like a lot till you try to stretch them over the next 60 years.)<\/p>\n
Can big corporations get by, recruiting slightly less talented CEOs at half the pay? Since such outfits are by definition \u201cgreedy,\u201d clearly not, or they would.<\/p>\n
Socialists keep writing in, asking why people complain about $125,000 firemen who don\u2019t earn their pay, while failing to complain about $12 million CEOs. Well, If I don\u2019t like the way the CEO of McDonalds is running things, I can stop buying his services, either switching to Wendy\u2019s or (heaven forbid) carrying a bag of carrot sticks and a bottled water for lunch. If I don\u2019t think my money is being well spent on a fire department, what do I do? Refuse to pay the sales tax? \u201cHire\u201d a different fire department?<\/p>\n
Which brings us back to our test for the \u201coverpaid.\u201d Can you advertise the job of a $100,000 fireman or zoning code enforcement officer and find 50 (heck, 500) applicants who are fully qualified to do that job — and who can learn all the necessary skills in a few weeks — for half the money? Yes, you almost certainly can, especially here in the New West, with our singular lack of fire-prone high-rise tenements.<\/p>\n
So who\u2019s got the corner on \u201cunearned wealth\u201d?<\/p>\n
Do you really want to live in Barack Obama\u2019s paradise, where the government steps in to \u201cspread the wealth around\u201d? Do you really want them to seize more wealth from \u201cthe rich\u201d and hand it to the rest of us until \u201ceverybody has just what they need\u201d?<\/p>\n
What if they later decide you don\u2019t \u201cneed\u201d a color TV, a home computer, or a diet that goes much beyond beans and rice?<\/p>\n
Make no mistake, the socialists have no intention of suspending their \u201cspread the wealth round\u201d doctrine when they hit an international border — which is a big reason why they have no intention of enforcing our immigration laws. They don\u2019t BELIEVE in borders, which allow one group of people to adopt a code of laws defending and enforcing an economic system which allows and encourages the ablest and hardest-working to keep what they earn — physically excluding redistributionist looters who don\u2019t like such schemes, who yearn for the opportunity to swarm into your town or neighborhood, form a tax-eating majority, and then call on the federal \u201cEqual Opportunity and Voting Rights Police\u201d to facilitate their plan to \u201cvote in a more compassionate safety net,\u201d taxing your savings and transferring said ill-gotten lucre to them and theirs.<\/p>\n
Opposing \u201ctax cuts for the rich\u201d — aside from being a nice rallying cry for riling up the masses — has little or no literal meaning, since only the \u201crichest\u201d half of Americans pay any income taxes to begin with.<\/p>\n
If the poor pay no taxes to speak of, how would you go about enacting a \u201ctax cut for the poor\u201d? I suppose repealing all sales and real estate taxes might constitute a \u201ctax cut for the poor,\u201d providing you didn\u2019t replace them with higher taxes on anything else. I\u2019m all for it. Who else? Any Clark County commissioners?<\/p>\n
Seize ALL the wealth of the 2 or 3 or 4 percent of \u201crichest\u201d Americans — surgeons, inventors, whatever — and hand it to the redistribution gang in Washington: It wouldn\u2019t fund their \u201cprograms\u201d for much more than a year, and what would you do then?<\/p>\n
\u201cThe rich\u201d didn\u2019t get that way by being dumb enough to accrue their next pile of loot anywhere within the jurisdiction of folks who have already demonstrated they\u2019ll seize it for no better reason than because they \u201cneed\u201d it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe rich\u201d are able to take their remaining capital and invest it somewhere else. The Swiss, the Panamanians, the Uruguayans are all happy to see them coming. Why? Because they\u2019re rich. They have wealth, and they have the energy and know-how to produce more.<\/p>\n
This is not theory. I know people who can read the tea leaves, and are establishing legal residency in those places.<\/p>\n
The propagandists of piracy say these greedy characters pay starvation wages. Really? In America, \u201cpoor people\u201d have cell phones and color TVs; the panhandlers all wear new shoes. But once the big taxpayers have all been driven away, do you think your favorite politician or union boss is going to start paying everybody 40 K a year?<\/p>\n
The congresscritters pretend they don\u2019t know what to do about all these unaffordable \u201centitlements.\u201d Sure they do; they just don\u2019t want to tell you.<\/p>\n
Their solution is to creep up the \u201cretirement age\u201d to 68, 69, 70, while \u201cmeans-testing\u201d the benefits.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, we promised you those moneys would be there for you — and they are! They are! But only if you NEED them, see. At this point, you still own a home and you\u2019ve got $100,000 in the bank, so you don\u2019t NEED Social Security or Medicare. Come see us when you\u2019re living in a cardboard box.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meantime, those who ARE broke get a full ride, right away.<\/p>\n
The problem with admitting this is obvious. You\u2019re punishing those who scrimped and saved and invested — punishing what used to be called civic and economic and inter-generational virtues — while rewarding those who \u201cpartied hard\u201d and reached age 69 (or 62, if you\u2019re fat enough to need a motorized wheelchair) with nothing.<\/p>\n
And once you admit those are the behaviors you\u2019re rewarding, who on earth do you expect to scrimp and save and invest to put themselves in a position to pay TOMORROW\u2019S taxes?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As we saw last week in the \u201cGirl Scout cookies\u201d case out of Savannah, Georgia, government — which was supposed to provide a level playing field by providing courts of law and barring interstate tariffs but otherwise stay out of the way — is destroying our economy, largely to protect the jobs of all its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42,18,15,9,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2012-election","category-economics","category-immigration","category-taxation","category-welfare"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-bB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=719"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":720,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions\/720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}