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Your Money and Your Life
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 The
late political scientist James Burnham
was fond of the adage “Who says A must say B.” That is, we
have to face the implications of our
desires.  The
thing we want may entail something else we don’t want.
I thought of
Burnham’s Law last week as everyone was bemoaning the latest
revelations about the extortionate practices of the Internal Revenue Service.
The stories were outrageous, all right, but what did we expect? When a
government that began with a budget in the low millions has climbed into the
trillions, how do we think the money is going to be collected?
If the
population of the United States is a quarter of a billion people, a trillion
dollars comes to $4,000 per capita. The federal budget is closer to $2
trillion, but you get the idea. As Everett Dirksen used to say, pretty soon
you’re talking real money.
When Russia
adopted Communism, became the Soviet Union, and abolished private
property, it created a whole new category of offenses. They were called
“economic crimes.” What had formerly been free private
exchanges were now, suddenly, serious violations of the law. The free market
became the black market.
Those who
traded on the black market were subject to imprisonment and even death. I
used to notice short news items from Soviet Russia about the executions of
these unmourned victims of Communism, who faced firing squads for doing
harmless and even beneficial things that were taken for granted in free
societies. No human rights group seemed to get upset about such state
killings. Even fervent anti-Communists rarely said anything about them.
The free use
of private property has lost its status as an important human right. In the
Soviet Union it was abolished wholesale; in the Western democracies it has
been nibbled away by taxes, regulation, and the alleged “rights”
of people who make claims on others’ wealth and possessions.
![[Breaker quote for Your Money and Your Life: A bad bargain]](2006breakers/061031.gif) We
don’t speak of “economic
crimes,” but we have adopted the concept without using the name.
Failing to pay taxes that increase without limit, at rates our ancestors would
have believed impossible (and, of course, tyrannical) is such a crime.
Who says A
must say B. A limitless government with limitless power to spend and tax is
going to use an appropriate “service” that may treat you as a
one-man black market.
If you want a
government to give people money they haven’t persuaded others to
give them voluntarily, you are in effect demanding an agency like the IRS. If
you want a huge military force beyond any needs of genuine defense, you will
get the IRS into the bargain. If you want a government that performs
countless functions and exercises countless powers nowhere authorized by
the Constitution, you are summoning the IRS into existence.
Such an
agency will naturally do its job by committing what should be crimes against
people who have done things that shouldn’t be crimes, like spending
their own earnings. It’s typical of the modern total state that,
recognizing no moral law above itself, it arbitrarily declares innocent acts
crimes and vice versa. If you make it legal to kill unborn children, for
example, you are going to make it a crime to interfere with killing them. Who
says A ...
Americans
have forgotten this simple logic. Of course most people still pay lip service to
the principle of “limited government.” But that’s not
enough. In the era of Jefferson, the American people understood clearly that
government must be not only limited, but defined. A government that
exceeds its proper functions becomes tyranny. But without some precise
definition of its proper functions, it’s meaningless to speak of its
limits.
Are feeding
the poor, supervising education and subsidizing the arts proper functions of
government? Are they, in particular, proper functions of the U.S.
government? If so, why aren’t they listed among the powers
“granted” and “delegated” by the people in the
Constitution?
A government
that usurps power in general will also abuse its power to tax. Why should we
be shocked to learn that the people who fear our government most are not
criminals and parasites, but taxpayers?
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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