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Socialism is alive and well, and living in my wife�s head

April 24, 2003 ~ 2:12 p.m.

BOSTON, MA, U.S.A.� �I am a bit of a socialist, I�m afraid, I think rich people should pay a higher rate of tax.�

My at-the-time future wife wrote this to me in a letter dated March 13, 1997. It gets better:

�I don�t mean ordinary people like us, but the mega rich.�

At the time, I remember thinking, ordinary people? So the mega rich must be like space aliens. They are not of this earth. And we ordinary people must make them pay.

As the years went by, through continued letters and our marriage in 1998, I thought I had convinced her that a society based on one rate of taxation (along with a pure meritocracy) was the model for a fair society. She agrees whole-heartedly with me that political correctness is a vile, pernicious scourge. But she continues to cling to her soak-the-rich beliefs.

Enter John. Last night, my long-time friend asked her, �Who are you to decide what people should earn?� A blunt question. It was the same question he used on me more than ten years ago, during my liberal phase, when I commented on the outrageous salaries of professional baseball players.

�Let�s face it, there�s only so much money you can spend, so many houses you can own,� replied the wife.

�You�re assuming that the rich would only pay the same as you or I would. That�s not true. We�re talking percentages of salary here,� John countered.

Think about it. I have advocated a flat tax for years and I will continue to do so. Graduated-income taxes are based upon divide-and-conquer, class-division techniques, doing their best to punish entrepreneurship. The theory is that the well-off will contribute more to society through a higher tax bracket, but who defines the starting point of rich? Who defines lower, average, and upper middle class, and what percentages should they pay?

Say, through years and years of hard toil, you and your significant other manage to raise your average household income from $40,000 to $80,000 per year. You have just moved up from working class poor to comfortable middle class. Now, imagine someone in power decides that, as a result of your success, you will now pay 25% tax instead of 15%. You are now being asked to give up half of your previous annual salary.You might still be better off, but who has the right to decide for you how much you�ll give to your government to spend on pork-barrel projects and junkets to the tropics (what the great Richard Littlejohn calls �fact-finding missions�)? A millionaire, taxed at 45%, hands over a whopping $450,000 per year. This hardly seems fair.

In fact, it doesn�t even satisfy the socialist impulse, because tax money perpetuates even larger government. Redistribution of wealth�a phony and immoral concept to begin with�cannot be seen through to fruition.

To sum it up, a skewed tax system, based on arbitrary definitions of rich and poor, and big government conspire to ensure class warfare and government dependency.

Now let�s say someone with $80,000 and $40,000 salaries are both to pay a 17% flat tax. The middle-class earner pays $13,600 per year and the working class family pays $6,800. Add a millionaire to the mix and he pays $170,000. No-one is paying the same amount of taxes; they are simply paying the same, fair and reasonable percentage of their earnings in taxes. This is more than adequate in providing local services, a safety net (otherwise known by the much-abused term �welfare�), an infrastructure, and a strong national defense.

�In England, no-one complains,� the wife threw out as a final defense to her arguments in favor of the GIT. Well, folks, England never really caught on with the �taxation without representation� argument. It�s odd that in a nation that fought bitterly with the mother country over taxes could have just as screwy a tax system, punishing the rich in society for�gosh! �being successful. The wife claims that she�d feel too guilty being rich, but nobody could stop her from giving very generously to charity. And let her tell me or anyone else that she felt guilty about flying upper class during a six-hour flight across the Atlantic while others had to squeeze into economy class. Was it fair for us to fly upper class at economy prices? Yes. Because we were successful at getting to the gate long before most of the other passengers did. As such, we were rewarded.

We can criticize the greed of CEOs and company directors and so forth. But for every Enron, there are at least five other corporations that abide by government rules on safety and the environment and give freely and generously to charity. And, like it or not, it is the rich and successful that drive our economy. Punish them, and you get high unemployment and economic stagnation. Just ask countries like Canada, Sweden or Germany. You never hear about a corporation that anyone could love because they are not considered newsworthy. The left-wing bias rampant in the media ensures that we will only ever hear about the Enrons of the world and how much of a failure that capitalism is as a result.

C�mon, hon. Learn from history and change your thinking on economic planning. At 38, you�re old enough to know better.

� M.E.M.

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