Michael Swickard
While listening idly to someone the other day a remark flew by, “And those receiving entitlements do not even say thank you.” I forget who said it. Still, I knew I had heard something important. Our government does not ask please when taking our private property for taxes.
The recipients of entitlements do not say thanks to the government for taking the property of some citizens by force to give to other citizens for the purpose of securing political power because the recipients believe they are entitled to someone else’s property. When the person in front of you is using food stamps, they have never turned and said, “Thank you for my entitlement.”
While growing up, I asked “please” to get things and said “thank you” when those things were given to me. That is not so any longer. Is that a problem with people or the society? Both.
Human rights and entitlements aren’t the same thing
Now I understand the concept of human rights, but entitlements remain a mystery to me. Many people use those two concepts as if they were one. They resemble each other as navy beans resemble jelly beans – outwardly but not in substance. Our country was founded on human rights.
Imagine if at the Constitutional Convention in 1786 the delegates tried to put entitlements into our Constitution: Be it resolved that George Washington has better land than John Adams so part of Washington’s property hereby becomes that of Adams, he is entitled to Washington’s property. How would that have been received?
There are two parts to entitlements: First, someone else is entitled to my private property because enough people have voted to take it. Secondly, when the government takes my private property, it does not have to say thank you, nor does the recipient. The entitlement recipient says instead, “I deserve this and more.”
My problem is that it is bad for both the taxpayer and the recipient because it violates basic human interaction rules of please and thank you. If the people of our country really wanted to give so much to so many, it would not take the full force and power of the government to get them to give their money to their neighbors.
They give their money not for the purpose of helping other people but because of the threat of force by our government if they do not pay their taxes.
Taxes are always taken by threat of force. If taxes were voluntary our country would not get much. The vast bureaucracy of the IRS, along with each state’s taxation and revenue departments, use reason (do this or we will make your life miserable) and if that does not work they use force to collect taxes. Simply, taxes are not voluntary.
Between liberty and slavery
What is a tax? It is a claim on my private property by the government. If the government claims all of my private property, it is slavery since I do not get the product of my labor. So each person is somewhere between liberty – getting to decide entirely for ourselves how the fruit of our labor will be used – and slavery – where someone else decides how the fruit of our labor is spent.
In fact, two centuries ago we as a nation rejected the notion that England’s King George actually owned all of our country and we paid taxes to use his property. This was the core principle of our revolution. King George and his taxes made us pour tea into Boston Harbor and more.
Two centuries later, Americans have looked up from the minutia of our daily living to find that Congress and our state legislatures own all of the property and license it to us for a tax. If we do not pay the taxes then our government takes “its” property back, much as King George did.
What is even more insidious is that debate about government’s reach into our lives is not covered in a balanced manner by the mainstream news media. The public needs to see the debate on both sides with each side equally advocated.
Example: we cannot have a strong nation without a strong federal approach to our national defense. This is what was wrong with our country’s first set of rules, the Articles of Confederation.
However, the Constitution intended states to have equal power to the federal government in areas where regions of our country differ in needs. States have the right to deal with commerce within their state and that right has been absorbed by the federal government with little protest. Most of the big debates, such as abortion, are state issues, not the business of the federal government.
Even more troubling is that our Constitution has no entitlement provision, so this is all made up. Wait, the Constitution does have a mechanism for change. But the amendment process was not been used for these changes because our leaders knew it was not going to pass. So entitlements were mandated, which is fancy language for put upon us without proper procedure.
Perpetuating a cheating system
One of the commonalities in the current president’s cabinet is that of cheating on taxes. I do not blame them for that; I blame them for perpetuating a cheating system. How to make it better?
They could use a sales-tax method, and it would be infinitely harder, but not impossible, to cheat. At least at the cash register the clerk usually says thanks.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.
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