Collectivists sell their politics with a promise of “equality,” generally understood by their audience as a promise to redistribute the wealth of the rich to improve the lives of the poor… but this is a lie. The upper class in a communist, fascist, or socialist government is fantastically wealthy. Most of the “redistribution” comes at the expense of the middle class, which shrinks as the lower class grows. Every form of collectivist government, including twenty-first century American socialism, declares war on the middle class, or tries to lure them into submission with promises of benefits.

While the poor are initial supporters of collectivism, that changes when the results of that system come home to roost:

The desperately poor are generally reliable supporters of socialist politics. Someone who pays no taxes will understandably tend to support endless expansion of government benefits. Eventually, members of the working poor may come to realize their own prospects suffer when too much economic damage is sustained by those who employ them. It follows that high rates of long-term unemployment will generally increase the size of the dependency class, which produces more political rewards for statists who promise hefty government benefits… and extracting resources from the economy to pay for those benefits causes the economy to contract further, producing more unemployment.  Unemployment is a malignant tumor.

Finally, the brilliant Doctor Zero describes the Cloward-Piven like results (and intentions) of the sort of state-run health care that our current Marxist ruling junta is attempting to force on us:

Collectivist politicians have much to gain by increasing the size of the dependency class. The fundamental political purpose of State-controlled health care is to transform much of the middle class into the lower class. The economic damage from spending trillions of dollars on a monstrous new government program in the middle of a recession is a feature, not a bug. A middle class dependent on the benevolence of the State for its health care will become less troublesome, less independent, and less able to begin the climb into the upper class through small business formation. Fewer small businesses means fewer working poor rising into the middle class.

Read the whole thing, and consider following Doctor Zero on Twitter.  Doc Zero does not tweet a lot, but it is definitely quality over quantity.

Before we do go any further in this discussion, let’s define some terms.  Starting about the time that Mr. Obama spoke of “spreading the wealth,” his supporters both inside and outside of the media adopted an often successful tactic of responding to the socialist label with an always patronizing dismissal of the notion, going into a hair-splitting definition of the word in an attempt to obfuscate the larger point.  Therefore, since the use of the word socialism is so often met by an intentionally tangential debate about strict definitions, I find it useful to use another term in its place.  Let’s dispense with the debate about one particular flavor called socialism but instead focus on the umbrella philosophy of collectivism that also includes its cousins of Marxism, Maoism, communism, and fascism.  But exactly where is the line at which point the social contract of funding base common needs crosses over into collectivism?

I think that most reasonable people would agree that we need taxation at some level in order to be able to sustain a certain level of common government services and functions; the basic infrastructure that all of us use.  Things like the interstate system or the military come to mind, as well as more immediate examples like the police and firefighters.  I know that purist libertarians will say that even the roads should be privately built and maintained, though I was never able to go that far even back when I was an uppercase-L Libertarian, but let’s just accept that at some point there are legitimate roles for government and that those commonly useful actions must be funded in some way.

Income taxes

The basic idea of a straight (flat) income tax is to fund things in a way that hits the lower earning people a little more lightly than the higher-earning people, and most people seem to be okay with that, though I think that there are often some implicit assumptions in that thinking that often prove false, as I will discuss in a moment.  For our first example, if the income tax is a flat 15 percent, then the young person earning $20K/yr pays $3000 in income taxes and will likely receive a refund check if withholding is a part of the tax.  In that same 15 percent tax scenario, the builder who made $200K last year would pay $30,000 in income taxes and the CEO who made a million pays $150K in taxes.  It is the same percentage but obviously a higher dollar amount based upon higher earnings.  Here is where I would like to make one point that I think is often missed.  We are already crossing into collectivism here even though we are still discussing a straight, flat income tax.  Remember that when we talk of genuinely common things provided by government, things like the FAA/FBI/FCC/FDA/USDA/EPA/etc (it goes on forever), these things are being provided pretty much equally to each of our example taxpayers.  Yet when the young person pays a mere three grand for these common services while the builder and CEO pay 30K and 150K respectively, it already seems like this lower earner is getting a great deal to me.  As I hinted at above, I would speculate that a lot of taxpayers can accept this arrangement because they assume that the people getting the tax break are either young and just starting out (and likely to pay much more in taxes over their lifetime) or old and on a fixed income (having paid a lot of taxes already).  But I think that a lot of compassionate people would feel differently if they knew that in many cases the people were simply being subsidized by the rest of us for large parts of their entire lives.  I will not dwell on this point, but I do want to stress that even though a flat tax feels like a very fair model (and is infinitely more so than our current tax code) it already skews the bill-paying towards the more productive people in society who in most cases are not getting anything more for their money.

On that note, a friend of mine made an interesting devil’s-advocate counter argument that we should look at it more like insurance.  His analogy is that just like people purchasing insurance pay higher premiums for insured items of higher value, the higher earners have more possessions and more at stake, and therefore it would then make sense for them to pay higher taxes for all of this infrastructure and stability provided by the government.  However, even if you accept my friend’s position you have to admit that to a large extent the flat income tax already accomplishes that, as my example numbers demonstrated.  Moreover, you could easily argue that the higher funding requirements should only apply to funding those parts of government that directly protect our possessions, like the police and firefighters; I am hard pressed to see how wealthy Americans get more out of the interstate system or the FCC, for example.

That flat income tax approach, though it comes up from time to time during some political cycles, should not be confused with what we have in the United States.  In America we have what people like to call a progressive income tax, which means that the tax rate itself is increased based upon the amount of income.  [This gives me the opportunity to make the point that you should always be exceptionally wary when someone uses the self-congratulatory word ‘progressive’ as a complimentary adjective as their likely intended “progress” is toward a more collectivistic society]  Under this nice sounding tax (after all, who wants to be against progress?) the young person still pays 15 percent, or that same $3000, but the builder is in a higher tax bracket and pays 28 percent, or a much higher $56,000!  Furthermore, the CEO who under the flat tax paid $150K in taxes finds himself in the 31 percent tax bracket and now pays a whopping $310,000 in taxes.  Of course, Congress has added in a lot of deductions and loopholes and write-offs that allow people to end up paying a lower effective tax rate, but the point holds.  What the progressive income tax adds is something subtle and insidious; once you start adjusting the rates paid based upon income level you are starting to decide how much people need and should be allowed to keep.  That is a dangerous step that once crossed leads to a complete loss of any objective moral compass.

Four types of taxpayers

I would like to break Americans up into four groups based upon their role as taxpayers, as I think that it will help provide some clarity in discussing the truth about our system of taxation.

First, let’s start at the top.  The people who make the most money pay the most in taxes, and as I demonstrated above they are not getting any more services from the government in exchange for this significantly higher tax burden; these taxpayers are the Cash Cows.  Often denigrated and used in class warfare rhetoric, these people comprise the bulk of the investment class – the people who create jobs for the rest of the people.  While I do not want to limit the Cash Cow label to this highest group, it is repellant to me that the top one percent of earners in America pays over 40 percent of the federal income tax burden.  That is a higher share than is paid by the bottom 95 percent!  These people are often despised and envied, but they are a big part of the engine of our economy.

The Regular Joe Taxpayer is the person who is always a net taxpayer.  By my definition this is the bulk of what we would call the middle class.  The best way to look at these people is that they are paying their fair share of the tax burden, roughly paying into the system enough for their fair share of the common services.  Unlike the Cash Cows, these people are getting a fair shake in terms of their tax burden, but unlike the remaining two groups, they do not make other people subsidize their lifestyles.

The next group is comprised of people who are non-taxpayers.  At tax time their income gets offset by convoluted deductions and loopholes, and they end up with a net tax payment of zero, likely getting a refund of the overpaid income taxes withheld during the year.  However, to be in this group these people also must not live off of the rest of us via government redistribution programs.  Since they are getting all of the common services and infrastructure that the top two groups are funding they are rightly called the Free Ride group.

The last group is the Societal Parasites – these people are a big tick on the neck of productive America.  I can make the argument that they should lose the right to vote given that they will never vote for fiscal responsibility since they are not funding anything.

Even at this point, with our [allegedly] Progressive income tax, you could still argue that we have not taken a hard left onto Socialist Parkway, but we are surely slowing down with that left blinker flashing, particularly with a certain percentage of our people paying nothing into the system. However, we undeniably cross the line into socialistic when we set the system up with fake tax breaks and credits that end up with government checks going to people who pay zero in net income taxes.  This is not the typical (and all too often ignorantly happy) “I got money back” refund of overpaid withholding taxes with which most of us are familiar but instead a check with real dollars that was taken from some other taxpayer who had a better year than the person who used government to take another’s property.  Though arguments can be made that a “progressive” income tax is collectivistic in and of itself, once you start shifting money from one group to another you have undeniably crossed a line.  Redistribution of wealth is collectivism.  When one individual can use the government to take the property of another individual we have crossed a moral line after which there is no more moral compass.  The argument becomes one simply of degree.

According to the IRS’ own numbers, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers pay only 3 percent of the income taxes, and the bottom 40 percent pays nothing – in fact they are actually paying a negative number as they are being paid for being unsuccessful.  How can a system where almost half of the people pay nothing towards the cost of things not be considered collectivist?  Note that this is well before one ever considers a new health care entitlement.

I think that it is worth noting that since it is completely based upon income, you can end up with people who have made a fortune and are now living off of it paying nothing into the system.  How much do George Soros or Ted Kennedy or some empty-headed Hollywood star care how much income taxes increase?  They are good to go, thank you very much.  It insults my intelligence when I see their constant attempts to take some high morals approach when they claim that they would be okay with paying higher taxes.

The Immorality of Collectivism

I mentioned earlier that I believe collectivism to be inherently immoral regardless of the results of an implementation of that system.  Churchill once said that “the inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”  In practice these results have proven to be true time and time again.  To Churchill’s first point, we will always have an unequal sharing of “blessings” when those blessings are based upon a free market meritocratic system, but we also always have incredible opportunity to better ourselves.  But Churchill’s second point properly points out that the results of socialism are better for a few people at the expense of everyone else.  In this sense collectivism is immoral because it turns the entire system upside down, structuring things to be best for and most conducive to the needs of the least productive, least successful, and all too often least ambitious among us.   Often lost in the debate is the sad fact that often the mere reality of government involvement results in a worse situation for all involved, including the unavoidable creation of less ambitious people with no incentive to work harder.

Socialism is immoral because at its core, once you strip away the camouflage of false compassion, it requires an acceptance that the government owns you, that when the rubber hits the road you are simply a number, and that if you are more productive than most other people you will be regarded as a cash cow to be milked for what some group of statists considers The Common Good.  You can dress that up in the “party dress” of alleged compassion but it remains un-American and immoral.

I have noticed a trend in America since the last election cycle.  It started on that morning when then-candidate Obama uncharacteristically dropped his guard and let his inner Marxist slip out in that famous exchange with Joe “the plumber” Wurzelbacher.  Obama made the mistake of admitting that he wanted to “spread the wealth around.”  Hearing that sort of clear collectivist-speak immediately evokes images of a damp, gray, Orwellian society to me:  part Animal Farm, part 1984.  Whether Obama is Orwell’s Big Brother or just a member of the politburo of elite pigs is irrelevant because the eventual miserable outcome is the same.  What I have noticed since the Joe the Plumber moment, however, involves the oddly consistent reactions of many people to any accusations of socialistic programs and philosophy.  I was reminded of this by a ridiculous article at CBSNews.Com penned by self-labeled socialist Frank Llewellyn, who played the typical hard-left games with the language to run interference for his allies in collectivism.

From the CBSNews article, titled Socialism And The Politics Of Fear:

“Socialism” is now an active part of the Republican lexicon, among the litany of routine charges to be trotted out whenever they cannot come up with a substantive critique of policy initiatives they oppose.”

…

“Republicans and their media allies never really define what they mean by socialism. To some, it is an expansion in government spending (although many capitalist nations funnel more of their GDP through the public sector than the U.S. does). This past February, Fox TV host Glen Beck informed me on the air that Canada must be a socialist country because it had a universal health care system. That would be news to Canada’s socialist New Democratic Party, which has occasionally held power at the provincial level but has never won a federal election.”

That is shallow talking point nonsense intended only to obfuscate and distract from the real issue.  Let me provide my definition, though in conversation I typically prefer to use the umbrella term of collectivism because it covers all of the slavery-isms that statists like Llewellyn worship: Marxism, socialism, communism, Maoism, fascism, etc.  Socialism has become an epithet for a good reason: simply put, socialism is slavery.  It is not different from slavery in kind but only differs in degree: in both cases someone claims ownership of you and will decide how that resource will be utilized.  Contrary to the disingenuous claim quoted above that to “Republicans” socialism is just “an expansion in government spending”, there is an obvious distinction.  When people acting with the alleged authority of government take property from the people who own it and redistribute it to those who did not own it we rightly call that socialism, at least those of us who do not play manipulative games with the language.  It does not matter that it does not completely follow the pure socialist rhetoric of Obama’s mentors or the class warfare rants of some unhappy French guys in the 19^th century.  I do not give a rodent’s posterior whether a statist agrees that it fits his definition of socialism.  People who approve of such soft-slavery do not even accept that socialism is immoral.  Why should we care about their strict definition of the word?  Shouldn’t we wisely assume that someone who follows that egregiously anti-freedom ideology would be willing to lie and cheat to obtain desired goals?  Why would a socialist ever admit that a system was socialist while it was still only 50 or 75 percent socialist, before it has hit its utopian critical mass?  Let’s not be naïve about our ideological opponents.

Whenever anyone claims that a government program or a particular ideological position is “socialism” there is an immediate chorus of condescension from people who are suddenly highly concerned with a strict definition of the word.  I have noticed that socialists of all degrees, from the hardcore Marxist down to the local Obama supporter who greedily wants something for nothing, have been increasingly running interference for the Left on the use of the S-word.  A good look at it shows that there are two basic groups of people who will reliably mock accusations of socialism, one side pathetic and the other sinister.

Clearly some people, particularly the myrmidons still sporting Yes We Can t-shirts, have convinced themselves that redistribution of wealth is not socialism, partly because of their class-warfare stoked greed and partly because they know implicitly that there is something anti-American about it.  They cannot accept that they are a part of the looter/moocher class so well defined by Rand in Atlas Shrugged.  These non-thinkers metaphorically put their fingers in their ears and chant la-la-la rather than accept that they are in fact societal parasites, ticks on the neck of productive America.  They have become comfortable with the idea of living off of others – as long they can be in outward denial of that fact – but remain mostly unwilling to call it socialism, perhaps showing a remaining microscopic sense of shame.  Incidentally, these people positively love the idea of socialist medicine in America.  Let’s call them the loser-socialists.

The other group mocking every claim of socialism has an agenda and should never be trusted for one moment.  This group, the benefactor-socialists, is larger than you might want to think because it includes all degrees of socialists, from admitted socialists like Llewellyn down to charlatan statists like Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama.  Though these people are a diverse group, from limousine liberals who all attended the same elite schools to their empty headed Hollywood allies to even the tenured college professor who could never make it in the private sector, they all share a lack of common sense and a tendency to deny any history that does not support their ideology. If you read the article linked above you may have noticed that the author’s main thrust is against Republicans and in defense of Democrats for the obvious reason that socialists and the Democrat party are on the same side of the collectivist ideological divide in America.  The Democrat party in America does not differ in ideological substance from hard-core socialists, they simply offer a more watered down version for palatability purposes.  In effect they know that they cannot put too much poison in the water or their victims might taste it too soon.  But just watch them when they get too much control and get drunk on their power, as is happening now, and see how far they attempt to take us all down the road toward their socialist utopia.

Three men who believed in socialism

Socialists have to be able to own the word in terms of its definition so that they can dishonestly arbitrate claims of socialism made by their ideological opponents.  As stated above, the loser-socialist will reject the label while implicitly accepting the system that it describes because deep inside (if only unconsciously) they know that socialism simply isn’t right.  The benefactor-socialist however, a modern day slave master harnessing the productivity of the people less likely to support him in order to subsidize the loser-socialists who will, has far more sinister motives that are more about power and control than any sense of fairness or compassion.  Because of their need to obfuscate their real motives and the historically-proven results of their theoretical system they must strenuously reject that S-word whenever it is uttered.  Just like NAMBLA members strive to redefine pedophilia into a “May-December romance”, socialists will continually attempt to redefine their slavery into “fairness and compassion.”  Don’t buy it in either case.

This has gone too far.

It was one thing when we had a small percentage of people getting a free ride, living off of the rest of us.  But that percentage is now over 40 percent!  Yes, the bottom 40 percent of income earners in America pay nothing in income taxes and our new Comrade-In-Chief is clearly doing everything that he can to increase that number.  President Obama’s math is not very complex: once 51 percent of the voters pay no taxes these moochers will perennially vote in looters like Obama and Pelosi and Reid, statists who believe that the proper role of government is to seize property from the successful people in order to redistribute it to the losers who are easily fooled by the collectivists’ class warfare propaganda.

I will argue on this blog that collectivism, which I use as an umbrella term in order to include its cousins of Marxism and socialism and fascism and communism and Maoism, is inherently immoral.  I will also submit that the results of a collectivistic system are irrelevant, that the soft-slavery of collectivism is wrong in and of itself even if some alleged good comes out of it.  Using the government to get other peoples’ property is no different than pulling a gun and stealing my wallet; the government middleman does not legitimize it.

I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it any longer.  I have been a net taxpayer every single year since I turned 18.  I am the cash cow that egregiously dishonest statists want to tap to fund their unconstitutional statist agenda, which when you get down to it is simply a calculated effort to make more and more people dependent on government.  It is immensely important to note that there are collectivists and statists in both parties but they are certainly far more prevalent in the socialist, I mean, Democrat party.

I declare a War on Socialism.  Those statist bastards are not going to crush my kids’ chances of enjoying the American Dream.  Will you take up the banner with me?

I will close this brief intro post with two of my favorite related quotes:

“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples’ money.”
Margaret Thatcher

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”
Winston Churchill