Anthony Esolen lays it out like this. We all hate taxes, but on some level everyone pretty much agrees that they are necessary. While we don’t like it, most of us are willing to pay up a bit to support a government that can “do some things that we cannot do, or can hardly do, on our own.” Everyone pays in, everyone benefits. It’s a fair deal all around.

But what happens when taxes are used not for the sake of something we each have a share in, as roads and armies? Then we might see the tax code used, for instance, as a powerful weapon of social control — and examples of this are everywhere to be found in our country; in fact, it’s hard for me to determine whether the tax code as it stands is primarily a revenue gathering device for Washington, or a behavior controlling device…. One can collect taxes in order to rig up a vision of what a utopian society would look like, regardless of the fact that the vision is not shared by everyone, or that there is no tangible and immediate good that the taxes would purchase, in whose benefit everyone would share (as is the case with roads, and possibly with schools). And that’s no more than state sanctioned theft.

This is what Obama has in mind when he tells a plumber that it’s better for everyone when we “spread the wealth around”. When the government can take your money by compulsion (pay up or lose your house and go to jail!) in order to support its social engineering agenda, they (not you) get to decide where that money is spent. While it may make you feel good to think that your tax dollars go to support a homeless shelter in some big city somewhere, have you thought about your tax dollars that went to the Planned Parenthood down the street from it? If you think you have a duty to vote for the guy who will help out the homeless, you might also want to think about your duty to not participate in the slaughter, by the millions, of babies who typically are from the same neighborhood as the homeless guy. You can’t take credit for one, but not the other.

Tags: election '08, Obama
Categories: Politics

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.