Posted on 12/12/2012 6:29:53 AM PST by Kaslin
"I'm in the top two percent," said Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, this week on CNBC. "Right now, I'm paying 45 percent of my total income in income taxes ... You tell me, what's fair about that when medieval serfs pay 25 percent, I'm paying half? I don't care what the majority voted to do, they don't have a right to steal my money just because they vote for it."
But according to most Americans, they do.
And that's the problem.
As America racks up more debt than God has ever seen on this earth, Barack Obama prepares to right all wrongs by taxing the top 2 percent of income earners in America. What right does he have to their money? Well, says Obama, it's only fair and just -- they make the most money, so they should foot a disproportionate burden of the tax load.
Obama, like all other liberals, thinks in vague terms like "fairness." He doesn't worry about a fair process -- whether or not it's right to allow a majority to discriminate against a minority simply because the minority is rich. He worries instead about a fair outcome. According to President Obama, a fair outcome -- greater income redistribution -- justifies the means. If a majority votes to seize the money of a minority, that's fair, because greater income equality is fair. No Democrat has yet explained convincingly why it wouldn't be most fair for the government to simply seize all wealth in the country and then split it up equally. After all, fair is fair.
But this notion of fairness was anathema to the founding fathers. They rightly recognized that the only real sort of fairness is fair process -- a process that deliberately takes into account minority rights. They knew that a majority giving its stamp of approval to wealth confiscation of a minority was not fair. As James Madison said, "Our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country ... [It] ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." Madison wasn't saying this because he was a brutal rich fellow trying to protect his pocketbook. He said this because he didn't want a government in which the majority could oppress the minority. And he also recognized that, in economic terms, wealth confiscation is directly opposed to economic innovation.
Madison wasn't alone in this regard. The founders despised what they termed "faction." They didn't mean political parties -- they meant, as Madison wrote in Federalist #10, "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." The purpose of the Constitutional order was to check faction against faction, to prevent a combination of the majority against the minority.
And yet over the past century, America has moved away from this limited view of government. The majority, which has since time immemorial wanted to rob the richer minority, moved to rewrite the system to allow such wealth confiscation. They did it under the guise of fairness. But once the process is overthrown, the tyranny of the majority is no longer speculative: it is a living, breathing reality. If the majority decides on the purest form of wealth redistribution -- from each according to his ability, to each according to his need -- then that thievery and impediment to human progress is branded with the stamp of legitimacy.
America is no longer a republic. It is a thugocracy. So long as fairness of result trumps fairness of process -- so long as a majority can trample the rights of a minority, then point at a simple majority vote as moral legitimation -- America has lost its way.
How cute, another moron writer has yet again made up a new name for our fascist dictatorship instead of just calling it what it really is, I tire of this. Even Levin and Rush call it statism, how cute, liberals, instead of socialists or the more correct term fascists.
It's not the way we do things in America. When are the freeloaders going to start paying their "fair share"? If the freeloaders want a BIG government with lots of freebies and handouts, they should be willing to pay for it.
It has nothing to do with fairness. It is about completion of the Soviet America.
The only reason we are not carted off to the gulags is because we are totally ineffective.
In my extended family I have some liberal parasites. They believe they they are cheated if someone has more success than they do. Of course, through their sloth and bad decisions, they have little success. They are true believers that others who have success (in any way) are somehow screwing them. They believe they have a “right” to whatever they feel they “deserve”. They are hopeless.
The sad thing is no representative has made the argument that what is happening is UnAmerican.They all blather on about Jobs,the economy and such,but it is playing on the basest of human emotions,jealousy,envy and greed.
That alone should have been enough to expose this not as a cure for our ills but a deliberate attack on the stability and well being of our country.Its obviously not about economics its is about fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
I guess that would have just labeled a person making that argument a racist
I’d transform the demands into the time domain. If the producers are slaves to the gov’t for ~ 50% of their working time, then the takers should be putting in ~2000 hr/yr doing something productive for the makers.
Fair share = Mine not yours
This environment of “tax the rich” and “fair share” and demonization and endless pitting of one group against another is all by design and is less to do with even redistribution of wealth than something wholly, unholily different. The degenerate rabble-rouser sitting on the bully pulpit said all along that he was after fundamental transformation and this is nothing short of that. His constant fanning of the flames of envy and resentment, something oh-so very European and not part of American psyche or history at all, is changing the very fabric and sentiment and climate of this country to something “other” something UN-AMERICAN right before our eyes. Damn, the country is just watching all this, in awe and wonder, with its thumb in its mouth.
He hired his fiance's brother to help him and he is seeing how much my son is making every day and made a negative comment to my son and my son's future father in law, a rabid liberal, that he is rich. His future father in law in his fifties is dishing s**t to my son for his success!!!
Great teaching moment for my son who is starting to feel guilty for his success. I set him straight, he is conservative now.
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