There is no issue at play in America today which comes close to duplicating the matter of slavery which tore the Union apart a century and a half ago...Somewhere among us there is the man for the time and we desperately need him to step forward. Is it Paul Ryan? Is it Gov. Perry? Could it be Sarah Palin?The fundamental issue of our time, as of that time, is, "who owns your labor".
I contend that, if the GOP nominates Palin or Ryan (I don't know anything about Rick Perry), that the wing that can speak of "tax expenditures" without reaching for a rifle will not support that nominee.
People who believe, like Newt Gingrich, that ANY attempt to right the ship on the basis that the material fruits of your labor do NOT belong to you by right is "radical right-wing social engineering", people who believe, like Mitt Romney, that free economic activity involving discovery, extraction, and exploitation of natural resources affects the output of the sun, people who believe, like Mitch Daniels, Haley Barbour, Karl Rove, and George Will, that cultural Marxism is ireversible - those people WILL NOT SUPPORT OUR CANDIDATE, even if we can get her (or him) nominated.
The GOP is fundamentally divided between those who believe that it is RIGHT to take your money to give to other people and those who believe it is WRONG. This is no longer a pragmatic disagreement about HOW MUCH of your money is is EFFICIENT to take, or about whether the race or gender of the looters affects the reasonableness of the confiscation.
Like the Democrats of 1860, the Republicans of 2012 will produce two candidates, because they cannot do otherwise.
We did not declare independence from Great Britain in order to be free of taxation but to be free of taxation without representation. We permitted the government to tax us in the Constitution and subsequently amended that. So I cannot say that we have an absolute right to retain all the fruits of our labor.
So long as we have a constitutionally defined representative system, I believe the government has a right to tax us. However the purposes to which that government puts those taxes is an entirely different issue and one which the Constitution as originally drawn intended to carefully restrict. Those restrictions in the course of history have been blown away.
Interestingly, this is the current shape of the argument before the various Courts of Appeals where the government is claiming that the mandate to buy insurance under Obama care is a tax and therefore constitutional.
I would join you in saying that it is illegitimate for the government, having taxed us, to redistribute our wealth as an end in itself. It is also probably illegitimate to tax us if the purpose is to redistribute wealth. But that has been done many times. For example, it was well known that the purpose of inheritance taxes was to destroy dynasties and even out the playing field rather than raise revenues. Moreover every exemption in the tax code is designed to subsidize behavior that the government regards to be desirable. As bad as is the taking our labor, this puts us in a Skinner box.
The problem with my approach is that I permit the camel's nose under the tent when I permit taxation and, as you point out, once the beast is in there it becomes an argument over how much or how efficient and that is an argument which conservatives ultimately are doomed to lose. Just a few articles ago there is a poll that says that 49% of Americans think it is appropriate for the government to redistribute wealth. This is a demographic battle that we are destined to lose and Obama knows it. The question is, can he shaped the world according to his liking while he has constitutional power?
