“Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals – that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government – that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.”

Ayn Rand

Maybe three percent of the adult population become addicted gamblers. Yet private gambling is illegal in most cities and states, except for government gambling schemes called lotteries. Less than ten percent of the adult population has a drug-addiction problem they can’t control. Yet all drugs are illegal for all adults in this country. Only a small number of men are sex addicts who can’t stop themselves from going to prostitutes. Yet prostitution, the combination of sex and free enterprise between consenting adults, is illegal in most parts of the country. The vast majority of adults who own guns use them responsibly and keep them away from children, yet gun-control laws are proliferating like weeds. Soon the 2nd Amendment will be shredded, and the right to possess guns, the right of self defense, will be taken from us.

This is government by and for the stupid. This is a tyrannical government punishing 95 percent of the American people for the actions of the other 5 percent who can’t control their addictions. What corruption of justice allows the rights of the vast majority of decent, law-abiding citizens to be violated because a small number of people can’t handle their sex, drugs, or gambling addictions? Why do politicians we elect presume they can destroy our rights because some people are idiots who can’t control themselves? What right do they have to punish you and violate your rights because of the stupidity or illegal acts of others? They have no such right.

Mankind fought for over a thousand years in England, starting with Magna Carta, to create and defend fundamental legal principles that protect liberty against government tyranny. The English achieved two crucial legal principles that were enshrined in English common law, and later American law. These principles are “mens rea” — no crime without intent, and “actus rea” — no crime without evidence of a criminal act.

Law-abiding gun owners are just that, law-abiding. They use their guns for sport and self-defense. When anti-gun laws control and restrict our right to bear arms, such laws are unlawful punishment against law-abiding citizens who have no intent to commit any crime, and where there is no evidence of any crime committed.

Also, gun-control laws violate another fundamental legal principle fought for over the centuries — no one should be punished for the actions of another. A man should be held responsible only for his own actions. Yet gun-control laws directly violate this self-evident rule of justice. They punish and violate the rights of the vast majority of law-abiding gun owners for the acts of gun-owning criminals or a few mentally unbalanced teen-agers who shoot their fellow students in school cafeterias.

Extend this outrageous principle and see where it leads. Suppose ten percent of us are hamburger, fatty-food addicts. We can’t allow that, of course. Therefore, all Burger King restaurants must be shut down. Because some people are too “weak-willed” to eat the “right” foods, government must “protect” all of us from our own stupidity. These hamburgers addicts must be protected from fatty foods that could lead to heart attacks. We should not have the right to decide for ourselves what food we want to eat. The ninety percent of us who eat hamburgers without getting heart attacks must be punished for the acts of the ten percent who do get heart attacks. Having a heart attack becomes a crime by this principle.

Suppose fifteen percent of young males are irresponsible and get their teenage girlfriends pregnant, which government prosecutors consider an outrage not to be tolerated. We must therefore pass a law that forbids all teenagers under the age of 21 from having sex. We will have sex-police SWAT teams roaming college campuses and breaking down dormitory doors. We must also forbid sex before marriage. The vast majority of teenagers who practice safe-sex will be punished for the actions of the irresponsible minority, and punished without any evidence of any crime committed.

Thousands of people are killed by drunk drivers each year. To prevent this, we must bring back alcohol Prohibition. More than 100 million adults in this country should be prohibited from drinking wine or beer from this day forth because a few thousand people are stupid enough to drink and drive. The vast majority of Americans who drink responsibly and moderately must be punished for the small minority who can’t hold their liquor and drink while driving.

A small minority of parents beat and abuse their children. To prevent this, all parents should be forced to go through a parent-training course before being allowed to continue being parents. If they don’t, their children will be taken from them and put under the “benevolent” care of government social-service workers, who will, of course, care for your children better than you do. The vast majority of parents who love and care for their children will have their rights violated and children ripped from their homes because of the irresponsible actions of a few parents.

If there were no compulsory education laws and no public schools, a small minority of parents might not “educate” their children, either because of stupidity, indifference, lack of money, or other reasons. Because of this, the vast majority of parents who would educate their children must be punished by being forced to send their children to government public-schools that waste twelve years of their children’s life and turn them into illiterates.

These examples show the moral obscenity and consequences of laws that violate the precious legal principles of “mens rea” and “actus rea.” Today we are awash with such laws, written by politicians who have not the foggiest notion they even exist, or who have utter contempt for fundamental legal principles that protect our liberty against their power-lusting agendas.

We are awash because, to their utter shame, the Supreme Court has repeatedly let Congress get away with violating these fundamental legal principles of common law and legal decency. The Supreme Court, over the last 70 years, has become a chief villain in this matter because they should have been protecting us against government tyranny. Yet, many of their decisions have ripped-away the sanctity of “mens rea” and “actus rea”, along with other fundamental legal principles that protect our liberty.

It is understandable, and common throughout history, for a powerful majority to become tyrants who punish minorities for “aberrant” behavior. History is full of horror stories of majorities stealing from, murdering, and torturing minorities they don’t like or agree with. It is the story of human nature at it’s worst.

But what are we to make of a society where a small minority, backed by Big Brother’s guns, now has the right to rip away the rights of the vast majority? What kind of society allows the small number of stupid or careless people that have existed in every society, to destroy the sacred legal rights of the vast majority? It is a society based on the vicious moral notion that “man is his brother’s keeper.” It is a society where this principle has been elevated to the overriding rule of government and the controlling mechanism over our lives. How so?

Every social program, every entitlement program, including Medicare and Social Security, is justified today by this evil notion that men are their brother’s keepers. The swarms of vulture-lobbyists descending on Washington asking for new programs, new handouts, new subsidies for their constituents, all tell their Senator or Congressmen that their constituents “need” the help, “deserve” the help, that they have a “right” to this help.

What are their demands based on? Group whining. If some group is suffering from some temporary economic problem, “it is not their fault,” spout the power-hungry liberals. The group’s problems are not caused by their apathy, laziness, incompetence, poor decisions, lack of foresight, or lack of perseverance. No, it is bad luck, Nature’s fault, or past injustices by other groups. It is everyone and everything else’s fault but their own. Whining is in, personal self-responsibility is out.

If a man didn’t have the common sense to save for his retirement, we need heavy taxes for a Social Security system to “support” him in old age. If farmers had bad weather this year, we need food price supports. If young teenage girls can’t control themselves and get pregnant, we need aid-to-dependant-family programs. If government regulations strangle the health care industry so health insurance is too expensive for millions, then we need Medicaid to pay for poor people’s health care.

If anyone is having a problem in life, why, it is everyone else’s moral responsibility to fix the problem. Our lives, our precious time, our hard-earned money is now mortgaged to any special-interest group who whines loud enough that everyone else owes them a living. That is what our liberal-fascists in government say — “we’re all our brother’s keeper, and brother, if you don’t want to “contribute” voluntarily, why, government will make you.” How? Through strangling taxes and regulations.

Our politicians say if most Americans are not moral enough to help their fellow man voluntarily, then government must step in and see that this alleged “moral law” is obeyed. Government is the highest judge of what is right or wrong, the highest judge of how we should behave, isn’t it? If we leave these decisions to weak or selfish men and women, why, the poor suffering special-interest groups would never get help. So government has to impose the “moral law” on all of us.

To do so, they violate our must fundamental legal rights. They strip away our property rights and our right to resist government orders. Through “creative” lawmaking and “creative” Supreme Court decisions that uphold the “public interest,” government has stripped us of fundamental legal principles mankind fought for over a thousand years to protect us against government tyranny.

Hence, we have the cannibal “entitlement-state” America has turned into. Compassion turned into compulsion. Government agents point legal guns at our heads and say, “be compassionate or go to prison for tax evasion.” Compassion at the point of a government gun. “Man is his brother’s keeper,” enforced by prisons, SWAT teams, taxes that loot forty percent of our paychecks, bureaucrats who strangle us with regulations — by America turning into a police state.

When the immoral notion that “man is his brother’s keeper” is forced on us by a tyrannical government, a country and its people lose their most precious possession — liberty. When we exchange our liberty for a mess of potage from government handouts, when we expect government and our “brothers” to protect us from every ill-wind life throws at us, we end up degenerating as human beings.

We also end up hating our “brothers” who presume the right to steal the bread from our mouths. We end up punishing law-abiding men for so-called “crimes” they did not commit, did not intend to commit, and for which there is no evidence of a crime. We end up punishing law-abiding men for the actions of others. We end up destroying a once free country.

© 2009 Joel Turtel – All Rights Reserved

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Obama and his liberal Congress cohorts are showing their lust to loot “the rich” to pay for multi-trillion dollar bailouts, home-mortage programs, socialized medicine programs, college tuition for all programs, and on and on. Senator Edward Kennedy is now pushing a new health-care bill through Congress to install quasi-socialized medicine. Hillary previously  set her sights on the “greedy” oil companies. She said in a recent speech, “I want to take those [oil company] profits and put them into an alternative energy fund that will begin to fund alternative smart energy alternatives that will actually begin to move us toward the direction of independence.”

Notice the word “take,” as in loot or steal from oil companies through confiscatory taxes. I’m sure millions of oil-company shareholders will appreciate government simply stealing their company’s profits in the liberal’s version of the “land of the free.”

What’s the moral premise here?—that government has the right to loot “the rich” to help the not-rich or middle class. It is the sick communist notion of “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.”

Do “rich” people have a moral duty to submit to this legalized theft? Will the middle-class benefit from this looting? No, they will not. If you are middle-class, look over your shoulder, because the same government looters will soon come after you.

If it’s true that helping others is a moral duty rather than a personal choice, then it’s reasonable to loot the rich. They have more money and therefore should “give” their money to people who have less. But progressive income taxes hurt the middle class more than the rich. The middle class is the bulk of our population, and they pay most of the taxes.

To balance the budget on the backs of the top-earning two percent of Americans, we would have to tax 100 percent of the income of everyone who made over $300,000 a year. If this outright expropriation is too extreme even for liberals, we would have to double the income taxes of households earning over $85,000 a year.

Stealing from “the rich” won’t prop up our exploding welfare-entitlement state much longer. But it does satisfy liberals’ secret desire to punish people who are rich.

It helps satisfy that green monster called envy. The progressive income tax rears it’s ugly head from liberals’ malicious envy and their desire to feel morally superior, with other people’s money.

Middle-income taxpayers might think the progressive income tax gets them something for nothing. But looting the rich only sets them up for slaughter by the same scheme. Why? Because everyone below the middle class on the economic totem pole will be looting them.

To poor people, the middle class seems rich, though the middle class is struggling to keep its head above water. Since only about two percent of taxpayers make over $300,000 a year (my arbitrary definition of rich), welfare-entitlement beneficiaries (including big farmers and corporations who get subsidies) have to knock on the middle class’s door for their “benefits.” After the rich, the middle class is next in line for the guillotine because it pays almost 80 percent of the taxes that support the welfare-entitlement State.

If you’re middle class and support higher income taxes for the rich, look over your shoulder. Someone poorer than you is breathing down your neck. If you support government’s right to loot the rich, you support government’s right to loot you. You can’t have your cake and eat it too—either we respect each other’s rights and property, or government loots us all in the end. Once government loots one person’s property with progressive income taxes, then we all become victims in the end.

You may think that looting the rich is moral because we have a duty to help others less fortunate than us. But if you believe this, you become vulnerable to the liberals’ propaganda. Your conscience shames you into helping others.

However, if you were consistent, you would feel morally obligated to give all your surplus income to the poor. You would feel immoral spending money on your children’s future while people are starving in Appalachia. Too bad that your kids can’t go to college now after you give all your money away.

But “compassion” can’t stop there. Many poor people in America are rich by comparison to the poor in underdeveloped countries. Mexican illegal aliens who sneak across the Rio Grande at night to work for minimum wages in the fields of California know this. If helping others is a moral duty (forced down out throats by tax collectors), it would be immoral to stop at America’s borders. We would then have to tax America’s poor to feed the rest of the world. After all, America’s poor are rich compared to millions of starving people in Africa.

So there’s no end to it. If giving to those “in need” is our moral and political duty, then no one has a right to one penny of extra income or savings while another human being is worse off than we are. Each of us would be morally and financially responsible for human suffering in every miserable hellhole on Earth.

But if you believe that your life and paycheck are not other people’s property, then the progressive income tax is a moral obscenity. The progressive income tax becomes a burden and a punishment you don’t deserve and shouldn’t tolerate.

To reject the welfare-entitlement State, and the liberal looters who demand your hard-earned money, ask yourself these questions: Why is helping others a moral and political duty, instead of a personal choice? Why should government rob you for the sake of others? Why is their life more important than yours? Does government have the right to punish you because you work hard and are successful? Do your elected “representatives,” whose salary you pay, have the right to turn you into a sacrificial animal?

If you think that looting the rich is moral and “practical,” look over your shoulder.

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Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. – James Bovard (1994)

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too. – Somerset Maugham

At the end of the nineteenth century, federal taxes only absorbed about 3 percent of the national income ($6.64 per person), and state and municipal taxes added another 6 percent ($13.28 per person). There was no income tax, except a temporary one during the Civil War, until the 16th Amendment to the Constitution established this tax in 1913. The bulk of federal revenues came almost entirely from tariffs, excise taxes, and customs duties. The federal debt was small and steadily contracting. There were minor outlays for social services, and the Treasury often had a surplus.

Low taxes meant that workers or business owners kept most of their wages or profits to spend on themselves or their businesses. At the end of the nineteenth century, Americans had the right to keep what they earned. The combination of a free economy, political liberty, strict protection of property rights, and a small federal government was the spark plug that turned America into the most productive nation on Earth.

The Founding Fathers created a brilliant political structure, but they also made some serious mistakes; there were holes in the dam right from the start. Unfortunately, the Constitution gave the federal government the right to coin money, ‘regulate commerce,’ and ‘promote the general welfare’ of the nation. At the time, these phrases were strictly interpreted and government interference in the economy was minor.

But gradually those general phrases took on an ominous new meaning as the country’s moral-political philosophy took a sharp turn to the left. Over the years, like a spreading malignant cancer, government’s right to ‘regulate commerce among the states’ and ‘protect the general welfare’ turned into government’s right to strangle our economy with hundreds of thousands of regulations, and create the Welfare State.

The dominant political doctrine ruling America today is socialism. Socialism rests on the idea that compassion is a moral and political duty, not a personal choice. Under the socialist Welfare or Entitlement State, government forces us to help others, whether we like it or not. Compassion has been turned into compulsion.

As a result, the guiding principles of our Founding Fathers have been all but forgotten. Limited government and the scrupulous protection of our property rights are just a fading memory. In their place, government is again telling us that ‘society’ or the collective is more important than you and I. Socialist liberals tell us that the ‘public good’ and the economic ‘rights’ of the needy are more important than our liberty.

Need, not individual rights, has become the ruling principle of our time. Government uses regulations and entitlement programs to allegedly protect the common good and create a safety net for everyone. Our government now forces us to live by Karl Marx’s dogma of socialism and communism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

That’s what a welfare state is all about. And when I say welfare I don’t mean simply for the poor, but for everyone. Most government subsidy, insurance, and entitlement programs are a form of welfare. Government taxes us to pay for food stamps, Medicare, bank bailouts, rent subsidies, farm subsidies, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and handouts to corporations. There’s an endless list of programs that benefit every conceivable pressure group.

Three entitlement programs are the powder keg behind exploding federal deficits: Medicare, Social Security, and federal pensions. In 2005, they accounted for over 75 percent of all federal entitlements. These programs’ millions of beneficiaries are not welfare recipients — they are middle-class retirees. Almost 75 percent of federal benefits are paid with no regard to a person’s financial status, and only about 17 percent of these benefits help Americans get out of poverty.

If we add up all the taxes we pay, including sales taxes, property taxes, Social Security taxes, city, state, and federal income taxes, and hundreds of business taxes passed on to consumers, we’ll find that government takes anywhere from 35 percent to 50 percent of our income. In the Middle Ages, feudal lords took about 20 percent of their serfs’ crops to pay for the lords’ protection. The medieval serfs of Europe were taxed less than the new middle-class serfs of America.

It doesn’t matter that we voted ourselves into serfdom. If government confiscates 40 percent of your salary or profits, it doesn’t matter if your ruler is a dictator, a medieval lord, or the ‘will of the majority.’ Our Founding Fathers didn’t base our government on unlimited majority rule. They had a healthy fear and scepticism about human nature, and men’s lust for power. Instead, they designed a political structure to protect us against majority rule. For example, freedom of speech and religion protects us against a majority mob that may not like what we say or who we pray to. That’s the purpose of the Bill of Rights and Constitution — to protect us against the whims, greed, or stupidity of the majority.

Majority rule doesn’t sanction or guarantee personal liberty. Instead, it usually violates personal liberty. A majority of the German people voted the Nazi party into office and approved most of its policies. Our own government has become dangerous precisely because it uses majority rule to justify violating our individual rights.

Our Founding Fathers would be turning over in their graves if they saw what has happened to the Republic they so carefully crafted in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They would be horrified that the monster they feared most, unlimited majority rule, has been unleashed and holds sway over our country and our future.

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The idea of forcing someone to pay his “fair share” of taxes through progressive income taxes applies only to a society of cannibals. It applies to a society where the majority has the right to devour those people who earn more than others. Paying your “fair share” in taxes implies that all of us have a responsibility to support the rapacious Welfare/Entitlement State, but some of us have more responsibility than others. It implies that the more money you earn, the larger your “fair share” should be, simply because you have more to give.

In other words, the “fair share” principal embedded in our progressive income-tax code brings to America, the “land of the free,” Karl Marx’s dictum from his Communist Manifesto, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

This dictum is the philosophy of socialist looters who are consumed by envy. This policy simply justifies stealing from those people who earn more than others. And since there’s always someone richer or poorer than you, the progressive income tax leads to universal looting, on a massive scale. Through the progressive income-tax system, everyone steals from the next victim above him on the economic ladder. Paying your “fair share” of taxes appeals to looters or parasites who have no idea how wealth is created or why it’s wrong to steal.

To see what fair share really means, imagine the following. You have $10,000 saved in your local bank. You worked for ten years to save this money. The bank then gets a new “progressive” manager. The manager finds that most of the bank’s customers have less than $500 in deposits, which he thinks is grossly unfair. So he makes new rules for the bank. He sends you a letter telling you that he is going to “redistribute” your $10,000 to all his poorer depositors so that everyone has their “fair share.”

Do you think the bank manager should be arrested or sent to the loony bin? What if the government passes a law that lets him get away with this theft? You know that the bank manager has no right to “redistribute” your money. Does the government? Yet progressive income taxes do exactly the same thing the bank manager did.

In 2005, if you earned $80,000, you now pay a 28 percent income-tax rate, or $22,400 in Federal income taxes. A person who earns $28,000 a year now pays a 15 percent income-tax rate, or $4200 in Federal income taxes. If you pay $22,400 in income taxes, do you get five times more in services from the Federal government than the person who paid only $4200 in taxes? No you do not — you get the same “services.” In effect, those who earn higher incomes are looted far more than low-income earners to pay for Welfare/Entitlement programs that are now devouring our country. By what right?

What is the excuse that liberals make to justify this legalized looting of people who earn more than others? Simply this, that low-income earners need more money for all the goods and services they are “entitled” to. Since higher-income earners have more money, they claim, these higher-income earners have a moral “duty” to hand over their “excess” money to the “less fortunate.” In other words, they say “you have the money, we want it, so we’ll take it from you, and we’ll use the progressive income tax to do this. In effect, the federal government becomes a fence for stolen property.

Well, any mugger does the same thing when he puts a gun to your head and says, “your money or your life.” The mugger sees that you have money, he wants it, so he has decided to take your money at the point of a gun. Our government income-tax collectors are simply legalized muggers who loot our money through the progressive income tax.

In a free society, the taxes a person pays should depend on the services he gets from government, his agent. We should only pay for services that we personally use or benefit from. We could devise a system where each of us paid taxes for government services we bought – a voluntary trade between a citizen and his agent. But this system would be possible only if America had a small, limited government.

This goal is entirely possible. In 1914, the entire federal government’s budget was only $725 million. The 2005 fiscal-year budget was over $2 trillion, a 2000-percent increase from 1914. Why the incredible difference? The income-tax revolutionized the role of government from limited agent to safety-net builder. It gave government the income-raising tool it needed to create our devouring Welfare/Entitlement State.

We could have a contractual tax system if we reduced government to its size in 1914. A contractual system would be easy then, because the budget would be so small. Imagine that the annual federal budget is $750 million because we phased out regulations and entitlement programs. To be more realistic, let’s increase the budget to $75 billion (one hundred times the amount in 1914) to account for inflation, defense costs, and the general increase in population.

The United States today has a population of about 250 million people. If we had a simple flat tax calculated by dividing the total budget of $75 billion by the population of 250 million, the tax per person would be $300 a year. Do you think you could afford $300 for taxes? This figure also excludes money the federal government collects from other taxes, such as excise, tariffs, and user fees, which were its primary taxes before 1913. These extra taxes would further reduce the income taxes needed and give government more funds to work with.

Most of us would be so happy about our low tax bill that we wouldn’t want to bother with a complicated contractual tax system. We would be happy to pay the $300 and be done with it. Except for this small tax, you could keep everything you earned. Add up all the taxes you now pay and then subtract $300. Everything else would be yours.

But low taxes are possible only if we totally reject the philosophy behind the Welfare/Entitlement State. We pay heavy taxes only because we have thousands of regulations and entitlement programs and millions of government bureaucrats. The Welfare/Entitlement State and out-of-control government can be swept away only when we reject the idea that helping others is a moral and political duty instead of a personal choice.

Until then, the Welfare/Entitlement State forces us to help others at the point of a legislative gun. Our paychecks and savings accounts are no longer private property to be scrupulously protected and used for our own benefit. Instead, liberals assume that your salary, profits, and property are collectively owned. They assume that your income is a national resource they can give away to anyone who “needs” it. They assume that the only person who has no right to your money is you, the person who earned it.

Are they right? Should you let them get away with that? Does your hard-earned money belong to you, or to any looting moocher who wants to steal it from you? The next time you go into a voting booth, ask yourself these questions. Every liberal, most Democrats, and too many Republicans believe in the welfare-state philosophy. Vote only for those who don’t believe this.

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Read more about The Welfare State book by Joel Turtel

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