(This launches a new series, “De-briefing Progressives: Exposing their Totalitarian Tendencies“)
Chuck Collins, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote and article called “Moral Measure of a Tax Plan” today in Sojourner’s God’s Politics blog. It’s a classic example of the assumption that wealth belongs to “society” and that it is the job of our wise overlords to confiscate most of it and distribute it as they see fit.
Here’s his logic:
By extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and instituting a significantly weakened estate tax, more wealth will flow into the hands of the richest one percent — and within that to the richest one-tenth of one percent….
As wealth concentrates, a hyper-organized segment of this wealth-holder class uses its wealth, privilege, and power to change the rules of the economy to further concentrate wealth and privilege. (emphasis mine)
So when does letting people keep their own money count as a “flow” of wealth to the richest in the country? And since when does taxing a dead wealthy person almost half their remaining wealth (which has already been taxed over and over again) considered “immoral”?
The problem is not the wealthy keeping their money. The problem is their legal ability to buy political power and control with it.
To be sure, the state is very involved in a transfer of wealth from the middle class and poor… but that mechanism is not the reduction of progressive taxation, but the mechanism of inflation through the state-sanctioned central bank, the Federal Reserve.
