Wednesday, March 28, 2001
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Wednesday, March 28, 2001 |
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Am I anti-government? Heavens no! By DAVE HAMRICK I don't know whether they're going for pure shock value or whether some of these pundits really have no idea what the tax battle is about when they write columns extolling the good things that governments do and asking to be taxed even more. They seem to be suggesting that conservatives don't appreciate paved roads and a well-ordered militia. That's quite a switch. Back in the '60s, I can remember numerous scenes of young hippie types being dressed down by stuffed-shirt conservative types because the liberal hippie types had dared to criticize the hallowed United States of America. Blacks, too, were on the receiving end of love-it-or-leave-it patriotism. "If you don't like the separate but equal drinking fountains we give you, go back to Africa." Remember that? Now all of a sudden it's those of liberal bent who are labeling as unpatriotic or even downright stupid those who dare to suggest that taking half of the average family's hard-earned income to spend on ever-more-intrusive government is just plain wrong. I read a column today in which the underlying suggestion was that if we didn't like paying so much in taxes, we should go live in a country where rotten eggs cause lots of disease because of under-regulation. I think that was the gist. Let me try and set the record straight. I'm not against government, nor am I against paying reasonable taxes. And those so extreme as to suggest that we do away with government entirely, or even that we do away with taxes entirely, are a tiny minority. I thought seriously about voting Libertarian this last election, but I didn't because I felt that party would go too far in reducing the size of government, especially the military. I, too, like driving on well-maintained, paved roads, having police protection, having the benefits of government-aided medical research, having health and safety standards for various industries. There's room for debate about how much money should be spent on such things, and how it's spent, but all but the fringe lunatics agree that these expenditures are necessary and beneficial. I'm not even opposed to foreign aid, though I think we sometimes squander it by not having a cohesive and coherent foreign policy to guide its distribution. The crazies who want to run the federal government out of a phone booth next to Del Taco don't scare me. They have no influence. It's the fringe lunatics on the other side who really scare me, because if the power brokers who run our government ever get the idea we're willing to remove the reins and turn them loose ... I can't even bear to think about it long enough to finish that sentence. Here are the choices: We can turn all of our income over to the government and rely on the government to take care of us and make all of our decisions for us; we can have no government, so that if you want pavement in front of your house, you have to rent a cement truck and put it there. Or we can arrive somewhere in the middle, and have a never-ending debate about exactly where that point should be. The difference between the extremes is that there is a lot more momentum in favor of the totalitarian extreme. Yes, we are a government of the people. Does that mean we the people are infallible? No, people are flawed, and one important way in which people are flawed is that power tends to make them drunk. We've got 500 sloppy drunks in Washington, D.C., and the only thing that keeps them from completely trashing the place is the fear that we might send them home from the party. It's still our responsibility to bring them up short when they've gone too far. And in the case of the onerous tax burden that they've placed on working people, they've gone way, way too far. They can pave the roads and do all of the other necessary things and take only 10, maybe 15, percent of our incomes at the federal level, maybe another 10 percent at the state and local levels. In other words, our tax burden is only about twice what it should be if we want to call ourselves a free country and if we want our economy to be all that it can be. What am I saying? That money is all that matters, that we should be selfish and hoard our incomes? I'm saying that if you can't choose how to spend your own income, you don't have freedom. There's no such thing as total freedom. We give up some freedom to have a measure of security. But when the government is spending half of our income on average ... How can you liberals not see that that's too much? How can you not see that if we continue the slide down this slippery slope, we're going to wake up one day and find that we have no choices left to make?
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