Amerika

Wise words from frontier hero Davy Crockett:

One day in the House of Representatives, a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in its support. The Speaker was just about to put the question when Davy Crockett arose:

“Mr. Speaker — I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I have never heard that the government was in arrears to him.

“Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as a charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.”

What you tax, you get less of. Consider: income, property, and sales taxes. Taxing income reduces the value of the currency, which means the same income buys less. Taxing property makes it more expensive so people buy smaller. Taxing sales raises costs, causing people to defer some purchases.

The vital rule regarding taxation is that it represents a massive distortion of the market. When the taxes hit, the costs are passed down to consumers, who in turn try to find methods to preserve and increase their wealth through speculation and unionizing, resulting in corner-cutting and higher prices all around.

Taxation produces a system where government is the driver of the economy, called demand-side economics, that means that only what government subsidizes makes money. At this point, the system becomes indistinguishable from Communism although slightly less brutally repressive. They call that “freedom.”

If you want to have a happy nation, minimize government by denying it the ability to tax the productive and then spend the money on others. If you prohibit wealth transfer, government has little to do and stays small. If you let in even a tiny bit of welfare state, it quickly takes over because it is a jobs program for bureaucrats and politicians.

We are slowly but steadily learning how correct Mr Crockett was, all those years ago, when he fought for freedom from the tyranny of good intentions before he went to Texas to defend it against third-world invaders and lost his life at the Alamo.

Tags: davy crockett, socialism, wealth transfer, welfare state