Who Owns You? or The Thrills of Living in a Democracy

“And while it is one of the indispensable principles of a free society that we value people differently according to the morality of their manifest conduct, irrespective of the, never fully known, reasons of their failures, egalitarianism preaches that nobody is better than anybody else.  The argument is that it is nobody’s fault that he is as he is, but that all is the responsibility of ‘society’.  It is by the slogan ‘it is not your fault’ that the demagoguery of unlimited democracy, assisted by a scientific psychology, has come to the support of those who claim a share of the wealth of our society without submitting to the discipline to which it is due.”

 — Friedrich Hayek

 

Even IF one concludes that, for example, an income tax is acceptable (some, not I, might use the oxymoron ‘a necessary evil’ to describe it) by what definition of justice is it just or right for a majority (people who make less than $X/year) to impose upon a minority (those with an income greater than $X/year) a set of laws (a tax rate of Y% on income above $X) from which the majority exempts themselves?

Granting the state the power to take property from another man (even under the guise of an ‘income’ tax) can not be justified by the fig leaf of the democratic process, by citing the will of the majority. Once granted, that power invariably will be abused in favor of the class holding the levers of power, and inevitably follows the battle to control those levers. Hence the NON-STOP political campaigns for the right to control, er, serve the public.

And look at the ugliness of it. Otherwise decent men (Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney) prostrating themselves before donors to convince those other people to fund their lust for the power to take more (or less) of certain other people’s money and deploy the spoils (> $3.5 trillion per year) in accordance with a scheme devised by a dozen or so democratically elected men/women meeting behind closed doors in the US Capitol while living a life of privilege, having never produced any of the wealth put at their disposal by the unappealable power of the very laws they write for themselves.

Which part of that do you influence with your precious vote?