Critical Mass

By Maynard Hutchins

A recent article in the Chicago Maroon had me absolutely floored after three sentences. Normally, were one to read the line “The House has just voted to deprive the American people of more than one trillion dollars over the next 10 years in fiscal revenue,” you would think that Congress was about to pass a massive tax increase. But no, this author was lamenting that,

Bills to repeal the estate tax, a tax on the net assets of deceased Americans, have already passed that will phase out the estate tax between now and 2010. The goals of these measures are simple: to protect the interests of the United States’ most wealthy elite and preserve this generation’s wealth for the distant future.

I utterly fail to comprehend how NOT taxing American citizens could in any way be construed as unjust or a deprivation. But then I realized that the author is not only certifiably insane; she is simply stupid. Not only does she see the repealing of a tax as the deprivation of Americans of their duly owed money, she some how thinks that when one tax payer pays less money to the government, the other tax payers pay more or get diminished entitlements. As unbelievably childish as it is, that is the ultimate theme of this piece: The estate tax was a tax on wealthy Americans. By repealing it, we are unfairly allowing them and their families to keep their elitist hoards of money. Furthermore, we are depriving the lower classes of the all the benefits of those tax dollars to which they are entitled and shifting the burden to them.

By deriding the preservation of personal wealth, she implies that the government has the duty and responsibility to make sure that no one gets too much money, and when they do, to redistribute it to all of those who have apparently been deprived. Perhaps the author is unfamiliar with the birth of this nation. Perhaps she forgot about the days when citizens fought against taxes; when excessive, bureaucratic taxing was seen as the mark of an oppressive government. Perhaps she is unaware that 83.88% of all income taxes are paid by the wealthiest 25%, or that 34.27% of all income taxes are paid by the wealthiest 1% alone.

Her response to this seems to be that by not taxing all this money that those elitist, evil rich people clearly don’t need, the beneficiaries of all those laziness-sponsoring government welfare programs are shorted their rightful portion of the upper class’ unlawful wealth. A flawless argument, to be sure. For example, she argues that Americans ‘lose’ $14.5 bn each year in tax cuts for the energy sector. Wow! Good thing she told me, or I might never have missed that check the IRS was going to send me on behalf of Exxon.

What’s more troubling than her insistence on viewing the American economy as a pie, in which if one person gets a bigger slice others get smaller ones (which is factually false), is her use and application of the term “American.” By her use, it would seem that the only people who count as “Americans” are those who stand to benefit from the pilfering of the rich. You are not an American if you have large amounts of money, if you inherit money, and certainly not if your money isn’t taxed to support the squalor of society. This divisive and derogatory use of the word American is not solving anything. Under this author’s worldview, rights are not something natural and deserved by all, but are rather some sort of preventative measure used by the lower classes to prevent a plutocracy. Rich people don’t need rights because they own everything anyway.

So we should just ignore the fact that taxing more money means more money inefficiently wasted in a giant federal bureaucracy. Never mind the fact that when the wealthy have more available funds, it gets invested back into the economy, creating jobs and strengthening the markets.

But the real kicker of this piece comes in the last paragraph where the author states, “Ultimately, repeal of the estate tax has effects that every good liberal and every good conservative will hate.” By ‘liberal,’ I must assume she intends no connection to liberty, freedom, or prosperity, but rather socialism, wealth-redistribution, and stifled markets. Worse though, is the inclusion of conservatives. I consider myself a “good conservative,” but I disdain every word of this article and fully support this repealing. A good conservative will never shun personal responsibility, private fiscal independence, and lower taxes in favor of a larger federal government, greater bureaucracy, and a welfare state.