Sunday, November 28, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOICZ: Only net tax payers should be allowed to vote

As I predicted, the recent election was won by a Yale Republicrat Skull-and-Bonesman who will proceed to vastly expand the central government and erode our remaining, vestigial liberties. (Thank goodness it wasn't won by the other guy, a Yale Republicrat Skull-and-Bonesman who would have vastly expanded the central government and eroded our remaining, vestigial liberties.)

Back in mid-October, I wrote a piece urging folks to vote Libertarian. The important thing, I proposed, was not to "win" -- freedom cannot win when the mob goes to the polls to vote on how much shall be looted from whom, and who shall be jailed for which non-violent consensual activities -- but to set an example, to stake our claim as "the remnant."

Comparing today's populace to the clueless Eloi in H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" -- unable to conceive of any way of life but to dutifully line up and be "harvested" by the government taxmen, our modern equivalent of the rapacious subterranean Morlocks who "farmed" the Eloi as a food species -- I advised, "Don't waste your vote on a Morlock, vote Libertarian."

In response, a Florida reader wrote in: "You covered all the salient points needed to convince any thinking person that unless we get somebody else besides John Kerry or George Bush in the White house, we are doomed on the slippery slope of going into slavery.

"Nelson Hultberg posted on the 321gold.com site that since over 50 percent of the people pay little or no taxes and stand to benefit from the status quo they will always vote for either the Republicans or Democrats. Is there any way to convince the public that we are on track for a disaster?"

That 50 percent statistic sounds counterintuitive at first, I replied. But it's certainly true if we consider net tax payers ... as we should.

Schoolteachers, cops and other government employees will tell you they "pay taxes the same as everybody else." They may actually believe it. But where an end to the tax system would mean a "pay raise" of at least 20 percent for the productive class, an end to the current tax system would mean the immediate income of cops, "public" schoolteachers and other members of the regulatory class would drop to zero.

Government workers as well as welfare recipients show this in their voting behavior, as well as in the screeching, emotional response that you "must hate children; the world would descend into chaos; everyone would be illiterate; people would be shooting each other at every stop sign" the moment you propose that these imposed government "services" are at best worthless and at worst counterproductive.

Try to point out to them that many of those outcomes are already happening (precisely in the places where government runs most everything), and that the populace was both better educated and more civil before the invention of the first organized government police force (London, circa 1820) or the first mandatory government school (imported from Prussia to Massachusetts in the 1850s), and the "discussion" doesn't remain calm or rational for long.

Courts could be financed by fees paid as an "insurance policy," the same way folks in my home town used to pay a small annual fee to the volunteer ambulance service so they'd be "covered" if they ever needed to make use of its services. Roads could be built and maintained by private firms who could charge us for our usage -- just as many toll roads today monitor and bill you for your travel via scannable decals placed on your windshield.

But none of these options to reduce the aspects of our lives run as armed monopolies can be sensibly discussed with clueless Eloi, terrified that the fruit baskets would stop flowing if they stopped lining up to be culled by the Morlocks, believing, "That's the only way it's ever been done."

Imagine how quickly the welfare-police state would collapse, if only those who could prove they were net tax payers were allowed to vote. (Remember: If you pay $8,000 per year in taxes, but the government spends $10,000 per year schooling your children, you're a net tax recipient.)

"As coincidence would have it, I am about four-fifths through `The Time Ships,' a very interesting continuation of `The Time Machine' by modern hard-SF writer Stephen Baxter," writes another reader, J.M. of Santa Cruz, Calif. "So Morlocks are on my mind, making me all the more eager to read your latest column.

"I just wanted to congratulate you on one of the finest pieces of writing I've ever seen with your byline. You hit the nail on the head so often that my mind's ear is still ringing with the sound.

"I suppose some may criticize you for the comparison of Nazis and Communists with Republicans and Democrats. ... But down at the level of the heart, your simile is right on, not to mention timely. Why? Because by the time the head figures out what the heart has seen clearly all along, history tells us that it will be too late. ..."

I replied: Socialists routinely tell me they "disagree" when I call them socialists. I recite for them a few platform planks of the 1932 Socialist Worker's Party platform, which Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 called "fantastic and un-American" as he campaigned on a Democratic platform promising an end to all wasteful public works programs, and a "federal budget annually balanced."

Do these complainants believe in a graduated income tax? A tax-subsidized federal old-age retirement "insurance" program? Federal aid to agriculture and tax-subsidized "insurance" against crop failures? How on earth can they embrace every major plank of the socialist platform, yet whine that I'm not allowed to call them "socialists" because "that's just name-calling"?

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the forthcoming "The Black Arrow."