Our Little Piggy Hearts
Money, Love, Desire - The Good of Affluence
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, 05 December 2012
As we are now in the midst of farcical fiscal cliff negotiations, with the Republicans being lame and the Democrats being eeeevil,
I thought I should handle this as a teachable moment. We should take
these teachable moments whenever they arise, for there will be fewer and
fewer of them as the clouds of economic lunacy settle in.
The president insists on raising the tax rates on the richest among
us, saying that they can afford to "pay a little more." This is
objectionable, on the surface, in two ways. Let me just mention those
briefly, and then move on to a third place where it is doing real
damage.
First, it is stealing. Taxing money simply because it is there
is offensive to God. The language of "fair share" notwithstanding, the
top five percent already pay 57% of the tax load. Here is a question
without guile -- when will the wealthy finally get around to paying their "fair share"?
Second, if all the rich people and their accountants were
ultra-cooperative, raising taxes on the wealthy with the proposed rates
would fund the federal government for about ten days. But as the process
of taxation shows itself more and more envy-ridden and irrational, we
have reason to believe the rich will become less and less cooperative.
They have lawyers and accountants to help them move their money out of
range, as I would encourage all of them to do. But -- you may be assured
-- "out of range" will not include the kind of investment opportunities
that will create jobs.
So let's get to the real damage. While I object to all attempts at
stealing, I am not spending a lot of time lamenting the sad lot of the
rich, because I think they have the wherewithal to limit the damages of
this attempted larceny. People are trying to rob their big house on the
hill, but they can usually afford a security system.
The real problem is created for the thieves -- Obama, the Democratic
Party, everybody who voted for them, everyone in Washington who opposes
them in such a lamesauce fashion, and everyone who supports them.
If someone attempts to steal something from me, but fails, then I am
none the worse. But for the aspiring thief, he gets all the guilt
credits for having made such an attempt, and none of the booty. He has
the worst of both worlds. He tried to steal two stools and he then fell
between them.
And this is the position the American people are now in. We have
thieves in Congress and in the White House because we have thievery in
our hearts. Because we have larceny in our hearts, wanting to pay off
2012 debts with 2022 money, we put up with Bernake's monkeyshines at the
Fed. Because we have larceny in our hearts, we hear a politician say
that the rich should pay their "fair share" and we reflexively say yeah! -- in the name of justice. Thus we call rank injustice justice (Is. 5:20),
and we do it because there is larceny in our little piggy hearts.
Because we have larceny in our hearts, we call it greed when someone
wants to keep the money he made, and we don't call it greed when we want
to take it away from him. But we are the ones with sticky fingers --
and we have sticky fingers because of our sticky hearts.
Because we have larceny in our hearts, we cannot follow any economic
arguments that have square shoulders, an upright posture, and an honest
face. Who do they think they are anyway?
By the way, and I simply make this point in passing, it will do no
good to get off this charge by appealing to our cultural memories of
Robin Hood. He was not robbing the rich to give to the poor. He was
robbing the tax collectors in order to get the money back to
the people who had earned it in the first place. The Sherwood Forest
hideout had a Gadsden flag flying over it.
No comments:
Post a Comment