North Star Writers Group

The American Revolution was, more than anything else, a tax revolt. When King George III unilaterally levied taxes on everything from stamps to sugar to tea, the Founding Fathers were moved to act in a big way – by declaring independence from England. Yet today, we blithely accept a much higher level of taxation on many more items and actions than the Founders could ever have dreamed - or nightmared, as the case may be. This taxation is quite simply immoral, and really nothing more than petty theft all dressed up and camouflaged.

Income tax. Last time I checked, slavery was outlawed in the 1860s, beginning with the Emancipation Proclamation and ending with the Thirteenth Amendment. Yet slaves of government is what the existence of the income tax makes us all, spending a substantial part of each day working for free as government seizes that portion of our wage. And don't get fooled by the fact that they only take 15 percent, 25 percent or 36.5 percent. If government can stake a pre-emptive claim to so much as one penny of the fruit of our labor, they in principle have a claim on it all. The only thing stopping them from doing so is the mortal certainty of an uproar. Believe me, if government could take all of our income without causing a backlash, they would do it in a heartbeat. But why be so obvious? They're already about one-third of the way there via patience and stealth. And we, like the frog in a pot of water slowly getting hotter, will apparently be happy to boil to death rather than see the growing threat and jump out while we still can. The Founding Fathers staged civil disobedience in the form of the Boston Tea Party over a two-cent tea tax (which could have been avoided entirely by simply not buying tea to drink). We obediently fork over a quarter to a third of our hard-earned income to our government slave masters and yawn. Does this sound like a citizenry still worthy of the liberty our forefathers bequeathed us?

Property tax. Would it surprise you to know that no one really owns property? That, in fact, truly private property is largely a mirage? Back where I come from, when you own something you no longer have to pay anyone else anything to keep or use that item. Why? It's yours! But that is precisely the effect property taxes have. They turn us all into de facto renters, not owners. Think about it – if you didn't pay property taxes for long enough, what would eventually happen? That's right, your property would be taken from you, seized by government as punishment for not paying rent to the real owners - them. So long as we must pay our government masters their blood money in order to keep it, truly private property in principle doesn't exist. As for the argument that we'd lose the local services that property taxes fund, if we kept government within its proper constitutional boundaries we'd have no problem paying for the remaining few powers via user fees. Gas taxes would pay for roads, for example. And with respect to the insatiable consumer of most property taxes - education - parents would pay for their own kids' education instead of forcibly foisting the cost of their responsibility onto everyone else. Then we'd stop having a government-run monopoly of a school system only the former Soviet Union could admire.

Estate tax. I shouldn't even have to explain why it's wrong to tax death. We don't work hard all our lives to build up a nest egg to leave to government to waste. We do it for our children and grandchildren to enjoy. That government can swoop in and seize 55 percent of all the wealth one has remaining after it's already seized up to 36.5% of it over our working lifetime via the income tax is obscene. This blatant theft is presently tapering down to zero, albeit for one year in 2009, based on what President Bush got pushed through Congress early in his first term. But it comes roaring back in its full 55% horror in 2010, thanks to Democrats stubbornly refusing to stop their thuggish stealing. I guess we'll all just have to make like government programs and never die.

Why is this sort of tyranny (maybe you think that is too strong a word, but it's what the Founders would call this) so easily accepted? Are we just too fat and lazy? Are we so easily distracted by the shallower aspects that we miss seeing the principles involved? Or is it like ancient Rome - just keep supplying the bread and keep the circuses going and we'll gladly accept that which causes an empire - or a superpower, as the case may be - to crumble? Whatever the answer may be, we need to find it and soon. America did not become and will not stay a beacon of freedom by having such confiscatory tax rates. And if we think that we cannot kill the "goose that lays the golden eggs," we are gravely mistaken.

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