Today’s Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece by Stephen Moore on the crusade by a number of plutocrats to raise taxes on all wealthy Americans. Those people may be good at making (or inheriting) money, but are clueless with regard to the harm that will be done if the state gets to continue to hollow out the voluntary sector to fund its wasteful and counter-productive programs.
I just sent the following letter to the editor:
Stephen Moore offers a strong and richly deserved rebuke to the “Responsible Wealth” crowd, but I think we should go further.
Professor Eric Schoenberg, a spokesman/lobbyist for this unctuous group derides the “mindset” of voluntarism with the non sequitur that we shouldn’t expect people to volunteer to pay for roads and schools. Governments already have far more funds than are needed for roads and schools. It’s absorbing far, far more of the national output than is needed for “collective goods” and thus interfering with ability of individuals to pay for things they want, to fund investments they want to make, and to allow them to donate to charitable groups they favor.
Schoenberg and his group are determined to override such individual choices by the use of coercion. Responsible Wealth isn’t content just to suggest to people that they ought to send more money to the government – it wants to force them to do so through increased taxation.
This is one more case of the disease that is ruining America, namely the idea that the way to go about accomplishing your goals is by harnessing the coercive power of the state. Just as Responsible Wealth lobbies for higher taxes on the wealthy, so do businesses lobby for regulations mandating that people purchase their products, unions lobby for rules forcing workers to pay dues to them, environmentalists lobby for recycling laws, health nannies lobby for bans on food they don’t like, and on and on.
Instead of using persuasion to convince people to act in various ways, which means having to take “no” for an answer, more and more groups turn immediately and exclusively to coercion. Every time they succeed, we become a more politicized and less free people.
