Archives for August 2011

I have a certain old friend who’s very bright and thoughtful. He’s a respected attorney with a responsible government legal job. I have a lot of respect for his intelligence and his intellectual honesty, but our ideas about politics and society are strongly opposed.

When I wrote Sunday about the idea that taxation is theft, he strongly disagreed, arguing that the idea was impractical and “naively idealistic.” He referred to what I said as an “untennable radical position.” I don’t want to re-argue that debate here. Instead, I want to look at other radical positions that seemed pretty untenable when they were first proposed.

Hundreds of years ago, it was taken for granted that kings had special rights that ordinary people didn’t have. He was seen as having his power from God and any opposition to the king was opposition to God. It was called the “divine right of kings.” The king had rights that made him little short of being a god in his kingdom. No one was allowed to judge or oppose the king except for God Himself.

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If you’re not wealthy, I have good news for you. Warren Buffet wants to give you money. Well, sort of. He want to force other people to give money to the state, but isn’t that the same thing?

In a smugly self-righteous column in Sunday’s New York Times, Buffet lectures other wealthy people about what they should do with their money. (Actually, it’s about what should be done to those people, but we’ll set that aside for now.) He says that people such as himself should be paying more taxes, because the percentage he pays isn’t as much as the percentages that other people pay. What insane person ever decided that percentages should be used to calculate the price of services?

Buffet says he paid $6,938,744 in federal taxes last year, but he says that’s too little because it amounts to only 17.4 percent of his income, which he says is a lower percentage than was paid by anyone else in his office. Would he care to compare the actual dollar amounts paid?

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I’d like you to think about becoming a runaway slave. I’m planning to escape. I don’t have my plan finished, but I’m working on it. I’d like you to come with me.

If you believe that taxation is a legitimate thing and that you have a responsibility to others to hand over your money and obey the will of the majority, please don’t waste your time reading any further. As I wrote Sunday, I realize that taxation is theft and is a moral issue, but I’m not trying to convince you to change your mind. I can’t change the mind of someone who’s been brainwashed into believing that he belongs to someone else — just as a plantation slave who’d been convinced that someone else owned him had no chance of freeing his own mind.

What’s it going to take to be a runaway slave? We don’t know everything about how to do it yet. I mean, there’s not a blueprint. We’re pioneers here. We don’t even know the destination for certain. But we know the beginning, because the beginning is in our own thoughts. It begins with a decision to quit being a slave — in our own minds.

When slaves started talking about trying to escape, I imagine that a few of them gathered furtively at night to talk about this crazy idea that one man had. Most of the others were afraid to even listen. Even the rest were fearful of the consequences. But a few overcame their fear of change and made an attempt. Some failed. Others made it to a place where they could live freely. They didn’t know where they were going, but they were going to work together to try.

Right now, I’ll be the crazy man talking to scared people around a campfire. Let’s talk a bit about how we might escape when the time is right.

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