UN’s ‘billionaire tax’ should scare those opposed to global government

By David McElroy · July 9, 2012

Since at least the 1960s, the John Birch Society has been fighting a lonely battle to get the United States to pull out of the United Nations and kick the UN out of New York City. If you don’t know anything about the John Birchers, they’re an interesting bunch. They’ve always believed in a world of conspiracies and communists under every rock. When it comes to the UN, though, it just might be that the Birchers had it right from the start.

The United Nations is now calling for confiscating wealth from the “super rich” in relatively prosperous countries in order to send it to poor countries. It’s not an income tax. The proposal is to confiscate 1 percent of the wealth of billionaires. It’s simple theft of an estimated $400 billion in order to send it to corrupt and repressive governments that have run their people into the ground.

I’m not worried about alleged conspiracies for a “new world order” or a fictitious “North American Union.” But I am worried about the fact that more and more people want the UN to function as a world government. A UN agency has recently proposed that it take over the management of the Internet, and the agency chief admitted that part of the purpose is to make sure that small countries’ telecom monopolies are able to make money — by preventing other ways of getting data in and out of the country. Doesn’t that sound like a great excuse for repressive governments?

The proposal calling for the billionaire tax was loaded with other proposals to raise money. Here are a few of the other proposed taxes in the document:

— a tax of $25 per ton on carbon dioxide emissions would raise about $250 billion. It could be collected by national governments, but allocated to international cooperation.

— a tax of 0.005 percent on all currency transactions in the dollar, yen, euro and pound sterling could raise $40 billion a year.

— taking a portion of a proposed European Union tax on financial transactions for international cooperation. The tax is expected to raise more than $70 billion a year.

Income transfers don’t work. They never have. All they do is destroy wealth, destroy incentives to be productive and reward corrupt, incompetent governments which preside over (and created) the disasters in other places.

What’s worse, this is no longer a question of whether voluntary aid to other countries is a good idea. (And many thoughtful people have argued that even voluntary aid is a bad idea. Here’s a random example.) If the “world society” is going to take money from rich people to give it to incompetent governments (or even directly to the poor, which wouldn’t happen anyway), it establishes the principle that successful people owe support to the countries around the world that refuse to set up a system under which their people can be free and prosperous.

You might look at the 1 percent confiscation and say, “Well, those people have plenty of money. What’s it going to hurt to take just a little? And it will only affect a few people.” Those were the arguments made about the federal income tax when it was established. It was only going to apply to “the rich” and the percentage was going to be tiny. That didn’t last long.

If such a world tax is established, what would happen to countries that refused to participate in the UN? The agency is slowly starting to act as though it has the right to claim dominion over the Earth, just as national governments already do over their territory. I don’t believe that such a powerful future UN would allow any place in the world to exist outside its jurisdiction — and that’s scary.

The UN isn’t strong enough to pull that off today. It’s time to make sure it remains weak and ineffective. As painful as it might be to agree with the John Birchers, it really is time to “get the U.S. out of the UN.”

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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