Politicians talk of the need for “shared sacrifice.” The translation of this means: Those of you who already pay taxes will now be required to pay more in taxes, so government programs may stay in place and continue to expand, despite a declining economy.
I have a few questions about “shared sacrifice.”
First of all, by what defensible standard is sacrifice a good thing? Some claim that sacrifice is noble. But isn’t such alleged nobility done in the context of a voluntary act? For example, it’s said that a man who saves a person from drowning is making a sacrifice, and is therefore noble. What if the government held a gun to this man’s head and forced him to save the drowning person? Would you still call it noble? If not, then why is it sacrificial and therefore “noble” when government forces those who already pay taxes to pay even more?
What about the politicians? What is to be their sacrifice? They live off money entirely taken by force from other people. They live for, and by, the power granted to them by those who produce, and who are compelled to give half or more of what they produce to these politicians.
What do the politicians contribute to the process, other than lies and manipulation?
If you don’t know how to answer this question, then ask it this way: Where would these politicians be if the productive, who pay most of the taxes, stopped producing?
I thought that “shared” meant more or less equal responsibility across multiple parties. I hear of no proposals to reduce the expense of government. The ones that do emerge all prove to be smoke and mirrors, at best. People who receive these transfers of wealth — be they corporate subsidies, medical subsidies, agricultural subsidies, or anything else — are not asking to share in any sacrifice. At times, there are proposals to reduce the rate of annual increases of these subsidies. The screams of protest are deafening, and these proposals — probably never authentic in the first place — are immediately reversed. Those who gain the money of others are not being asked to sacrifice or give up anything, while those who give up their income are being told to give more.
By what twisted logic is this considered “sharing”?
People who are allowed to keep a half, or maybe even two-thirds, or their incomes are called recipients of gifts. ‘Tax breaks for the rich,’ they’re called. Since when are you the recipient of a gift by being allowed to keep your own money? If a thief tried to take your wallet and you resisted, and the thief backed down saying, “Well, OK. You can keep your wallet. Consider it a gift”; if this happened, would you consider the thief any less a thief?
It’s said that people will die without all the programs of wealth redistribution that make up our government’s multi-trillion dollar expenses. What will happen when the government goes so bankrupt that its computer-generated currency — its theoretical currency — loses all value? Inflation will do this, and inflation is already returning, as it must when the government artificially increases the supply of money in order to pay multi-trillion dollar deficits. What will happen to the people who depend on government programs then? Government programs only matter because they transfer money from those the government considers less deserving to those government considers more deserving. But doesn’t this whole scheme assume the money being transferred is actually worth something?
I see a lot of sacrifice going on, but I don’t consider it noble. It’s nothing more than legalized theft. And I see absolutely no sharing. The dishonesty of this whole scheme of welfare redistribution is quite literally without limit. But dishonesty cannot alter facts. The more people lie, the more they are forced to believe their own lies and to evade the consequences of those lies.
This is the real scandal of Washington DC in the present day.