Goldberg hits a home run (when talking taxes)

Obama may have been making a fool of himself with baseball, whether throwing a ball badly, misspeaking the name of an American institution, or refusing to admit that no, he didn’t know the team line-up, but Jonah Goldberg , distinguishing himself from Obama, hit a home run today.  Admittedly, the home run didn’t actually have anything to do with baseball, but it is an absolutely fantastic article about taxation — and one that ran in USA Today, which means a large audience:

A 100% tax rate would be tyrannical not just because you have a right to own what you create, but because the government would necessarily decide what you can and can’t have. Reasonable people can of course differ about where a tax rate becomes tyrannical, and we’re far from that line in historical terms. But any amount of taxation can be unjust if it is being used for bad reasons, is applied discriminatorily or if it’s taken without representation. (That’s how the American Revolution started, after all.)

Individual liberty is far from the only concern, either. The kind of country we want to be is deeply bound up in taxation. The Tax Foundation estimates that some 60% of American families already get more from the government than they pay in taxes (and the top 10% of earners pay more than 70% of the income taxes). If all of President Obama’s plans are enacted, that percentage will increase. We are heading toward being a country where instead of the people deciding how much money the government should have, the government decides how much money the people should have.

Only after they passed “ObamaCare” did Democrats clarify that this was one of their motives. ObamaCare’s appeal has less to do with saving money — which it won’t do — and more to do with spreading the wealth around. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., recently admitted that alleviating the “maldistribution of income in America” from the haves to the have-nots is one of the legislation’s real benefits.

Read the whole thing, please.  It goes a long way to explaining why the Tea Party is increasingly more popular than Obama.  People understand that taxes do not equal government wealth, but that they do equal individual servitude.