Letter From America (About French Wealth Taxes)

France Shows That Taxing Wealth Has Devastating Consequences

Daniel Hannan

British Conservative MEP

Washington Examiner

January 5, 2015

I was living in Brussels when François Hollande, the President of France, introduced his 75 percent top rate tax in 2012. Immediately, my quartier began to fill with French exiles, who could commute to Paris in just over an hour. One of the few Belgians left in my street, a stern local matriarch, stopped me as I left the house one morning. “You’re in politics, Monsieur le Député, maybe you can tell me something. What kind of hell must these poor souls be fleeing if they see Belgium as a tax haven?”

Three years on, President Hollande is shame-facedly scrapping the 75 percent rate, having forcibly re-learned an ancient truth: Wealth taxes don’t redistribute wealth; they redistribute people. Thousands of well-off Frenchmen made the easy journey north, including the country’s richest man, Bernard Arnault.
Others decided that if you’re going to flee punitive taxation, you can do better than the land of moules frites and speculoos biscuits. Gérard Depardieu, France’s greatest actor — in every sense — went to Russia, where, whatever their other problems, they have a flat rate tax on income of 13 percent (9 percent for dividends).

Not since the expulsion of France’s Protestants in 1685 has there been such an exodus of entrepreneurs to the Anglosphere; and this wave, like that one, has been a transfusion of talent, leaving the English-speaking world more energetic and France more anemic.

Hollande’s tax, levied on incomes above one million euros, has been a miserable failure. Over its lifespan, it raised around $500 million, a tiny fraction of the original projections. Why? Well, the Paris bureaucrats who made those projections overlooked something rather important. Rich people don’t sit around waiting to be taxed. They have all sorts of ways of beating the system, not necessarily involving accountants. The two most straightforward forms of legal tax avoidance are earlier retirement and emigration, and wealthy Frenchmen have made ample use of both.

Parts of Kensington, an expensive district of West London, are now largely Francophone. London is, on some measures, the sixth-largest French city in the world. It pullulates with French financiers and French footballers and French management consultants and French pastry chefs. They have just two things in common. First, all had the get-up-and-go needed to start a career in a new language and a new country. Second, all are paying their taxes to the British Exchequer instead of the French treasury. Merci, mes amis.

Not since the expulsion of France’s Protestants in 1685 has there been such an exodus of entrepreneurs to the Anglosphere; and this wave, like that one, has been a transfusion of talent, leaving the English-speaking world more energetic and France more anemic. Nicolas Sarkozy, well understanding where the relatively small free-market-minded section of his population could be found, launched his presidential election campaign in London.

When rich people emigrate, they leave others to pick up their share of the tax bill. Even in 1685, the loss of revenue hit the French state badly, setting it up for a series of defeats in the wars with the English-speaking peoples that were to follow over the next century. These days, friendlier tax jurisdictions are a Gulfstream flight away, and financiers can often open their businesses abroad simply by opening their laptops.

A lot of politicians don’t want to hear this. Instead of accepting international competition, they legislate against it — by, for example, imposing international rules on tax harmonization. The new president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has campaigned all his life for European fiscal integration, including financial transaction taxes, debt pooling and a common EU finance ministry. Amusingly, though, it now emerges that while he was mouthing these platitudes, he was, as prime minister of Luxembourg, wooing multi-nationals with secret tax exemptions.

If there is an American who understands the tax code in its entirety, I have yet to meet him.

The best way to maximize your tax revenue, though, involves neither harmonization nor secrecy. On the contrary, it involves lower, flatter, simpler taxes.  The complexity of a tax system is every bit as damaging to competitiveness as the overall tax rate, yet we take it almost for granted. If there is an American who understands the tax code in its entirety, I have yet to meet him.

The super-rich, who can afford ingenious tax advisers and high upfront fees, turn complexity to their advantage, sheltering their assets in various pockets unintentionally created by government schemes. Again, the rest of us then have to cough up to cover their portion.

One way to think of the tax system is as a massive Swiss cheese. Each hole is an exemption created by a legislator in pursuit of good headlines — a hole waiting to be filled by the clever accountants.  If we were to compress the cheese, collapsing all the holes, its overall height would fall substantially. In other words, scrap all the special incentives, rebates and waivers, and you can cut the basic rate. Time spent on legal avoidance would instead be spent productively. Revenues would increase. It works every time.

Between 1980 and 2007, the US cut taxes at all income levels. Result? The wealthiest one percent — those chaps that the Occupy crowd keeps banging on about — went from paying 19.5 percent of all taxes to 40 percent. In Britain, after the top rate of income tax was lowered in stages from an eye-watering 98 percent in the late 1970s to 40 percent by 1988, the share of income tax collected from the wealthiest percentile rose from 14 to 27 percent.

In other words, flat taxes don’t just make avoidance pointless; they don’t just boost the economy; they also ensure that the rich pay more. If President Hollande were to embrace them, he might edge even France out of its nosedive.

Dan Hannan is a British Conservative member of the European Parliament. 

Making Matters Much Worse

When Solutions are the Problem

One of the reasons Western capitalist societies are struggling is due to a bizarre approach to supply and demand.  We say, “one” of the reasons, for there are legion.  Nonetheless the deliberate skewing of supply and demand is a significant impediment.

Let’s consider some of the ways the productive economy is inhibited and made inefficient by inappropriate interference with the buying and selling, investing and producing populace.

The first is a relentless compulsion to restrict the supply of resources useful for constructing and delivering goods and services.  This is largely driven by the notion that natural resources are finite and are running out.  Oil, gas, energy, land, timber, coal, steel, water, etc. are all limited.  Consumption will reduce their supply.  Therefore, it is prudent to restrict their use and application to make them last longer.  But rumours of the disappearance of natural resources are greatly exaggerated.  Remember the shrill, siren calls of the looming, dooming devastation of “peak-oil” about to wreak havoc upon us all.  The Sirens began shrieking in around 2008; “peak-oil” was supposed to hit in 2012.  Now, world oil supply is such that we presently have a glut.  Go figure.    

A second inhibition comes from the various ideologies of Greenism.
  We are not thinking now so much of a responsible environmental approach which seeks to reduce destruction or poisoning of the environment wherever possible, but the religious commitment of most Greens to oppose all human activity because of its environmental impact.  For such Greens, any human activity is bad.  The most glorious environment is the one which is pristine–by which is meant, no human interference or impact whatsoever. 

A third distortion, this time to demand, rather than supply is the penchant of governments to re-distribute income.  This has the effect of artificially distorting market demand, thereby pushing up prices, ultimately making the poor poorer.

In New Zealand, particularly in our largest cities, we have a shortage of housing.  The supply of housing has not met market demand.  House prices are rising.  The poorer amongst us cannot afford to buy or rent houses.  Therefore they are forced into renting sub-standard dwellings, or clustering together into overcrowded living conditions, leaving them exposed to diseases and viruses.  Diseases once thought extinct are now making a come-back–particularly those spread in damp, overcrowded living conditions such as rheumatic fever and whooping cough.

Why has this happened?  It has come about because of a prejudice against supply.  All three factors referred to above have been at play.  Local councils are imbued with Greenist ideology.  Town planners rule councils.  They exist solely to add impediments to housing development, driving up costs not only by the specifications they insist upon for new housing, but by restricting land for residential development.  They have grand ideas for luxuriantly endowed cities because they read about them in their textbooks at university.  The end result is a severe restriction of the supply of housing, buried under a mountain of costly red-tape–but all for our good, you understand.

Central government rules and regulations also inhibit the supply of housing.  Successive governments have laid claim to the property of citizens for “environmental” reasons.  If someone wants to develop land for a housing estate, anybody in the country is entitled to register an objection–which is then considered in an Environment Court.  National environmental pressure groups often join the list of objectors.  The “consenting” process to get permission to proceed is long, arduous, and costly.  Often the environmental objections are little more than covert sabotage from business competitors.  There are infamous cases of supermarkets not being able to open because competitor supermarkets have used the objection provisions of the Resource Management Act to contest the new development in the courts.  Often-times this can drag out for years, even decades.  The end result for residential housing is that supply is restricted and those houses which are built are far more expensive than they might otherwise be because they include the dead, hidden costs of gaining development approval.

Finally, the politics of guilt and pity seeks to seize income and re-distribute it to the poorest families, thereby artificially stimulating demand for houses, driving up rents and house prices.  Since the supply of houses remains restricted, the end result is that the poor become poorer.

Eric Crampton, writing at the blog Interest.co.nz explains how this has worked out.  Firstly, the income of the poorest families amongst us has risen in aggregate for the past fifteen years.

Even more surprisingly, data from the Ministry of Social Development shows that real household income growth in the lowest deciles has been very strong, both from 1994 to 2013, and from 2004 to 2013. The poorest decile in 2013 has real household income 40% higher than the poorest decile in 1994. And from 2004 through 2013, real household income growth was strongest for the lowest four deciles than for the richest six deciles.

But the Ministry’s figures are produced before the impact of housing costs is taken into account.  Because housing costs have risen faster than the incomes of the poorest deciles, in actual terms, poorer families have made less progress.

Housing unaffordability is consequently a substantial part of New Zealand’s child poverty problem. When poor households have to spend 30%, 40%, or even 50% of their incomes on housing, there simply is not much left to pay for anything else. And so spots of bad luck, like a car breakdown or an unexpected expense, can quickly become major issues.

Precisely–and merely dolling out more expropriated, re-distributed money to the lower income deciles is like pouring gasoline on a fire.  It ratchets up demand for limited housing, thereby driving up both housing prices and rentals.  Very quickly, the poorest are back to spending higher amounts on housing.  They have slid back down the greasy pole–often to a position worse than when the latest government handout increase was first dolled.

When the Resource Management Act was first passed, its intent was to facilitate the use of resources in a managed way.  It rapidly fell into the crevasse of  artificially restricting and constricting the supply of goods and services.  Its impediments to the supply of goods and services are incalculable.  It has made us all poorer–the worst impact falling on the most vulnerable.  And every attempt to mitigate the unintended outcomes of restricting the supply of goods and services by dolling out expropriated income has resulted in exacerbating the situation. 

Don’t Steal–The Government Does Not Like Competition

It’s Redistribution, But Not As We Had Thought of It

Quantitative easing has been a massive thievery of ordinary citizens and a redistribution of wealth to the monied classed operating in the financial sector.  A Mckinsey report documents how this has played out in the UK (and in the US, and Europe in general).

Here’s the evidence that QE has harmed the UK economy

By Jeremy Warner Economics  
Daily Telegaph
Last updated: November 15th, 2013

[In] . . . a report this week by the management consultancy McKinsey has attempted to quantify the distributional consequences of central bank asset purchases (so-called quantitative easing) which I referred to in my column this morning. Pretty terrifying reading it makes too, hammering home the point that QE has been extremely beneficial to indebted governments and other borrowers, but on the whole very damaging to households, particularly elderly ones reliant on fixed income forms of saving.

. . . .  the big beneficiaries of QE since the onset of the crisis are governments. The UK government alone has saved itself approximately £120bn of net interest payments as a result of the ultra low interest rate environment that QE has brought about, or more than two years worth of interest costs at the current burn rate.

The big losers, on the other hand, have been households, which have been deprived of a similar amount of interest. This may come as a surprise, as one of the justifications of QE was to support highly indebted households. Well, no doubt such borrowers have benefited, but households as a whole are overwhelmingly net savers. Just to put this in a more brutal fashion, QE has deprived the UK economy of £110bn of household spending and or saving that would otherwise have taken place.

Most certainly the profligate have been bailed out at the expense of the thrifty, but it is not even clear that there is a net economic benefit from propping up the overborrowed. In the end, it may have been at best a zero sum game. More spending sustained among the overstretched has very possibly been cancelled out by less spending by those with the foresight to save. 

QE has resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from households the governments. . . .

Thankfully New Zealand has largely escaped such brazen theft and profligacy.  This, coupled with the increasing world demand for our soft-commodity products, helps explain the persistently high New Zealand dollar against almost all other currencies. 

And when, you ask, will QE end?  How long does it take an addict to kick heroin? 

Meaningless Morass, Part II

Holy Discrimination

In Part I of “Meaningless Morass” we argued that the concept of social justice is meaningless because it can be expanded to embrace anything which a human being thinks is good.  Social justice, once the “good” is identified is a social or political order which delivers the good, whatever it may be.

Take, as an example, the evil of abortion.  Since some believe that a woman’s “right” to her own body is axiomatic and ultimate, the rights of the unborn child are subordinate (at best), non-existent, at worst (the unborn is not human, therefore by definition cannot have human rights).  Therefore, abortion is a good thing, preserving a woman’s control (or, property right) over her own body.  Consequently the cause of social justice must provide free, accessible abortion.  If not, injustice stalks the land. 

In addition, modern Nazi organizations assert they are committed to social justice for white people, which means getting for white people what they are due.  What white people are due, presumably, is their rightful position of racial supremacy.  Modern communist parties also claim they are committed to achieving social justice.  Naturally, the notion of what is just is worlds apart from Nazi ideology.  But both alike claim they represent the cause of social justice.

Christians are starting to get swept up in this errant nonsense.
  They are coming to believe that Christians, too, should be committed to social justice.  But which kind?  The social justice of the Greens, the Nazis, the Communists, or the abortionists?  Or all of them?  Christians would answer that we are to commit to the social justice taught in the Bible.  Which is fine, as far as it goes.  But maybe, in that case, it would be helpful to say that we ought to be committed to biblical social justice, not communistic, or abortionist social justice.  Yes, on balance, we think that would be helpful.  Discrimination can be a good thing.  So is discernment.  So is thinking beyond meaningless slogans.

But then the question is begged: what does the Bible teach about social justice?  The law of God is clear: we are to love our neighbours as ourselves.  We are commanded to love our neighbour; therefore, we owe love to our neighbour. And our neighbour owes love to us, by the same law.  Things start to go awry when the loved commanded by God, and therefore owed to our neighbour, is extracted by law or human demand, and vice versa.  As soon as human compulsion enters the picture, man is dehumanised and enslaved.

Consider this parallel: we are commanded in Scripture to believe in God.  Therefore, we owe faith and trust to God.  But if anyone comes along and compels our faith and belief in God, we are oppressed and violated on the one hand, and, on the other, whatever belief we have in God as a result is not free, not genuine, not belief in the heart, and out of love.  Similarly, if someone comes along to compel us to love our neighbour as the neighbour’s rightful due, we are immediately oppressed and violated: whatever ends up being done to our neighbour is not love.

Moreover, consider the parable of the Good Samaritan–one of the most celebrated parables of our Lord.  The Good Samaritan was obligated to love the wounded man.  He owed him compassion (as did the other two passers by, who ignored his need).  The Samaritan gave freely, without external (or social) compulsion.  If folk are committed to this kind of biblical social justice, we can only endorse it with all our hearts.  But we must be clear: that is not the kind of social justice other folk–all Unbelievers–are talking about.  To make common cause with them in pursuing social justice is naive and credulous. 

Let’s consider further what the Unbelieving social justice take on the the Parable of the Good Samaritan would be.  The victims and heroes of the story would be the thieves.  Here they were, no doubt poverty stricken and homeless.  They lurk on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho in an effort to get what is their due, what is rightly owed to them.  When the unsuspecting traveller came into view their desire for social justice rises ineluctably and righteously in their hearts.  They apprehend the actual thief, the true thief, and demand social justice from him.  They insist the traveller give them that to which they were justly entitled.  Since there are four of them, and one of the traveller, social justice can  only be served if the traveller gives up four fifths of all he carries.  But since the traveller is reluctant, they are justified in removing his excess possessions.

Note that in this parable, theft only occurs if the lurkers take more than what is their due, more than what is owed them.  Consequently the brigands reason that up to four fifths of the travellers possessions did not belong to him, but them, since there is a society of five people that day on the road to Damascus–four of them, and one traveller.  Only if they took more would it be theft. Since the traveller resists, he has to be forced to stop thieving.  They duly punish the malefactor and leave him by the roadside, after taking from him what was always rightfully theirs. 

That’s Social Justice 101, Unbelieving version.  The Parable of the Good Samaritan is thus recast by pagans: it becomes the Parable of the Thieving Traveller.  This is inevitably what occurs when the biblical obligation to love is recast as a property right or a demand right.  That is why Christians must be very, very scrupulous when they use terms like social justice.  There are Unbelieving notions of social justice, and there are biblical notions.  The latter trades off freedom, conscience, and dignity; the other oppresses and enslaves.

Let us choose wisely and carefully–which is to say, let us be discerning and discriminating.

An Embarrassing Result

Facts Undermine a “Good Story”

New Zealand’s crime is falling off, according to a report in the NZ Herald:

New Zealand’s crime rate has dropped to an all-time low, latest figures reveal.  The annual crime statistics released by the police today showed recorded crime dropped 5.2 per cent on the previous year.

There were 394,522 recorded offences in the 2011-2012 fiscal year, compared with 416,324 the previous year – a decrease of 21,802 offences.  New Zealand’s population increased by 0.7 per cent during the period, resulting in a 5.9 per cent decrease in the number of offences recorded per 10,000 of population.

This was the lowest number of offences in any fiscal year since 1988-1989, and the lowest crime rate per head of population since before electronic records were maintained, police said.

Some caveats are in order.
  The first is that one swallow does not a summer make.  We would need to see a series of data before a trend could be definitively pronounced.  The second is that there was a mega-catastrophe involved–Christchurch earthquakes.  The NZ Police (somewhat politely) pointed out that this mega-cat destroyed most of the CBD in that city and it was in the CBD that a great deal of criminal activity took place. 

But the big elephant in the room is this: the decline occurred during a time of nation-wide socio-economic restraint and constraint.  More people were out of work; more were finding it hard to make ends meet; job uncertainty was prevalent in so many industries; government spending increases have been curtailed, and most households were struggling with too much debt.  Why is this interesting?  Because the dominant narrative of the pundits when it comes to crime is that poverty and economic deprivation is the biggest driver of criminal activity. 

When crime rates are rising or remain stubbornly high the politicians and the Commentariat routinely opine that it is due to the socio-economic disenfranchisement of large swathes of the population. Crime will not be reduced until people have more money and a higher standard of living.  Therefore, the “crisis” of higher crime rates is used to purchase politicians and voters to agree to more welfare, more government programmes in low socio-economic areas (aka ghettoes), and more education spending–more confiscation and redistribution in general. 

These recent results put that thesis under question in no slight manner.  Precisely at the time when we have had the most difficult economic circumstances of the past twenty years, crime has dropped.  No doubt the causes have been multi-valent, but rising prosperity has not been one of them.  Ergo, the correlation between rising crime rates and economic hardship and social deprivation is looking to be close to zero, if not negative.

But for inveterate social-welfare egalitarians such facts will never be allowed to get in the way of a good story.  They remain too ideologically hidebound ever to accept facts that get in the way of their socialistic narrative.  And, lest we forget, at the heart of that narrative is the proposition that all human activity–even to the extent of how one thinks and what one believes–is formed, shaped, conditioned, and created by one’s socio-economic environment and circumstances.  Change the circumstances and, hey presto, a new model man will emerge. 

That’s why confiscation and redistribution of people’s property ever remains at the operational core of the socialist world-view. 

Exposing the Hypocrisy Beneath

“You First” Tax

We at Contra Celsum are proposing a new kind of tax.  We realise it’s a bit different, but we believe it’s way past time.

It is called the “You First” tax.  The radical component is that the You First tax will not just be targeted at legal persons– whether corporations, groups, or individuals.  The principle of individually targeted tax law is well established.  Penalty taxes, for example, are applied only to those people who are late in paying their dues.

The radical and refreshing aspect of the new tax is that it focuses only upon those people advocating redistribution of income and wealth.

How will it work?  Whenever anyone advocates the redistribution of wealth and property for the “common good”, the You First tax will be applied to that person so as to reduce their income and property to the minimum income and property band.

Take Elle Macpherson as an apt illustration of how the You First law would apply.  The “supermodel” has candidly pronounced herself a socialist–thereby endorsing government redistribution of income and property: 

Supermodel Elle Macpherson told shock jock Howard Stern Tuesday that she’s pulling for Barack Obama to be reelected.  “I’m living in London and I’m socialist,” she told her host. “What do you expect?”

The You First tax law would strip Macpherson of all her assets, including those which have been sequestered in trusts and other protective mechanisms, and all her personal and corporate income, so that she is earning no more than the minimum wage (say, $20,000 per annum) and owning no more than those living well below the poverty line. 

It goes without saying that under You First tax laws, the expropriations would go into General Funds, but that is OK because this would mean 80% of it would be redistributed into public Health, Education, and Welfare services. 

Just the sort of thing Elle loves and advocates as righteous.

  

A Necessary Evil

Poverty is A Requirement of Modern Life

Our Lord said that we would always have the poor with us.  We never imagined how those words would be twisted and perverted by modern Unbelief.  The prevailing narrative of state exacted redistribution of property to achieve equality (or as near to it as possible) requires that the poor be always with us–for propaganda purposes.  We repeat, the seize-and-redistribute property brigade requires a narrative where the poor perpetually exist.  How else could you justify perpetually increasing exactions of other people’s property and assets?  How else could you maintain the politics of guilt and pity?

One of our favorites in New Zealand is the inequality approach.

>Klingon Cloaking Devices

>Unmasked by Boat People

It was inevitable.  Sooner or later a boat filled with desperate people would set out from India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, whatever, for New Zealand.  We have been “protected” to date only by an accident of geography–New Zealand’s relative distance.  Australia has faced the problem for decades.

A group of Sri Lankan poor (allegedly Tamils previously caught up in the former civil war) have boarded a boat large enough to make it all the way here.  They have been declaring their intent to sail to New Zealand to seek asylum.  The Prime Minister has made dark hints that he has received intelligence briefings that leave him in no doubt that New Zealand was the intended destination.  Others have accused him of overreacting.  We believe Mr Key in this instance.

The Commentariat is having conniptions.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Meum and Tuum
Culture and Politics – Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, April 13, 2010

So let’s come at this from another angle. We are talking about whether governments can steal, and once that seemingly obvious point is settled, at what point their taking becomes pillage. And the brief answer is that it become indefensible when they can’t defend what they are doing from the Word of God.

In City of God, Augustine tells the story of a pirate who was captured and brought before Alexander the Great, and boldly asked why he was called a pirate for doing with one ship to other ships what Alexander with great armies to other nations. We lose track of what happened to the witty pirate after that, but his question is manifestly a reasonable one.

“What would it be called if we did that?” is a reasonable way to begin the discussion.
If the directors the Ponzi-scheme Social Security program were in the private sector, they would all be down the hall from Bernie Madoff. This is not a radical anarchist question either. There are times when the magistrate can answer the question — e.g. “you can’t take personal vengeance on your enemies because God has given the sword of vengeance to us.”

Someone might object that I intruded the Scriptures into the equation, making it impossible for us to determine what is right and wrong for the magistrate to do apart from God’s Word to us. And that would be correct. We are sinners. We need Christ. We need Christ individually, and we need Christ collectively. We need Christ preached in our pulpits and offered on our communion tables, we need Christ remembered and honored around our family dinner tables, and we need Christ in the public square.

What is the American problem? What is the American dilemma?

“If we have forgotten the name of our God, or stretched out our hands to a strange god; Shall not God search this out? for he knoweth the secrets of the heart” (Psalm 44: 20-21).

We have forgotten the name of our God, and that is why we don’t even know what stealing is anymore.

There are three basic governments that God has established among men. The overweening state wants one government, overseeing atomistic individuals. Those individuals are all dumped into a statist sack, which has the structural integrity of a bean bag chair. Each individual can be isolated — easily — by the state if he becomes obstreperous. This is why the behavior of solitary tax protester types is so easy for the civil totalizers to deal with. It is the atom against the collective.

A biblical civilization rests upon Burke’s little platoons, which in turn spin out of the three governments mentioned above. God created the family, God created civil order, and God created the church. When Paul says that no authority exists except what God has established, he did not say that all the authority was located in one spot, or that all of it had been invested in one man, parked on one throne. God has more than one deacon.

The family is His Ministry of Health, Education, and Welfare. The civil order is His Ministry of Justice. The church is His Ministry of Grace and Truth. That’s the basic set-up. Dislocations begin to manifest themselves when any one of these established governments get above themselves and try to usurp functions that God assigned to the others. The church did this in the middle ages, the family has done it in times of tribal wars and feuds, and the state is doing it now.

When authority is decentralized, and located in small, interlocking entities (families, churches, townships, nations, volunary societies, etc.), then the strength of that society is molecular. This can happen in a healthy way only when Christ is the point of integration, when Christ is acknowledged as the one in whom all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). When a secular state tries to hold us all together, the necessary results will be brittle, authoritarian, and oppressive. These men refuse to rule in the name of Jesus, and this is why they do not know what justice is. This is why they do not have even the most basic grasp of the differences between meum and tuum (between what belongs to me and what belongs to you).

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>More on Government Thievery
Culture and Politics – Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, April 12, 2010

The discussion about what constitutes governmental theft is most important — because an awful lot of it is going on these days, and an awful lot of Christians do not appear to have the principles straight on how to identify it. The Scriptures are clear — qualification to rule must include a hatred of covetousness. This is obviously because the rulers have guns (part of their job, right?) and if they don’t hate covetousness, then the natural tendency will be to use their power to feed their lusts. So much is self-evident.

If this is not recognized as a basic civic problem (rulers share in the depravity issues, remember), then it is time to return to basic Calvinism 101 stuff. If you can’t see Calvin behind Madison, then you probably can’t see Paul behind either one of them.

But what about the passage in Hebrews (Hebrews 10:34) that says Christians joyfully accepted the confiscation of their property? A basic distinction has to be made here. Accepting the confiscation of your property is not the same thing as accepting the lies that the confiscators tell about what is happening. Every Christian is responsible to rejoice at all times, and in all things (Philippians 4:4). Every Christian is to give thanks for all things (Ephesians 5:20). We are to be content in every circumstance (Philippians 4:11), even if that circumstance is that of having no food — and this includes those occasions where we have no food because somebody stole it all. So, if the IRS comes in and takes all my stuff, I must thank the Lord. But, I might add, I am supposed to do the same thing if pirates take all my stuff also.

But rejoicing in God’s sovereign control over all things does not mean that I have moral obligation to be blind to the existence of pirates. Nor does it mean that I cannot resist them, within the parameters that God has set for this kind of thing in His law. The same deal with thieving magistrates. I may resist them the way God says, and I may not resist them in ways contrary to His Word, and if my resistance is insufficient, and I lose, I must rejoice in God, He who does all things well.

Now what do we call it if the rulers are not godly, are not free from covetousness, and are running around the country with guns, taking people’s stuff? What sin is it? It is not adultery. It is not making graven images. It is not dishonoring father and mother. To remove private property from someone’s possession when you have no authorization from God to do so is theft. That is what theft is.

Murder is not taking a life. Murder is taking a life contrary to the revealed will of God. Rape is not defined as sexual intercourse. Rape is sexual intercourse that is contrary to the revealed will of God in a particular way. So theft is not the government removing property from someone who doesn’t want them to. That is not the definition. Theft occurs when property is transferred from an unwilling “donor” without the express authorization of Scripture.

Put another way, I don’t have to show that a sixty percent tax rate is theft, just like I don’t have to show that the fire-bombing of Dresden was murder. The burden of proof lies elsewhere. If we understand the nature of man and the nature of coercion, and the subtlety of the serpent, and the greasy covetousness of rulers who do not fear God, the burden of proof is on the magistrate who supports such a proposal. He has to prove to us from the Bible that his exorbitant tax rates aren’t theft. He is the one that God requires to hate covetousness, as a prerequisite of holding his office in justice.

And one quick comment about “redistribution.” All tax monies that are gathered are redistributed to somebody. So in line with the principles above, that element is not what makes the process theft. The question is whether it is a scripturally authorized redistribution. If we are redistributing the money to the sheriff to catch bad guys, it is not theft. If it is so that some lazy bum with thirty-eight tattoos can cash in his Federal Plasma HD Television Voucher, it is theft. And in between those two clear examples, there is a line somewhere. At some point it has to become theft, right? If governments can steal, then there has to be a point where what they are doing would be stealing, right? That should be a simple point.

When we are close to the line, wherever that line is, the questions are more difficult, admittedly (which is why we need wise men as rulers, instead of our current cowards, thugs and punks). So let’s have a civilized debate about things that are more problematic. But we are not going to be able to have a civilized debate about any of that unless we stop pretending that civil governments cannot break the tenets of the Decalogue, that they cannot legalize plunder. As we have done in this nation, some years back.

>There Ain’t No Free Lunch

>A People Who Worship Their Belly

In the Scriptures, the Apostle Paul characterises Cretans as a people who were “always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” Titus 1:12 Their god was their belly (Philippians 3:19). It is an apt characterisation of our modern age in the West.

By and large, in the West, politicians, government, and people in general are concerned predominantly with one thing, and one thing only–how to get more into our mouths. The pre-occupation with getting more money in the hand (and therefore food in the belly) through the agency of the state is universal in the West. Political opponents and voters debate endlessly the quantum, not the morality of state expropriations and re-distribution. Even those who would argue for less state re-distribution at the same time ardently defend the legality and morality of state expropriation and redistribution in principle.

These days it has become fashionable for state expropriations to extend to future generations as governments run up billions of dollars of debt to pay for food in the belly of today’s Cretans. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” is the underlying ethic of both politicians and people as redistribution relentlessly rises.

But now and again we see shock at reality bites. One of the truly liberal newspapers in the United States, the Chicago Tribune has woken up and found that the cupboard is bare. (Remember this is Obama’s native political soil; it is the homeland of corrupt crony politics, and sweetheart deals, of under-the-table payoffs. Rich Trzupek tells the grimly ironical story:

The very day that the United States Congress passed sweeping legislation that will undermine the economy, increase debt and send tax rates soaring, a leading liberal media outlet criticized the elected officials who have been in charge of the president’s home state for repeatedly passing legislation that has: undermined Illinois’ economy, increased Illinois’ debt and sent Illinois tax rates soaring, thus poisoning the business environment and employment prospects in the state. It appears that government’s mission isn’t to tax and spend. Who knew?

For decades, Illinois has engaged in spend, spend, spend Cretan politics. Like the corrupt Roman emperors of old, the Caesars of Chicago maintained their political power by showering bread upon the plebians at the circus. But now the system is broke, really broke.

It will be hard to believe, but when Illinois Democrats passed all of the legislation that got Illinois into this cesspool of a fiscal crisis, both they and the MSM assured voters that the there was nothing to worry about. These great new programs, they said, will actually make the state more prosperous and, if you disagreed with that proposition, then you were obviously a crabby conservative trying make political hay at the expense of what was obviously the best thing for the people of the state of Illinois. Sound familiar?

Suddenly the Chicago Tribune as woken up, its bloated belly quivering in righteous indignation.

Still, it’s nice for the Trib to finally notice:

State government’s free-fall into insolvency was designed intentionally and executed methodically. Over the years, legislators devoted more to hoarding power and ensuring their re-election than to smart governance. They repeatedly created employee benefits, entitlement coverage and spending obligations that the people of Illinois cannot pay as costs come due.

That’s a keeper. Substitute “federal government” for “state government” and “the United States” for “Illinois” and you have a paragraph that the Trib can trot out again around 2020. That’s about when the Trib’s editors will figure out that the reason the United States is $100 trillion in debt and unemployment rates are competing with inflation rates to see which can soar the highest is because Congress created – starting on May 21, 2010, “employee benefits, entitlement coverage and spending obligations” that are simply unsustainable.

What we see happening at the state level all over the United States is what is going to happen at a national, federal level. It is inevitable. It is locked and loaded. Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will die. But, not to worry. The Tribune has thought of a way out.

How to solve Illinois’ problems? The Trib hit upon a novel solution:

You can re-elect lawmakers who, for two decades, have grown state obligations at twice the rate of inflation. Or you can mobilize en masse and elect a responsive new legislature.

Gosh, thanks for the advice Tribune editorial-writers. Anyone reading your paper for the last decade would be forgiven for assuming that there’s some sort of state law that requires Illinois residents to vote Democrat. Illinois Democrats have had control of both chambers of the legislature and the Governor’s office for eight years and have spent most of their time spending tax dollars, most of which don’t yet exist, like a drunken sailor on shore leave. It would have been something of a public service for the old media to notice what was happening before now – before Illinois’ economic situation could be described in the following terms:

(Illinois ranks) a pathetic 48th in job creation (and) now suffers an unemployment rate of 12.2 percent, the highest in 27 years. Here’s a damning metric: The January jobless rate in all 12 Illinois metro areas exceeded the previous year’s rate — for the 32nd consecutive month.

Might the Tribune have seen this crisis coming before it reached these epic proportions? It might have, had the paper been listening to conservative Illinois Republicans who predicted this was going to happen as far back as 2002. That was when then Illinois state senator Steve Rauschenberger, a strong fiscal conservative and a Republican, outlined in horrifying detail exactly how the state’s economy was going to crash and burn if Blagojevich and the Democrats went forward with their plans. And, at that point, all Blago and the Dems were doing was robbing state pension funds to pay for other government goodies.

The freight train that has just smashed into Chicago could be heard coming down the line years ago. But then it was still the “eat, drink, and be merry” phase, so the rumbling was drowned out by the noise of revelling.

The Trib was all but blind to what was going on as the crisis was building in Illinois. They gleefully joined in the “Great Bush Bash of 2006,” which saw Democrats swept into office in overwhelming numbers. When Republican state level candidates in Illinois tried to make state finances the focus of their campaigns in 2006, the newspaper’s editorial board was much more interested in a candidate’s views on immigration reform (which isn’t in the purview of state government), abortion (ditto), and – I’m not making this up – whether foie gras should be illegal or not. The economy was going to hell in a hand basket and the Trib wanted to talk about goose liver. Now that it’s clear to everyone this side of Richie Daley that Illinois Democrats have screwed up Illinois so badly that it’s going to take a Herculean effort to fix this state, the Trib is reacting like Claude Raines in Casablanca.
They are “shocked, shocked!” to find that the lawmakers in Springfield have been so irresponsible. And, if Barack Obama’s grand plan to socialize medicine in the United States is not somehow derailed, we can expect to have much the same conversation in about ten years, on a much larger scale.

Meanwhile, let’s party on, and enjoy the foie gras.

>A Simple Question

>Avoiding the Obvious

The New Zealand government has taken a tentative step (which some are calling radical and revolutionary) towards getting people off welfare rolls. It likely will not make any impact at all, and may make things worse in the long run. (For an initial critical evaluation, see Lindsay Mitchell’s piece, here.)

There is only a limited political window opportunity for these kinds of changes. Good intentions by politicians (and one does not doubt the intentions of the Prime Minister, John Key or the Minister of Social Development, Paula Bennett) do not cut the mustard. What is done must be effective or else future politicians and governments will simply scrap the changes as ineffectual–and they are usually right, at least at that point.

The indications are that this “reform” will not work. Nevertheless, the media used the occasion to do the normal interview of people on the welfare rolls who express how hard and difficult it all is to survive, and how harsh the forthcoming changes will be. Not one of the media pieces asked the really important question, the urgent critical question. We believe it is a question which must be asked over and over and over. It is a simple question.

Every such interview should include the following: Why do you think other people should be forced to pay money to support you? No interview or discussion with beneficiaries should proceed without that vital question being asked–every time.

Every time a beneficiary applicant or re-applicant enters a Winz office they should be required to fill out a statement explaining why they believe other people should be forced to pay money to them. Around the walls of every Winz office should be large posters asking the embarrassing “Why?” question. Only when this issue is part of “entitlement discourse” will a government be able to make most, if not all, benefits temporary only and time-limited.