Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her by Dinesh D'Souza Read Free Book Online

president to praise the people pulling the bandwagon, and thank them for what they are doing for their fellow citizens. Not Obama. He praises the folks sitting in the bandwagon, assuring them that they are the most morally wonderful people in America. Then he castigates the people pulling the bandwagon, accusing them of being greedy, selfish, and materialistic. Through their policies, Obama and the progressives create more incentives to sit in the bandwagon and fewer incentives to keep pulling. Naturally some of the people pulling the bandwagon are going to think, “Gee, maybe I should get in the wagon. It’s so much better than pulling.” So the bandwagon slows down, and at some point it could grind to a halt.
    These critiques of government, while telling, have nevertheless not gotten very far. Why not? Because progressives have convinced people that they are fighting theft. If a greedy capitalist has looted your possessions, you would want the government to do something about it. An essential function of government is to bring thieves to justice and to restore stolen possessions to their rightful owners. If the progressive critique is valid, then it doesn’t matter if government does it inefficiently, since there is no one else to do the job: inefficientjustice is better than no justice. Moreover, when we ask the police to go after bad guys and repossess their stolen goods, we aren’t concerned with whether we foster virtue among the “giver” and gratitude in the “receiver.” That’s because the giver isn’t really giving; he’s merely giving back, and the receiver has no cause for gratitude since he (or she) is merely being made whole. In this scenario, Americans who are sitting in the bandwagon have earned that right, and the people pulling are the thieves who deserve to be penalized and castigated. This is why I’ve devoted the bulk of this book to refuting the theft critique. If I’ve succeeded, then the whole progressive argument collapses and our federal government, far from being an instrument of justice, now becomes an instrument of plunder. This term may seem unduly harsh; in the rest of this chapter I intend to show that it is duly harsh.
    Let’s consider first the issue of plunder. How does progressive government plunder its citizens? It does so by illicitly transferring wealth from one body of the citizens to another. The mechanisms for doing this are confiscatory taxation, and also regulation and mandates. Taxation is quite obviously a form of “taking” but it’s not so clear how regulation and mandates constitute theft. Imagine if the Obama administration were to say to an American family, “You must rent that extra bedroom in your house for $100 a month.” The market value of that rental is $500 a month. By forcing you to rent for $100 a month, the government is stealing $400 of your money. Similarly when the Obama administration orders businesses to provide this or that benefit, it is basically stealing from the stockholders who have invested in that business.
    Illicit taxation is also a form of theft. We are so used to being taxed in this way that we typically don’t recognize this rip-off. So let’s begin with some historical perspective. The core principle of slavery, according to Abraham Lincoln, is “you work, I’ll eat.” In hisChicago speech of July 10, 1858, Lincoln called it “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.” This, Lincoln said, is not only the essence of slavery; it is the essence of tyranny. It is the same argument “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all the ages of the world.” 3
    For centuries in Europe, people understood that the very freedom of the serf—the main thing that distinguished serfs from slaves—is that serfs got to keep some of the fruits of their labor. Karl Marx points out that “the peasant serf … worked three days for himself on his own field or the field allotted