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

society because they want protection from foreign and domestic thugs. This is the primary purpose of government. Yet it is not the only purpose. People together may also assign to government functions that promote the common good. The key feature of the common good, however, is that it benefits all citizens. It does not promote the common good for the state to require the people of the North to pay the mortgage bills of the people in the South. It does not promote the common good for the state to insist that successful people pay other people’s medical bills. We see here why Obamacare is so outrageous. It would be one thing for Obama to urge government subsidies to provide insurance for poor people who can’t afford it. Arguably that benefits the common good because we all benefit from a society with a safety net, a society that provides a minimal floor below which no citizen can fall. Obamacare, however, is not a safety net. Obama’s healthcare law forces all Americans to buy insurance—even people who don’t want it—and it imposes the additional cost of the premiums on Americans who already have insurance and are already paying for their own healthcare. Obamacare is a form of theft.
    Progressive taxation is also theft. Of course, it is based on the claim that an earlier theft is being rectified. Absent the earlier theft, there is no legitimate rationale for the government to impose higherlevels of confiscation on some citizens. Indeed, the only truly just form of taxation is proportional taxation. Proportional taxation means that everyone who is eligible to pay income taxes pays at the same rate. Of course the rich pay more, but they pay proportionately more. So above a certain floor, everyone pays a 10 or 15 or 25 percent federal income tax. Not only is proportional taxation consistent with the constitutional purpose of government—to promote the general, and not particular, welfare—but it also establishes a rule of fairness. It doesn’t matter what level of taxation democratic majorities choose, through their elected representatives, as long as that level is imposed on everyone. Right now we have a system where people can happily vote to raise taxes on others while keeping their own taxes the same or even lowering them. The current system is a progressive delight because it encourages envy and promotes state-sponsored theft.
    Consider this startling fact. While the top 1 percent of Americans pays more than one-third of all federal income taxes, and the next 9 percent pays another third, the bottom 50 percent of Americans pays no federal income taxes at all. This is grossly unfair. Obama is right about the unfairness of the system. In reality it is unfair to the successful! It is also unfair that so many Americans who are earning money and are not poor nevertheless pay no federal income tax at all. The American Revolution was fought, in part, to advance the principle of “no taxation without representation.” Well, evidently half of the country currently has representation without taxation. This would seem to be a very troubling feature of our democracy, because we want citizens to have a stake in the system. Democracy is about self-government, not about making laws that affect only other people. Yet people who pay nothing into the federal income tax coffer are asked to make judgments about what constitutes a “fair share” for others and for themselves. No wonder that Obama’sdemagoguery falls on so many receptive ears. He is telling people that it is just and proper that they, who contribute nothing into the system, should get more out of it, while others, who contribute a lot, should pay even more. Here’s the formula for Obama’s success: “They work, and you eat.”

CHAPTER 16
    DECLINE IS A CHOICE
    We are so used to the world being Western, even American, that we have little idea what it would be like if it was not. 1
    M ARTIN J ACQUES , W HEN C HINA R ULES THE W ORLD
    T he post-American era, when