It’s Independents’ Day

by shep

Congratulations Independent Libertarians. You’ve helped to take us all to that beautiful utopia where we can all be left alone by government (except for reading your email, watching where you go on the internet and listening to your phone conversations). You’ve been inspired by Goldwater, by Rand, by Reagan, into believing that government is the problem, that taxing the rich proportionate with their wealth is some sort of moral crime. The government should just tax everyone at the same rate and the provident hand of (what was that you believe in again?), oh, right, talent and hard work will take care of the rest.

Well, so how’s it going? You happy with the country you’ve helped to create? Is it good for you? Can you afford to buy a house? Can you afford to start a new business, write a book, pursue your dreams? Can you pay for your own healthcare, raise a family, send your kids to college? Do you think you have it better that your parents? Will your kids?

Rick Perlstein writes about a new book called The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat In Winner-Take-All America, by a young writer named Daniel Brook. (H/T: Digby)

“Instead, because investments are taxed so lightly, America has for all practical purposes adopted what only tyrannies had before - a flat tax: ‘Americans making $50,000 to $75,000 pay the same percentage of their incomes in taxes as the four hundred highest-income families in the country.’”

“It hasn't given us Athens. It's given us a world that better resembles Thomas Hobbes's state of nature: ‘No Arts; no Letters,’ as Brook quotes him - or more broadly, no chance for us to flourish to the best of our abilities.”

“Brook's portrait of the generation that grew up with Reaganism and the choices they face graduating from college now is striking. They can't afford to go into public service, even though a 2005 survey showed that public service was the most desired profession at top universities; Washington-area real estate is so expensive, he points out, that people are commuting from as far away as West Virginia.”

“What with all that college debt, they can't afford to go into much of anything except for the fields that immediately dangle the biggest the biggest paycheck in front of them. [snip] Brook, citing the social critic Brendan Koerner, calls college debt America's new ‘ambition tax.’”

“There is, too, the ‘public school’ tax. Brook cites one of the most shattering public policy insights of our age, the fact that there is no longer any reasonable distinction between ‘equality of opportunity’ and ‘equality of outcome’ when those who can't afford to live in the most expensive neighborhoods, whose high property taxes support the best ‘public’ schools, can't provide a decent education for their children”

(Note: the “public school” tax was just effectively doubled for poor black children by the most recent ruling of the corporatist majority of the John Roberts Supreme Court.)

“Most damning for conservatives who actually think they've accomplished something for freedom these twenty-six-plus years since Ronald Reagan's inauguration is the ‘entrepreneur tax.’ Put simply, in a society where to fail in business is to make economic survival impossible, fewer and fewer are willing to take the chance. Where are entrepreneurs better off? Dreaded Old Europe, according to the quite conservative Financial Times: ‘With its low [real estate] costs and generous welfare net, Berlin is an entrepreneurs' heaven, where barriers to entry are low and failure rarely entails personal ruin.’ Brook claims, counterintuitively, that America's self-employment rate is lower than it has been in decades. What if you do give it a go? ‘[T]he holes in the American safety net, health care chief among them, make entrepreneurship and family life mutually exclusive.’ That's not freedom.”

I hope that the lessons of the last 27 years haven’t been lost on economic libertarians. I hope that they’ve come to understand that without the careful, progressive, mitigating (yes, imperfect) hand of democratic government, the best will not rise to the top. The richest, the strongest, the most ruthless, the most subservient, yes. But not the best.

That's not freedom.