Grasp of the obvious

http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/02/politics/planned-parenthood-bloomberg/?hpt=hp_t3

"Politics has no place in health care," said Mayor Michael Bloomberg, of New York City, in a written statement today, as he gave two hundred fifty million stolen dollars to Planned Parenthood.

Do you think he does not realize that he is a politician? That he personally is now responsible for a measurable ($250,000,000) political involvement in health care? Do we all need to write him a letter, get those closest to him to whisper in his ear and let him know what a ridiculous and embarrassing thing he said in his statement?

Is there a fund we can contribute to for the mayor's mental health care?

Truce

I call for a truce. Conservatives will not ask Liberals to fund wars which the Liberals believe are murder, and Liberals will not ask Conservatives to fund abortions which they Conservatives believe are murder.

Why is it that so few people would agree to this completely rational proposal?

And why is anyone who disagrees with this principle allowed to have any say over my life at the ballot box?

Texas proposition 3

I heard a radio spot this morning from Texas Realtors urging me to vote on a number of "proposals" to make real estate appraisal "more fair." Little warning bells went off in my head, of course. I do not plan to vote, but I thought I'd glance at the issues and see what's up and perhaps offer a brief analysis.

First of all, anyone involved in politics always has a skewed understanding of fair. Let me explain fair: if you don't take anything that doesn't belong to you, or restrict what I can do with what is my own, or hurt me, that's fair. If you are taking my money, that's not fair, no matter how much "reform" or other excrement you smear on it.

So, fair would be repealing all real estate taxes. "More fair," I suppose, would be an across the board cut in tax rates, which I would support, and maybe even vote for if it didn't involve voting for a specific liar -- I mean "person" -- promising the alleged policy change. Heck, even a selective reduction in some people's tax rates would be more fair, and I'd support that even if I wasn't going to get a direct benefit myself. At least it'd be a benefit to the economy, which could sorely use it right now.

Unfortunately, nothing of the sort seems to be on the table. Proposition 2 might result in a lower tax rate for some people, and comes the closest to being something I could support. But I've never heard of anybody in the situation that proposition 2 describes. It makes noise like it wants to protect innocent homeowners, but it smells like it wants to protect real estate developers who monkey around at your city council meeting to get their property zoned a certain way for lower taxes while they wait to decide what to do with it. Ever read your city council minutes? Disgusting enslavement politics. Almost everything on the agenda, in my experience, involves case by case changes of the "zone" for pieces of property, where everything you might ever want to do requires approval. These are the people who give you grief when you want to use your property for something of your design, but easily sway the council to bow to their will because they allegedly help the local economy. Forget it. Not interested in helping such powermongers for something so vague and slanted.

Propositions 3 and 5 are far, far worse. They rest on an insane and destructive assumption: that your local government wants to screw you, and the higher level of government is here to help, and that centralization and standardization across the state will help lots of people. Note again this is cloaked in helping people to retain more of their wealth, i.e., libertarian motivation, but we should know that increased centralization never helps. What you want is a patchwork of differing local regulations so that if your locality is too much more thieving than the next one over, you can move. (Actually what you want is differing competing local regulations within the SAME locality, but if wishes were horses ...) Centralization regulations always function as a means for powers to collude without the threat of competition. And so in this case. The criminal gang in Austin wants to bring all the little gangs under its control, because power feels good when exercised, especially if you can get people to worship you for being their "benefactor." The little gangs actually support the centralization because then they can collude under cover; they will run the much larger centralized show and set regulations that are worse. Example: the Federal Reserve, far from forcing banks to keep more reasonable reserve standards, allows the banks to collude and set reserve standards lower than the previously freer market allowed.

Want to make my real estate appraisals more fair? Give me a free market in government, from which I can choose the option I want, or create my own if it does not exist. In other words, allow me to secede. In other words, allow me to be free.

The Laffer curve

If you've listened to conservative talk radio, you've heard about the concept of the Laffer curve, although you might not have heard that name mentioned. The Laffer curve is a hypothetical concept about what happens when you change the tax rate. At a tax rate of zero, the government obviously gets zero dollars in taxes. As you raise the tax rate, as a percentage of people's income, the amount of revenue the government gets rises.

But as you raise the tax rate, you are also chewing away at people's incomes. The total income of the people gradually diminishes. As a result, taking a percentage of their income is less and less effective: for each percentage rise in tax rate, you get more tax revenue, but this is increasingly offset by the fact that there is less total income to take (as the very result of your taxes). Eventually you reach a point where the rise in taxes attacks the people's income so much that increasing the tax rate actually decreases your total revenue. You've gotten to the point where you're "better off" lowering the tax rate, because you'll then increase people's income so much you'll get more tax revenue even though the rate is lower. As you raise the tax rate all the way to 100%, eventually you'd get zero revenue: if you take all the people's money, they won't have any income at all, and they won't be able to invest it or use it to buy gas to get to work. Therefore they won't make any money, and even with a 100% tax rate, the government coffers will be empty.

I don't know if anybody's ever "proved" the Laffer curve concept, but it makes intuitive sense. Any tax is an economic disincentive on the people's income, and eventually it seems like this effect should begin to outweigh the amount of tax revenue you take in.

Conservative radio trumpets this concept all the time, although they don't often fully explain it. Conservative radio hosts seem convinced that we are perpetually on the top side of the Laffer curve, that we are always at a point where cutting tax rates will spur the economy and generate more revenue (while benefitting everybody in the process). They constantly cite successes in the Reagan and/or Bush administrations of instances where cutting taxes actually brought in more tax revenue. This is the triumph they say proves the concept, and they boldly declare that cutting taxes will always bring us more tax revenue, and is therefore always the right thing to do. (Of course, since I believe it's sinful to tax and harmful to tax, I'm glad to hear them proclaiming this.) I don't know if some of these conservatives just don't know about the lower end of the curve, or just think it's a safe bet given our exorbitant taxation that we are on the upper end of the curve, have been for a long time, and have little hope of getting out of it in the future.

Meanwhile, I don't know if liberals just don't believe in the Laffer curve concept, or believe we're in the lower end of the curve. (Or just aren't capable of the reasoning involved in the concept.)

But regardless, my perspective is that the Laffer curve is a big mistake in the first place. Not because it isn't true; it makes perfect sense to me. What I question about the Laffer curve is the whole goal involved: maximizing government revenue. Sure, if you're goal is to get as many dollars into the government as possible, then it makes sense to use this curve to try to maximize that. But that's not my goal. My goal is to a) do what's right, and b) do what's best. What's right and what's best is to not steal. Taxation is wrong, and it harms the economy. And increasing the size, scope, and budget of government is wrong (insofar as government engages in activities other than defending the rights of its citizens, and it certainly does!). So why do I want the government to have more dollars? And why in the world would I think that doing a little damage to the economy is okay as long as it's offset by getting enough dollars to the government to spend? That's not success; that's a tragedy!

A far better goal than "maximize government revenue" (so you can maximize government spending) is "maximize the productivity of the economy." When you have this goal, you produce as many goods and services as possible, and people's needs and wants are best served. Want to help the poor? Aside from charity, one of the best things you can do for them is support dismantling all the government institutions that interfere in the economy that is supposed to be serving them. Wal-Mart has done far, far more to help the poor than all the government institutions in the history of the United States combined; because of Wal-Mart, the poor can get what they really need: cheap groceries. And the free market could help them still more if it wasn't hampered by government regulation. The theory goes that government should only take an action when the benefits outweigh the costs. But the fact is that when it comes to government interference, whether by taxation or regulation, the costs always outweight the benefits. Therefore, the government shouldn't take action. And Christians certainly shouldn't support these damaging and sinful interventions!

If you took the Laffer curve concept and plotted against some measure of economic output, like GDP, rather than government revenue, you'd see not a curve, but a straight line. Plummeting straight down. It would be obvious that every increase in tax rate results in less prosperity for everyone. And if your goal was to maximize economic prosperity, it'd be obvious what tax rate to set: ZERO.

How much do you trust God?

It's just that I think our families share some other things in common - things we aren't used to sharing with other people, LOL - that I was curious about why we came down differently on the free market. I look forward to being given something interesting to think about.

Christians disagree about a variety of things. One reason for this is that none of us perfectly understands the will of God, yet. No matter how long we keep studying and living the Christian life, we will always be learning. Hopefully we will always be willing to accept correction from the word of God, and willing to repent when we discover that we've been in error.

With that said, I want to reiterate that the free market is taught by and required by the word of God. When God said "Thou shalt not steal" -- that's a free market. That completely prohibits taxation as something Christians can engage in. (Note: I'm talking about requiring taxes of our neighbor, not talking about paying taxes.) As Walter Williams says, "He didn't say thou shalt not steal unless you got a majority vote in Congress.."

"Thou shalt not steal" means we practice charity, not socialism.

God said about property that while a man owns it, it remains his own, and if sold, the money remains under his control (Acts 5:4). Nowhere did He authorize us to make decisions for everybody's property, as a whole, rather than as individuals. Not even within the church, as evidenced by this passage.

Nor did God authorize us to govern other people. We may hold people accountable within the church, but if they choose to reject that accountability, the maximum judgment we are allowed against them is to put them out of the church, to "abandon them to Satan," and for those outside of the church, we can do nothing other than repeat the call of God (I Corinthians 5). And as I've said previously, the most effective power against sin is that call, not things we could do by taking away freedom.

Faith means "trust." The very word, pisteuo in Greek, is Greek for "trust." May I please encourage you to trust in God, to step out in faith and believe in His commands, even if you don't yet fully see how it could work? It worked for Abraham, who believed he would receive a multitude of descendants, even as he offered his only son on the altar (Hebrews 11:17-19).

Three ways to fund government

There are several ways to fund a government. Almost all of them are prohibited to Christians, though we are definitely commanded to submit no matter what they do to us. We just aren't permitted to engage in such actions ourselves. How can you fund a government? You can:

1) Tax. Take money that doesn't belong to you. We're not allowed to do that, even if the money is for good purposes (Acts 5:4).

2) Borrow. Interestingly enough, many Christians believe that verses such as Romans 13:8 prohibit Christians from going into debt (although others disagree and believe this passage is teaching something else. I'm not going to address the theological issues here.). Either way, the Bible definitely proclaims debt to not be a good idea: borrowers become slaves: "The rich rules over the poor, And the borrower becomes the lender's slave." (Proverbs 22:7) And decent finance experts such as Dave Ramsey will tell you what a bad idea debt is. If debt is a bad idea for a person, how much more of a bad idea is it for a whole group of people to go into debt? And if it's bad for a person to be in debt, isn't it wrong to put other people in debt, through the means of the state? And if debtors are slaves, isn't the state enslaving itself and its citizens when it funds itself through debt? How could any Christian support giving an institution (the state) the power to put other people in debt without their consent?

But it gets worse: debts incurred by the government are never paid off by the people who made it. Government loans are paid off a generation or two later. In other words, when you authorize your government to borrow (all those bond issues we vote "YES" on), you are stealing from other people's children, and your own. "Children are not responsible to save up for their parents, but parents for their children." (II Corinthians 12:14) Should we be borrowing from our children's future, or saving up for them?

3) Inflation! This one is my favorite. Inflation is government caused, although you will hear a million and one other alleged causes of inflation. (The government likes for you to think it is not caused by them. They'd rather have you blaming greedy oil companies or something, and coveting what they own and continuing to support government theft.) Inflation is a direct violation of Leviticus 19:35-36. In ancient times, rulers accomplished inflation by melting down all the coins they took in, mixing in more and more base metal, and reminting the coins, so that they could make more coins that were actually worth less, hoping to trick people into accepting them at the same rate for a while. In modern times, we accomplish inflation by producing more and more dollars; the U.S. money supply is constantly growing, when instead it should be constant. Every time we bring a new dollar into existence, every other dollar in the world shrinks slightly in purchasing power in order to "create" the new purchasing power of the new dollar. In other words: creating a new dollar is theft: it steals a small amount of value from every owner of dollars in the world. Repeat it a billion times and you've stolen quite a bit of value. God's ordained free market picked an inflation-proof money; you can read more about this and how government forcibly (and with direct theft) interfered with this decision in order to make inflation easier in Whatever Happened to Penny Candy, by Richard Maybury, or What Has Government Done to our Money? by Murray Rothbard. The Rothbard book is available for free online at the previous link, or you can buy it. The Maybury book is easier to understand (it's written for children) and is actually for sale at most homeschool bookfairs I've been to. Both of them have insights and information that the other does not.

Funding controversial causes

Is it right to take tax money and use it to fund abortions? Of course not. Of course, we know that the abortions are wrong, but unfortunately about half of society disagrees. But thankfully we can sometimes come to the agreement (though not often enough) that it is wrong to take "other people's tax money" and use it to fund causes that they find reprehensible and immoral.

In our society, a significant number of people oppose the war in Iraq. Is it right to take the money of these people and use it to fund the war? I submit that it is not. These people are being forced to fund an act that they find immoral and reprehensible. Sadly, people of faith are often at the forefront of justifying this coercive funding, which I demonstrated to be stealing in an earlier post.

Now I'm not saying everybody ought to agree with the opinion of the war protestors. I am personally a Christian pacifist, but I have to confess that a) the war against Iraq sounded pretty rational to me, as long as you accept the idea that we may use force to defend ourselves, which most people accept, and b) the people trying to make a case against the Iraq war honestly have yet to make a case that sounds rational to me. (And I've honestly tried to look. I even checked to see what Pat Buchanan said, because I assumed an honored Republican who opposed the war had to have some good reasons. But he couldn't get away from the same "Bush lied" nonsense I hear from complete non-thinkers. I was disappointed.)

But what I am saying is that we do not have the right to force our opinions on other people. Not in any way, and certainly not through forcing people to fund our causes. It would be wrong to forcibly take the money of other people to teach Christianity, to teach evolution, to fund abortions, to fund charities, to fund peace activists, or to fund wars, assuming the victims -- I mean taxpayers -- didn't agree with the cause and/or were not willing for their money to be spent in this way.

Here's a little fact that seems to be a big surprise to many on the Left and the Right: embryonic stem-cell research is not illegal in America. What is prohibited by George W. Bush's decision of 2001 is the use of federal funds for this research. The main reason is the justification I'm using in this essay: it is wrong to take money from people to use it for something that they are not sure is right, or are certain is not right. Private (and even state) funding of this research is still allowed.

So sometimes we recognize this principle. But violations occur all the time. The public school system might be the biggest example: we take money from "all of society" in order to educate "all of society" the way "all of society" wants. This means that our democratic institutions get to vote as to exactly what shall be taught: we can vote to teach evolution, or creationism; we can vote to teach homosexuality as abomination, or as alternate lifestyle. We can vote to teach history as leading inexorably toward liberty, toward democracy, or toward Marxism. We can vote to teach sexual abstinence and chastity, or fund contraceptives for children. Possibly every single identifiable group in society has their money stolen from them and used against them in our school system.

Want a more principled way to accomplish your goals? Do it with your own money. Honor what God said: "Thou shalt not steal." If you want something to succeed, donate your own time, money, and resources, and attempt to persuade others to do the same. If you do not have the resources to accomplish it, perhaps God does not want it done, or wants you working on something else. Concerned about underprivileged, uneducated children? Start a charitable work to help. Concerned about the lack some people have of health care? Start a charitable work to help. Concerned that some children who are existing with inadequate supervision (basically emancipated by default, which turns them into adults in my mind) don't have birth control and need it? Use your own money to provide it, not mine. (And stay away from my kids, while you're at it. They are not grown up yet, and I'm not turning them loose until they are.)

In so doing, you'll manage to accomplish whatever God wants to permit you to accomplish without committing the sin of stealing. You'll have a society where nobody is forced to fund something that they object to on principle. Moreover, you'll also eliminate the economic waste that taxation and socialism accomplishes: when we socialize an aspect of our existence, when we fund it collectively and coercively, we find that we always, always misallocate resources: some issues are overaddressed (meaning we spent too much to accomplish something that could've been accomplished for less), while other issues are underaddressed (meaning something we want done doesn't get funded). A collective, centralized system where decisions are made for everybody as a whole (rather than individually, as decentralized individuals pursuing the ends we believe in, independently) cannot possibly accurately calculate the relative worth of the needs that need to be addressed. But when we allow ourselves to function as God's ordained free market, we function as a gigantic distributed supercomputer that can and does do so, that outperforms any collectivists wildest utopian fantasy.

Are you worried that this won't work? Then let me ask you to do something: please support banning and terminating these annoying Susan Komen breast cancer marathons. Obviously private funding to cure cancer will never work, and these things are a major annoyance and inconvenience to me.

Obviously the Susan Komen foundation believes that something worthwhile can be achieved through voluntary funding. And since God commanded that we not steal, commanded that we respect private property even if we think we might be able to use it to do good like helping the poor (Acts 5:4), and promised to make sure that we always had an abundance (not that we could always obtain an abundance by taking what doesn't belong to us) in order to be able to perform every good deed He wants us to do (II Corinthians 9:6-12), God obviously believes this as well. Christians should never support funding "good works" of any sort through taxation.

But didn't God command us to pay our taxes? Of course He did. Pay them. Just don't tax other people. And once the money is taken, recognize it as Caesar's, not yours. Caesar was not one of God's people, and he certainly didn't use the money that he took from God's people for God's purposes. In fact, he used it to oppress God's people and fund immorality such as drunken orgies and idol worship. If somebody wants to take what is yours, do not resist them. But never pretend that God has authorized you to do the same.

Why Christians cannot tax

Imagine you meet a man in an alley and demand his money. You tell him that if he does not give you his money, you will kill him.

Obviously, this is theft. It is a violation of God's command "Thou shalt not steal." You are also threatening to violate God's command "Thou shalt not kill." No Christian would justify such an action.

Suppose the man weighs the situation and decides to comply with your threat: he gives you his money. Has he done so willingly? Have you therefore not committed theft? Can you just say that the man made a gift? Of course not! The man only gave you his money because you gave him no choice. (Or, at least no choice other than death.) If you do this, God will judge you.

Now, suppose you and one other person meet a third person and demand his money. If the third person doesn't comply, you will tie him up and leave him. Again, whether he gives you his money or chooses to resist, you are committing theft. You are committing sin, and God will judge you.

Suppose you and ten other people meet two people and demand their money. You threaten them, and whether they comply or resist, you are committing theft.

Suppose you and fifty people decide to take the money of ten people. You tell the ten that the sixty of you are going to take a vote as to who should own the money. The ten lose the vote. You take their money. Did this theft become right because you pretended to give the ten a say in where their money should go? Of course not. You have stolen that which is not yours.

Suppose the ten resist. They see through the sham of the vote and realize they have no chance to keep their money and that it is being stolen. You tell them that if they do not make their voice known that this means they are willingly letting you decide who will keep the money, that they have no cause to complain when the vote does not go their way. You tell yourself that you are justified in taking their money. But of course you are lying to yourself. You have stolen other people's money.

Suppose you and fifty-one percent of the population of America meet the other forty-nine percent of the population of America. You tell them that you are going to hold a vote as to who gets the privilege of taking money. You call this privilege "taxation." You tell the forty-nine percent that they must participate in the vote and that they must abide by its outcome. You tell them that if they do not participate that they are bad people and that they will have no cause to complain if the vote does not go the way they want it to. Most of the forty-nine percent participate, they of course lose the vote, and the rest of you get your leaders in place with the privilege of taking as much money as they want. Even though you've voted to give these people the privilege of taking money, does that mean that they now have the right to do so? Of course not. You can call it what you want, but it is still theft.

You may rightfully hire someone to do anything that it is right for you to do. You are rightfully permitted to drive your car, so you may hire a chauffeur to drive it. You are rightfully permitted to defend yourself against a thief, so you may hire a security guard. You are rightfully permitted to preach the Gospel, so you may hire a preacher to do so.

You do not have the right to hire somebody to take money that is not yours though, do you? So if you hire somebody to do so, you are hiring them to commit theft. You are responsible for the actions of people acting on your behalf, just as surely as if you hired a hit man to kill for you.

Back to our series of "supposes": suppose you and eighty-percent of the population vote for leaders with the right to "tax" people. Does that mean they may now rightfully take money, on your behalf? That anyone who wants to keep his money away from your hired goons is selfish? Of course not. You are empowering people to steal on your behalf.

It doesn't matter how many people become involved, they never have the right to take what isn't theirs, because none of the people in the group have that right. You can call it taxation and pretend it's justified because of democracy, but you're still stealing.

Christians are not allowed to steal, not even for noble purposes. Therefore, Christians may not tax, and may not empower people to tax on their behalf. Doing so would be stealing.

And again, let me remind you of this marvelous fact: economists of the Austrian school have proved that a society without the interference of taxation runs the best and reaches the maximum satisfaction that can be reached in a world of scarcity. Taxation turns out to be waste (even when the tax money is spent). This shouldn't surprise us. If a band of raiders rode into a town every year and took twenty percent of the town's property, we'd recognize that as a twenty percent loss to the town, and a horrible economic inefficiency.

It also shouldn't surprise us because God told us not to. We should have enough faith in God to do what He says even when it hasn't been proved to us like this.

But didn't God command us to pay our taxes? Yes, He certainly did. He also commanded us to give up when we are sued, to let people take things from us when they want to, to allow ourselves to be defrauded, and not to resist if someone wants to steal from us. God can and does use the actions of wicked men to accomplish good, and therefore He may accomplish good through those who practice taxation. But this does not mean that we are permitted to do this. Let us leave it up to wicked men and let God use them as He will.